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rootcoors

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 6, 2018
14
15
UK
Before upgrading to Catalina, I had over 120GB of space, and now I have 72GB of space, I have no clue where the 50GB has gone or what it is. When I view storage for my Mac there is 'Other' listed which is around 52GB so I assume its this.

Can anyone advice where I might find what this is and the best way to remove?

Thanks in advance.
[doublepost=1560682037][/doublepost]For info, I have looked in the following locations using Terminal, but both are empty

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /System/Volumes/Data


Thanks
 

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GET RID OF the "local snapshots" and see what happens to your "free space"...
 
GET RID OF the "local snapshots" and see what happens to your "free space"...
How do I do that please? Thanks.

Also I am not saying that's what I need to do, I am trying to work out whats in 'other'
 
Last edited:
Does anyone know how I find out whats in the 'Other' grey section taking up all that space?

Sorry to bump. Thanks.
 
I am losing space as well. It's just getting bigger and bigger even though I am not doing anything. I tried deleting my entire music library and tons of movies but the hard drive never updates with the gained space. I can't update to the latest OS because it says i don't have enough room. Ugh.
 
As a follow up, I decided to wipe my drive and go back to 10.14. As I was downloading the Mojave installer, the SSD started to shrink and then all of a sudden it gave me back all of my lost space! I went from 5gb available to 300. Not sure why it took so long to do that but I'm back up and running now. I will have to move all of my iTunes media back over from my backup but that isn't the end of the world. So frustrating.
 
Since it now resides on it's own are of the drive, maybe it just hold some free space aside for working, swap, updates etc.
 
I had this issue as well. “Other” can be a number of things. In my case it was several copies of my home folder that I created and deleted trying to move my user account to an external usb-c nvme ssd. I was never able to get this working in Catalina and eventually just moved my photo library and music media folder to the external. During the process, iCloud desktop and documents got totally messed up forcing hours of time recovering data. Yes quite the mess. In the end I tried to empty my trash folders on both internal and external drives. Something odd with the iCloud folders prevented completely emptying the trash. Sudo didn’t work nor the many suggestions on the web such as recovery mode. Once I got my iCloud house in order, I reformatted the system drive and reinstalled beta. It was the only way I was able to remove the files and free up the lost space. Ugghhh right.
 
Post 8 above provides the best example of why I don't use -- and will NEVER use -- a "service" such as iCloud.
I prefer all my documents "right here on earth", on my drive, where I can see and manage them...
 
Post 8 above provides the best example of why I don't use -- and will NEVER use -- a "service" such as iCloud.
I prefer all my documents "right here on earth", on my drive, where I can see and manage them...

I hear you. But there are advantages. We live full time in our RV. We do keep local backups but we are more prone to loss than most. Having iCloud adds another location for backups. I so miss crashplan. We also use cell service for connectivity which very likely exasperated the issue with load balancing across 3 carriers. But yes, when things go bad, they really go bad. Fortunately, I had enough backups to eventually get back to good. As for the free space, I finally decided it would be quicker to do a clean install than to fight with what appeared to be a losing battle. Overall I’m glad I did. My Catalina system is running much better than it did vs. upgrading from Mojave.
 
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