M1 Mac Mini hard drive is full

[benwiggy]

how do I go about adding external storage to offload files like media? Presumably I’d need two drives - one for the data and another for backup?

Yes: a backup must be a separate device, so that either one of them can fail with no loss of data.

You can move your Photos library in the Photos.app Settings. Same with Music and TV. If you have Logic Pro, there are settings to move the audio samples to another location. Not sure about Garageband.

For your own documents, you can just create a folder called "Documents" on the external.

 

[JSRinUK]

I did try and offload my media to an external drive a few weeks ago when I could see that the internal drive was getting full, but the drive seems to have failed - my mac won’t read it anymore. It’s made me a bit nervous of external drives to be honest.

I use a couple of 1TB/2TB Crucial X9 Pro external drives for my larger files. Every few days, I rsync the lot to an older (and much larger) spinning HDD - just in case the SSDs fail me. I never rely on a single drive.

 

[KenSM]

As I posted recently on a different thread, and as others have suggested, offload some of the files on your internal SSD to an external one. My M1 Studio has a 1TB drive (and 32 GB of memory, though that isn't the point here), and if I loaded all the photographs I take onto it, it would soon be full – so I write all my photograph files initially to an external SSD, and only write a selection of these image files to the internal storage. I have a number of Samsung T7 2TB drives, though of course other brands are available, as they say. Although the read/write speeds of my internal drive are much faster than the external drives, in practice when I access image files from the external storage I see no difference in the time it takes to load them, so don't obsess about read/write speeds on external storage – so long as they are SSDs. And absolutely have backup copies. I use a 4TB T7 for Time Machine, which backs up what is on the internal storage plus an attached 2TB T7 containing the image files initially downloaded from the camera card, and I regularly copy all important files to another T7 which my daughter holds on to.
And because I'm paranoid, if I'm out of the house for any time I take my Time Machine drive with me, so if I were to return to find my computer gone, I'd still have all my files.

 

[Sophytaylor6@]

Try these tips:

1. Move the file to the external drive connected to your Mac.
2. Delete the files from the download folder as well as from the trash.
3. If you use your Mac to back up your iPhone or iPad, you can delete old backups.
4. For Mail app, choose Mailbox > Erase Junk Mail from the menu bar in Mail. Also, choose Mailbox > Erase Deleted Items.

 

[Alameda]

I bought an m1 Mac Mini when it was first announced in 2020. It’s a great machine and still does all I need. Unfortunately I cheaped out on the storage and got the 256GB model. Now it’s completely full and the system data has grown to over 50GB.

I’ve tried deleting files, optimising storage to iCloud. I even did what I never wanted to do and took my photos library off local storage and into iCloud. But the thing is just full and now I can’t even open certain apps.

I have 2 questions: 1) how do I fix it, and 2) how do I go about adding external storage to offload files like media? Presumably I’d need two drives - one for the data and another for backup? So then I’d need a hub as I’d need extra ports.

My alternative is just to get a MacBook Air but get a higher storage model.

Begin by right-clicking on your disk icon on the desktop, and select "Manage Storage." This will tell you what's taking up your storage. Then, you can delete files or move them to an external drive. The Mac will quickly show you your largest files, making cleanup easy.

 

[rumourmonger]

how do I go about adding external storage to offload files like media?

I believe you might want to do it routinely to an external media. Or use a sync app that routinely syncs it for you whenever you connect that drive to your Mac.

Presumably I’d need two drives - one for the data and another for backup? So then I’d need a hub as I’d need extra ports.

Yeah, pretty much that. In my case as well that was the solution.

I had set (I do not remember doing it so I guess mac itself is the default location for mac backups) save Time Machine backups to the local mac disk which I never wanted.

I didn't want Mac's backup on Mac itself. Plus - I anyway use more than two cloud backups of my files including BackBlaze.

So I set Time Machine backups to an external drive (as it should have been since the beginning) and get rid of what it was saved already on Mac and there I had - my precious! Some ~305 gigabytes back on my 512 Mac Pro.

But remember - this is a choice you might want to make iff you DO NOT depend on Time Machine backups alone - I personally do not. In fact I when that external had disk (that I set only for Time Machine backups now) fails, I don't think I will be using this Apple software still stuck in prehistoric times which is also as little transparent as it gets (a common Apple software/service trait) and probably will never know there are things like compression, deduplication in the world of backups now. Either way - getting an e2ee cloud backup is must (you have not mentioned it so I am not sure you have one). Because if you depend on Time Machine backups - then you might want to have one (or two) full copy on some other disk and then delete the TM local backups (do this very carefully!).

 

[ignatius345]

If you're hard up against your SSD's limit, I would also recommend a restart before you work to free up space, as any disk swap that happens will create bulky files on the SSD.

