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Howdy.

Have you done routine maintenance procedures like boot in Safe Disk,
boot in Recovery and do First Aid, and delete cache files?

Have you checked Activity Monitor for heavy usage by something?

You can delete snapshots with a Terminal command.

In Terminal type the following to list snapshots:

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

To delete a snapshot the command is (can be copy/pasted from this
message):

sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots

You will be asked to type your Admin password.

Then type a space and the date info from a snapshot in the list. It
would look like this:

sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2018-03-01-002010 (and a Return)

I don't know of a batch delete command for snapshots.

Good luck

Denver Dan




On Wed, 30 Oct 2019 22:16:49 +0000, Tom_Kirshbaum wrote:

Not a Halloween joke. A month or so ago I noticed that System in
Storage tab on “About this Mac” was growing alarmingly. The Finder
showed normal numbers (6-8 Gb). My 2017 MacBook Pro is running Mojave
10.14.6 with 250 GB of storage. I started jettisoning files to
exterior drives ― about 60 GB, then my photos to the cloud. It made
no difference. Now, according to the Storage tab in “About this Mac,
the system is occupying 162.74 GB, roughly 2/3 of the entire drive!
Yikes! Available storage is 8.6 MB. Outlook will no longer open,
apparently because it requires some free space. My computer is
becoming a brick.

I spent two hours yesterday with an upper level AppleCare tech. We
re-indexed Spotlight. She seemed to know a lot but didn’t know how
to remove Time Machine snapshots, which I gather might be a problem.
We tried many things, some of them in Terminal, such as “thinning
snapsbots,” but accomplished nothing. Since the system files started
growing

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iSent from iDan's GyazMail on my MacPro

开云体育

HI

What is a Time Machine snapshot?

Brent,
on my iPad

Howdy.

Quick discussion of snapshots.

<>

Apple introduced the APFS file system in 2016 to replace the very old
HFS+ file system. Snapshots are part of APFS.

I think snapshots were introduced in OS X Lion.

Denver Dan


On Wed, 30 Oct 2019 21:17:42 -0700, Brent via Groups.Io wrote:

What is a Time Machine snapshot?

Brent,
on my iPad

On Oct 30, 2019, at 6:27 PM, Daniel Settles <denver1.dan1@...> wrote:

Howdy.

Have you done routine maintenance procedures like boot in Safe Disk,
boot in Recovery and do First Aid, and delete cache files?

Have you checked Activity Monitor for heavy usage by something?

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iSent from iDan's GyazMail on my MacPro

On Oct 30, 2019, at 3:16 PM, Tom_Kirshbaum wrote:

A month or so ago I noticed that System in Storage tab on “About this Mac” was growing alarmingly.

This used to be a common occurrence. But yours is the first report I've heard of it in quite some time.

It is a very frustrating and scary problem when your hard drive quickly fills up for no apparent reason. Unfortunately it could be any of a number of things that has caused this. But it's normally not hard to track down what is causing the problem.

The most common cause of this sort of problem is that your OS is detecting a software error (which might be minor), and that error is being written to an error log over and over continuously, causing the log to balloon in size until your hard drive runs out of free space.

You can clear out the offending log by downloading:

ONYX (free)

and use it to clear out all of your log files using:
Maintenance --> Scripts
and/or
Cleaning --> Logs

See if that helps.

If it doesn't, other possibilities are that:

- Time Machine is creating backups on your main drive itself



- Dropbox (if you have it) is automatically syncing files to your computer
(Go to the Dropbox gear wheel which is at the bottom right of the Dropbox drop down menu. In the window that opens, choose Advanced. Next to the title Selective Sync:. click on Change Settings. Uncheck all the folders/files you do NOT want automatically synced to your computer. )

- Your laptop is creating and storing a huge "sleep image"


If none of the above help, see:
<>
for the mother of all suggestions on where your hard drive space may have gone.

___________________________________________
Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance

___________________________________________

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Howdy

开云体育

If you've got crazy budget, ?there's always a Thunderbolt-to-Fibre Channel adapter, and a SAN. You don't actually need a PCIe slot to do that.

On Wed, 30 Oct 2019, Brent wrote:

What is a Time Machine snapshot?

On Oct 31, 2019, Daniel Settles replied:

Apple introduced the APFS file system in 2016 to replace the very old?
HFS+ file system. ?Snapshots are part of APFS.?

Dan/Brent –
I think Time Machine snapshots are what Apple calls what Time Machine writes to?the backup drive, including anything that had changed since the last previous one.
If you are *disconnected* from your backup drive, Time Machine will write its?snapshot to the boot drive, then update the backup drive with them when?reconnected.

APFS snapshots are different.
Apple makes vague references to “recording the state of the system” to enable?error recovery, but I haven’t found any concise, simple, explanation.

Here’s Mike Bombich of Carbon Copy Cloner discussing them:
<>

开云体育

Thanks so much for all the great answers. Both upper-level AppleCare specialists I spoke with told me the only solution would be to do a clean install and bring everything over one item at a time. I'd rather eat worms. Thanks to all your answers I now have hope. I'm going through your suggestions one at a time. ?By erasing caches in the Library I've picked up 5 GB of storage, up from 8 MB! It's not much but it enabled me to open some apps. Other apps still crash due to the small amount of storage memory, such as Omnisweep, which I hoped might tell me about my biggest files. Someone suggested Whatsize and Daisy-Disk. I'll try them next. I've installed OnyX, but I don't think I have enough storage for it to run yet.

