Lack of Storage.

[Scotty45]

Hi all. I own an early 2014 13" MacBook Air laptop, with 121gb memory.
Lately, i've been receiving messages to advise that my storage is nearly full. After clicking on 'Manage', I have downloaded all my files, including photographs & anything else I could save to external hard drives, then deleted the files from my laptop, then emptied the trash bin. Yet my storage advice tells me i've only got 6.15gb of 121gb of storage left.
At the bottom of the list of recommendations under the heading 'System', it reads that I have used 107.81gb of storage, but this is greyed out, & I can't open it. There is very little in the way of files on the rest of the manage page.
I do regular back-ups to external hard drives that are solely for the purpose of back-ups, so i'm not concerned about losing any of my files.
Can anyone help me understand why my system has used so much memory, yet won't allow me to access it? Thanks in anticipation.......Scotty.

 

[auxbuss]

If you run Time Machine, it might be that you have a lot of local snapshots. You can list them via the console command:
`tmutil listlocalsnapshots /`
and delete them via:
`tmutil deletelocalsnapshots <snapshot_date>`

imo, the easiest way to find disk space usage oddities is via a console command called `ncdu`. However, it doesn't come with macOS and requires (something like) homebrew to install it. (Happy to go through this if you are unfamiliar with it and want to give it a go.)

It's also worth performing a safe boot, which does some sort of disk tidying process, leave it for a minute or two to do its thing, then reboot normally.

 

[Shirasaki]

Also the newer macOS does not “immediately remove” files when they are deleted for some odd reason, resulting less available space even after removing a huge amount of files from the SSD.
There has to be a way to force such “clean up” to free up the space. Not sure how to do it tho.

 

[Ghost31]

Also the newer macOS does not “immediately remove” files when they are deleted for some odd reason, resulting less available space even after removing a huge amount of files from the SSD.
There has to be a way to force such “clean up” to free up the space. Not sure how to do it tho.

So when you empty your recycle bin, that doesn’t show up as freed space? Or am I mis understanding?

 

[Macdctr]

Scotty what OS are you running on your MBA?

 

[Scotty45]

Mojave version 10.14.3
A friends son has suggested that my system might just need a good flush. He's going to have a look at it on the weekend.

 

[Macdctr]

review this: http://osxdaily.com/2016/02/06/mac-startup-disk-almost-full-message-fix/