 

[Cassandle]

Thanks everyone for all your advice. The T7 drive arrived today and I managed to move most files onto that. Unfortunately it didn't seem to help but I realised that Time Machine backups had been saved locally and had basically filled all the space on the internal drive. Once I deleted these everything was fine (I already had an external drive for Time Machine backups so deleting the local copy was no issue.)

My wife is particularly happy that this has saved us from buying a new Mac (at least for now 😂)

 

[pivo6]

I use a couple of 1TB/2TB Crucial X9 Pro external drives for my larger files. Every few days, I rsync the lot to an older (and much larger) spinning HDD - just in case the SSDs fail me. I never rely on a single drive.

 

[ChrisA]

Thanks everyone for the advice.

Mac has pretty much ground to a halt now. I do have Time Machine backups, so hopefully I’ll be able to restore when this is all sorted out.

I did try and offload my media to an external drive a few weeks ago when I could see that the internal drive was getting full, but the drive seems to have failed - my mac won’t read it anymore. It’s made me a bit nervous of external drives to be honest.

I obviously need to do something to make the machine useable again. I’ll get another drive and see if that works.

My wife - who normally is against tech purchases, has said she’s happy for me to upgrade and said a 1TB Mini or MacBook Air is allowed, so I might also take the chance for a new toy whilst I have it 😂

What poor luck. Was the external drive new? then it might have a warrenty

If you buy another Mac with a larger internal drive, kit will only be a short time until it too fills up. Remember, the first thing you will do is move all you existing data to the new drive. Look at your yearly rate of data growth and plan for 3 to 5 years from now having no more them 75% full. Assume you growth rate will go up

Today even 4TB drives are not so expesive and then maybe an 8TB drive for Time Machine. Then you are set for the typical 4 to 6 year life of a Mac.

 

[Cassandle]

Hi all

Bumping this as I’m still having issues. I successfully moved my photo library to an external hard drive and deleted a bunch of Time Machine backups that had been stored locally. Left myself with well over 100GB of space. Time Machine saves are going to a second external drive.

Unfortunately the hard drive keeps filling up. Restarting the Mac seems to fix it temporarily but it gets full again. I’m not sure what exactly is filling it - it seems to be ‘System Data’ each time.

On more than one occasion now I’ve only discovered it’s happened when I’ve tried to save something (usually a game) only to find it can’t because there’s no space available. This can’t be normal behaviour!

Can anyone advise what might be happening and how to fix it?

 

[ChrisA]

Hi all

Bumping this as I’m still having issues. I successfully moved my photo library to an external hard drive and deleted a bunch of Time Machine backups that had been stored locally. Left myself with well over 100GB of space. Time Machine saves are going to a second external drive.

Unfortunately the hard drive keeps filling up. Restarting the Mac seems to fix it temporarily but it gets full again. I’m not sure what exactly is filling it - it seems to be ‘System Data’ each time.

On more than one occasion now I’ve only discovered it’s happened when I’ve tried to save something (usually a game) only to find it can’t because there’s no space available. This can’t be normal behaviour!

Can anyone advise what might be happening and how to fix it?

If you are using Finder to delete stuff, ot only moved the files to the trash folder, You have to empty the trash. I assume everyone knows this, but just had to say it for completeness.


You might want to look to see what processes are wring the disk. Run Apple's "Activity Monitor" and click the "Disk" tab. But I doubt you willcatch it in the act.

If you want to find the new data that is being written, you have to work a little. I use a couple of command line programs for this "du" will tell you how much Disk is Used and "sort" will sort data. then you combine them with a "pipe"


du -s * | sort -n

You need to look around with something like the above and note the size of directories and then do it again and find which are gaining size over time.

After you see what files are filling the disk,it should be easy to figure out what os writing them

 

[okkibs]

Try the folder "HomeKit" in your user Library (the library folder is hidden so you need to view hidden folders). There is a database file "core-cloudkit.sqlite" that keeps growing for no reason on some of my systems (I do not use homekit).

You could reset the Mac to factory defaults and start over with a fresh user account and migrate your apps and essential local files manually. That will definitely leave you with the most amount of free space and should fix any bugs that cause the SSD to keep filling up.

What you could try either alternatively or in addition is to move the Timemachine slider in settings from on to off. This will not delete backups but it will stop a dozen snapshots being kept. You will then need to remember to start a backup manually regularly but you will only ever retain that very newest snapshot. You can check the snapshots in Disk Utility when clicking on Macintosh HD - Data on the left side.

It's definitely not a big issue to live with this small SSD but it takes some extra work like setting the Mac up from scratch. You can then access your files and apps in your backup with Finder and copy paste everything you need.

 

[Cassandle]

Thanks @okkibs - I checked the HomeKit folder but it wasn’t the cause.

A quick look on Activity Monitor didn’t help @ChrisA and I’ve not had a chance to dig deeper yet.

Shutting down the Mac and powering it on again has done the trick - for now. Back to 143GB available. Will see if it fills up again randomly…