Hi WAMUG,… Hope everyone is going well, and had a good Christmas and New Year. (I’ll apologise up here for my long post,…but it’s quite a bit of info to explain things.).
Just thought I would share the following for something I came across recently, that others may be interested in. If you’re curious, or often thought you’re missing storage space on your internal drive, but couldn’t work out where it could be,…the following may be helpful. I think this only affects the last 2 or 3 operating systems - so mostly in macOS 15 (Sequoia), macOS 14 (Sonoma) and macOS 13 (Ventura)….but it could be in others past that as well. Time Machine does some local “Saves” to your internal drive - even if you have an external drive being used for Time Machine. (Which we all should have,…but that’s a whole other subject). You can read more about the Time Machine local storage here - https://support.apple.com/en-au/102154 However, in some instances, it doesn’t delete these as well as it should,..and it can chew up GB’s of data. So even though all your data is being saved to your external drive, it’s also writing data internally as well. And although it’s “meant” to delete these, I’ve seen quite a few instances recently where it doesn’t. And there are quite a lot of Apple forum posts for people with the same issue. My self included. I like to run my laptop quite lean on storage used, so even though it’s a 1TB SSD, I like to keep at least 700GB free. Older or more files I move off to my iMac drive or multiple external “Archive drives”. (As it’s cheaper to have external SSD drives with lots on them, then paying more for an internal SSD. But I noticed it was under 500GB the other day, and couldn’t work out where the space was being used. (Which is similar to a lot of the forum posts I read as well). And found, that almost all this space was taken up with local Time Machine images, and not deleted. So I removed these (plus another folder I’ll mention later) , and gained back 200GB of space - the amount I couldn’t work out where it was. To find this, you can do the following. Go to Macintosh HD then Applications folder then Utilities folder. Open the program called Disk Utility. Beside the name “Disk Utility” in the top bar of that window, I like to click on “View” and set it to “Show All Devices”. Then on the left hand side you’ll see a sort of break down of the drive. It will read something like - Internal (heading). APPLE SD ABC123 Media (or some name for the SSD component in later computers). Container disk# (eg Container disk1, Container disk2 or 3 etc) Macintosh HD - volumes ***** This is the one we’re interested in ****** Maintosh HD Data You want to click on the one noted above called “Macintosh HD - volumes, so it’s highlighted on the left hand side Then go to the View menu and choose “Show APFS Snapshots” On the right hand side, you’ll then get a new part to the window under a heading “APFS Snapshots on “Data” With Name, Date Created, Tidemark, Size, Kind. All of these will be listed like com.apple.TimeMachine.year-month-day-time.local - and under size, will show how big each snapshot is. and date created. Now, given all this info a) should be deleted with 24 hours according to Apple and b) is already duplicated to your main external Time Machine,….these files technically are all duplicates. And using space on your internal drive. I went through and deleted close to 150GB of these things,…and gained back 150GB of space. To remove them all, if you so want to,..you can highlight all of them and hit the minus sign (-) down the bottom of the window. (Command A when you click on that part of the window and hit those keys on the keyboard will highlight All of them in that window. Or you can also use Shift key to select between two points, or Command key to randomly select ones you want.) Once all highlighted, and you hit the minus (-) sign, these files will all be deleted, and you should then see the space come back to your main drive. Thus freeing up drive space,…and using less space on your computer! In some of the previous systems, there was a way to run a Terminal command to stop it doing this. But from what I’ve gathered so far, it’s been removed and doesn’t work in Sequoia. And no real “easy” way as yet to stop it from doing this. Bar checking these say on the 1st of each month as a bit of house keeping to ensure it does actually remove them. For a bonus bit of space, you may also not be aware of….in Sequoia (and possibly some of the previous ones), the Apple screen saver that does all the lovely flyby’s around the world,..which look nice when the screen saver comes on,…but some are 4K files and take up a lot on your system as well. (In my case,…the folder I removed was another 50GB of these files! And I don’t use that screen saver,…so I deleted that folder. You can find this one in - Macintosh HD - Library - Application Support - com.apple.idleassetsd - Customer. In there can be a folder something like 4KSDR240FPS - in my case, this folder was 50GB alone. I’ve seen others where it’s 25GB. So can depend on the size of your SSD storage. If you want to keep them “just incase”, you can copy them to an external drive before deleting them. (I normally make a folder to put them in called something like “From MacHD-Library-Application Support-idleasset-Customer” - then put it inside that folder. Then in 6-12 months if I’m looking at it going,..now where did THAT come from,…I have a visual guide to show me WHERE it was on the main internal drive. ) As mentioned, by removing not only these internal Time Machine backups, as well as the Customer 4KSDR240FPS folder,…it gained back the 200GB of storage I couldn’t work out was missing. So definitely something I’ll be keeping a track on going forward. Quite a lot of people on the Apple forums found the same thing, and have been putting in Feedback notes to Apple, to bring back the option so we can at least a) get Apple to resolve or b) give us the option to turn it off or on as we want to. So I’d recommend doing that also, if you find your computer has a lot of storage being used in those things too. You can give Apple feedback here - https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos/ Which, if you find yours is similar, I’d recommend putting in the feedback. As the more people that report it, hopefully in some software updates we get the facility back to disable it if we so want to. Or someone who does their coding puts in a line of code that says “if local backup is more then 24 hours old, delete it”. (And not use up my SSD life span faster by constantly writing more data to my drive then it needs to!). Hope others find it useful, and that it may also find missing space you weren’t aware of. Again, apologies for the “essay”,….but wanted to try and get as much of the info down as possible. :) Will be interested if others have similarly large folders as well. :) I hope everyone has been having a good start to 2025 and the year carries on well! 😀 Kind regards Daniel NOTE : I would recommend at least ensuring all your external Time Machine backups are up to date before doing any of this. Just to be on the safe side. --- Daniel Kerr MacWizardry p : 0414 795 960 e : <daniel AT macwizardry.com.au> w : <http://www.macwizardry.com.au> **For everything Apple** NOTE: Any information provided in this email may be my personal opinion and as such should be taken accordingly, and may not be the views of MacWizardry. Any information provided does not offer or warrant any form of warranty or accept liability. 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