Unable to see internal partition of Hard Drive inside OS X

[wavemaster88]

My GF asked me to free up space on her MacBook which is completely full. I deleted everything I could find but her HD is showing only 18GB free and the capacity of 250GB. She has no files on there I can see that are taking up this space


I looked in disk utility and noticed there is another ‘DATA’ portion of the hard drive that is taking up 218GB but I cannot find this anywhere in the OS. It’s not in finder, they are no other users on the MacBook.

I have finder prefs set to show all hard disks. I ran first aid on both drives listed and both are fine.

Please see screenshot, where can I find this drive that is taking up all the space? If I right click the data drive in disk utility, and choose show it finder, it takes me to a folder Inside the OS section of the hard drive but it doesn’t relate to the DATA drive.

The second screenshot shows where finder opens if I click 'show in finder'

 

[Significant1]

My guess is, you haven't emptied the trashbin efter deleting all you could find.

Don't mess with the Data Volume. It is the system drive. The system drive is at deep level two parts, a write protected system volume and a the Data Volume. It is a newer separation and the system fuse them together so apps and everything can work as they used to.

 

[wavemaster88]

My guess is, you haven't emptied the trashbin efter deleting all you could find.

Don't mess with the Data Volume. It is the system drive. The system drive is at deep level two parts, a write protected system volume and a the Data Volume. It is a newer separation and the system fuse them together so apps and everything can work as they used to.

I emptied the trash, and to be honest I didn't find much, only around 2-3GB.

There is nothing on this machine that takes up 218GB, so I am stuck

 

[Significant1]

I emptied the trash, and to be honest I didn't find much, only around 2-3GB.

There is nothing on this machine that takes up 218GB, so I am stuck

If timemachine is configured, it is likely local snapshots. The space they occupy are still considered free, if you check storage in About This Mac, because it will delete them as needed if there is a demand for more space than available.

Local snapshots are timemachine backups created when the TimeMachine backup drive is not connected.

In monterey they can be managed in diskutil. But seems like you are not there yet, but download.

View APFS snapshots in Disk Utility on Mac

In Disk Utility on Mac, view a list of APFS snapshots, copy information about the snapshots, and delete them.

support.apple.com