My Mac (late 2015 iMac) has experienced serious slow down and I ran Disk Utility. Machine has 2TB Fusion drive (1TB free space), 32GB RAM). Disk Utility showed 23 snapshots on the drive, there is an external 2TB drive to which Time Machine backs up. Last backup 10 minutes before last using Disk Utility. Machine showed now difference in performance, so booted into Recovery Mode (Cmd-R) and ran Disk Utility from that. Disk Utility is now looping - shoes an "error: directory valence check: directory (did 0x13): children (1) does not match dress count (0)" message. Can't find a solution to this online. Help!!!
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Mojave Disk Utility
- Thread starter dazzer21-2
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Did you get out of that loop?
As Fisherman said, CCC is, I believe, a much better backup solution.
It is not exactly easy to get rid of those "snapshots". I found the following here on the forum, but I didn't record the poster's name so I can't give credit where it is due. the following is that person's solution.
"I found that there were two useful verbs "listlocalsnapshots" and "deletelocalsnapshots". Used the first one to get the exact date stamps required for the second one and deleted all local snapshots manually.
Result: "System" went from 260GB to 60GB.
Step by step I went as following:
Code:
sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
This resulted:
Code:
com.apple.TimeMachine.2017-09-27-005259
com.apple.TimeMachine.2017-09-27-104645
com.apple.TimeMachine.2017-09-27-114218
com.apple.TimeMachine.2017-09-27-124220
I took these four date stamps and followed the next command with each as following:
Code:
tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2017-09-27-005259
So in the end if i double checked with
Code:
sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
there were no snapshots and after checking "About This Mac -> Storage" I was happy
Code:
sudo tmutil thinLocalSnapshots / 10000000000 4
That 10000000000 there is how much you want to thin in bytes (so about 9GB). I tested the command and the
listlocalsnapshots as you suggested before and after and this completely removed all the snapshots from my MacBook. I suppose if you had more than ~9GB you could stick another zero on that command to make it ~90GB.
At any rate the thinLocalSnapshots command removes them all with one command.
for d in $(tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates | grep "-"); do sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots $d; done"
Time Machine and a cloned backup are not the same thing, and a clone is not suitable for everyone's needs. This is not good advice.
Ironically, whilst Disk Utility was chugging away, we had a power cut!! When it came back on, I again booted into recovery, ran Disk Utility and it ran through the procedure without looping and, having booted back into normal mode, today seems to be more like its usual self. I'll run Disk Utility again at some stage to see if the issue has actually been repaired or not, but won't tempt fate for the moment...