I've removed and turned off my Time Machine drive and instructed TM to stop making backups. As a result, the System files on my HD have finally stopped growing! So next, Dan, I'm trying to get a list of snapshots on my HD. I think that would be very important. But I've never used Terminal before and I don't speak a word of Unix, so your command isn't working. Here's what happens:

MacBook-Pro:~ tomkirshbaum$ sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots/

Password:

Usage: tmutil listlocalsnapshots <mount_point>

MacBook-Pro:~ tomkirshbaum$?

It looks to me as though Usage is a formatting suggestion, then Terminal reverts to the beginning, inviting me to try again. Yes? But I have no idea what to do with <mount_point>. Can you or someone help me get this command working? That would be a huge positive step. Thanks one and all.
Tom

On Fri, 1 Nov 2019 11:37:42 +0000, Otto Nikolaus via Groups.Io wrote:

On Fri, 1 Nov 2019 at 02:12, Tom_Kirshbaum <tom.kirshbaum@...> wrote:

Thanks so much for all the great answers. Both upper-level AppleCare
specialists I spoke with told me the only solution would be to do a
clean install and bring everything over one item at a time. I'd
rather eat worms. Thanks to all your answers I now have hope. I'm
going through your suggestions one at a time. By erasing caches in
the Library I've picked up 5 GB of storage, up from 8 MB! It's not
much but it enabled me to open some apps. Other apps still crash due
to the small amount of storage memory, such as Omnisweep, which I
hoped might tell me about my biggest files. Someone suggested
Whatsize and Daisy-Disk. I'll try them next. I've installed OnyX,
but I don't think I have enough storage for it to run yet.

I've removed and turned off my Time Machine drive and instructed TM
to stop making backups. As a result, the System files on my HD have
finally stopped growing! So next, Dan, I'm trying to get a list of
snapshots on my HD. I think that would be very important. But I've
never used Terminal before and I don't speak a word of Unix, so your
command isn't working. Here's what happens:

MacBook-Pro:~ tomkirshbaum$ sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots/
Password:
Usage: tmutil listlocalsnapshots <mount_point>
MacBook-Pro:~ tomkirshbaum$

It looks to me as though Usage is a formatting suggestion, then
Terminal reverts to the beginning, inviting me to try again. Yes?
But I have no idea what to do with <mount_point>. Can you or someone
help me get this command working? That would be a huge positive
step. Thanks one and all.

Usage is telling you that the parameters are not recognised.

You need a space before the /. / is the mountpoint. So, it should be
sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

Otto

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iSent from iDan's GyazMail on my MacPro

Howdy.

Otto has you on the right track but here's a screen capture of my
Terminal window. I just deleted the first snapshot in the list.

Once you see the list of snapshots in Terminal do the delete command .
. . .

sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots

Press Spacebar once after deletelocalsnapshots and copy/paste the date
part only from ONE of the listed snapshots.

sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 1019-18-31-115431

And press Return.

In the above example, the 115431 is a digital time of day stamp.

In the screen capture attached, each line with com.apple.TimeMachine is
a snapshot.

The "sudo" part of the Unix/Terminal command is often called Super User
Do. It's an override and when you type your Admin account password
(which remains invisible) a sudo command lets you be like god on a Unix
system.

You can copy/paste from this email or from an online article so you
don't have to learn the Unix command line structure.

Good luck!

Denver Dan


p.s. And now, with my Terminal open, I'm going to delete some
snapshots.

I've removed and turned off my Time Machine drive and instructed TM
to stop making backups. As a result, the System files on my HD have
finally stopped growing! So next, Dan, I'm trying to get a list of
snapshots on my HD. I think that would be very important. But I've
never used Terminal before and I don't speak a word of Unix, so your
command isn't working. Here's what happens:

MacBook-Pro:~ tomkirshbaum$ sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots/
Password:
Usage: tmutil listlocalsnapshots <mount_point>
MacBook-Pro:~ tomkirshbaum$

It looks to me as though Usage is a formatting suggestion, then
Terminal reverts to the beginning, inviting me to try again. Yes?
But I have no idea what to do with <mount_point>. Can you or someone
help me get this command working? That would be a huge positive
step. Thanks one and all.

Usage is telling you that the parameters are not recognised.

You need a space before the /. / is the mountpoint. So, it should be
sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

Otto

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iSent from iDan's GyazMail on my MacPro

开云体育

On Nov 1, 2019, Daniel Settles wrote:

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I wasn’t able to find a batch delete for this

开云体育

?Thanks Dan and Otto. By adding the space before "/" I got a chance to add my password, but the system ignored me (or so I thought):

MacBook-Pro:~ tomkirshbaum$ sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

Password:

MacBook-Pro:~ tomkirshbaum$ sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

MacBook-Pro:~ tomkirshbaum$ sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

MacBook-Pro:~ tomkirshbaum$?

Now I think it's not ignoring me, it's answering my query with "none." Here's the very discouraging result from last night:

1. Armed with 5 GB of new storage from deleting caches, I was able to run Onyx.
2. I deleted logs and checked for snapshots (which OnyX will do). Guess what? No snapshots! Huh?
3. I quit OnyX and checked storage available in About this Mac, thinking it would have increased somewhat from 5 GB. ?What a shock: I now had MBs instead of GBs. What happened to it while I was running OnyX? I have no idea.
4. Now I'm back to not being able to run apps. Why are there no snapshots? Might it have to do with the fact that I turned off Time Machine yesterday and ejected, disconnected and turned off the TM backup drive?

Anyway, I don't know where to go now. I removed over 60 GBs from the drive, cleaned out caches and logs, ?found no snapshots, and have too little memory (again) to run apps. My computer is crawling. ?I'll continue to go through the suggestions I've received, doing whatever I can with nearly zero storage memory and watching a spinning beachball by the hour, but the takeaway is that 2/3rds of my 250 GB HD is System files and my computer is circling the drain. What a mess! ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
Tom Kirshbaum?