Second - check for local snapshots tmutil listlocalsnapshots / On more recent OS (2021 and later), open Disk Utility and select view APFS snapshots (command - shift - S) to see the space used by snapshots. Your 40 GB of space that could have been 40 GB of documents will show up as grey colored System once the process completes. One easy way to check space is to open the system information app (or look in storage portion of about this Mac) and give it several minutes to catalog all the space into buckets.

Here are some details on snapshots from 2019. If you run low on disk space, they take no space locally and exist in the cloud only, downloading on demand. You should also not be deleting the stub files in iCloud. Just like a backup where the point is to go get a copy of a file you deleted after the delete, snapshots show the contents of a disk in the past and allow you to grab a copy of a past file while that snapshot exists. Simulator images are also saved to this location ~/Library/Caches/.On the assumption that you have APFS file system, macOS 10.14 Mojave, and local snapshots - the system might take some time to purge the space. Most of these were for older iOS versions that we can safely delete.īrowse to ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/iOS DeviceSupport and remove older iOS version folders. Head to ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/Archives and remove any folders you no longer need. Firebase/crashlytics/bugsnag/instabug etc.) I had 11Gb or archives - which was only about 5 months! These archives are only needed if the apps are still installed on customer devices (and then only if you haven’t pushed the symbols to your error tracking service - eg. If you’re building and deploying iOS apps, you may have built up a large number of archives. List disk space and in human readable form -h and summarize -s In a terminal, use the du command to print out the disk usage of a folder or all folders. It’s easy to see what folders are using up disk space - either by the command line or Finder GUI. This gives a quick overview of what’s using your disk space.Ĭlick the Manage… button and follow the recommendations. Running through the process below, I was able to free up more than 50Gb of space.Ĭlick on the Apple icon in the menu, select About this mac & then click on Storage. But, wearing my engineer’s hat, I prefer to know how things work and wanted to do it manually. There are plenty of commercial tools that will help. This usually gave me about 10Gb free, which would last another few weeks, before I needed to repeat the process.Īnnoyingly, most of the disk was used by the System. Clear downloads, empty the bin & sometimes reboot. It always occurs at a bad time, so I’d do the minimum.

I’ve been receiving Your disk space is critically low messages for the past couple months.

How to clear disc space mac