Making more space available by deleting unused User

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Making more space available by deleting unused User

I gave my daughter my old MacBook Pro (2012 Retina 15") . When I gave it to her, I created a new User account with admin privileges, but I left my old user account fully intact because I loathe deleting files.

A year or two later and she is running out of space. So I backed up all the files from my old user account onto an external drive, then deleted the user account, opting to delete the user folder.

But the computer is still full. My old user account had around 600+GB on a 1 TB drive, so it should have cleared a ton of space for her. When I look at the storage usage on the drive (accessing it from her Admin user account), it shows the bulk of the usage (around 700+ GB) under "Other." It also shows around 800 GB as "purgeable," but I can't do anything to delete those files. The "Other" is greyed out and I can't even select it, even though I am doing this from an Admin account.

I've restarted the computer, and emptied the trash, but still show only around 60 GB available on the 1 TB drive.

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Aug 25, 2022 02:06 PM

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Answer 1

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BDAqua

Level 10

250,031 points

Aug 25, 2022 02:32 PM in response to candez

We cannot trust the Storage report as to where the usage really is, 4 suggestions, especially what “Other” is…

And apparently Apple has a new way of hiding files & more than a few find out the only way is to Backup, then Erase the Drive!?

Terminal code to clean DocumentRevisionsfolder…

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/313102/what-will-occur-if-the-documentrevisions-v100-folder-is-deleted

macos - What will occur if the .DocumentRevisions-V100 folder is deleted? - Ask Different (stackexchange.com)

System Memory OS 10.12.6 Sierra - Apple Community

4 suggestions…

Look for iOS backups…

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

OmniDiskSweeper shows you the files on your drive, largest to smallest, and lets you quickly Trash or open them.

https://www.omnigroup.com/more/

Purging local backups

Please note that although this doesn't affect your remote backup from Time Machine, this will get rid of the redundancy (at least until the next Time Machine backup) that a local backup disk will provide. If you need such redundancy or are worried about the recovery of your data then you would be best served to let macOS determine when to purge these files.

Start Terminal from spotlight.

At the terminal type tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates.

Hit enter.

Here, you'll now see a list of all of the locally stored Time Machine backup snapshots stored on your disk.

Next you can remove the snapshots based on their date. I prefer to delete them one at at time. Once my "System" disk usage is at an acceptable level, I stop deleting but you can delete all of them if you want to reclaim all of the disk space.

Back at the terminal, type tmutil deletelocalsnapshots YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS , where will be one of the dates from your backup. This will be in the form of xxx-yy-zz-abcdef. Try to start with the oldest snapshot.

Hit enter.

Repeat for as many snapshot dates as required

http://www.thagomizer.com/blog/2018/03/27/cleaning-up-time-machine-local-snapshots.html

tmutil deletelocalsnapshots / # deletes all the snapshots

Thanks to BobHarris file sizes, Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal:...

sudo du -hx | sort -h

sudo du -hx ~/| sort -h

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Answer 2

candez Author

Level 1

10 points

Sep 8, 2022 03:46 PM in response to candez

Just an update for anyone with a similar question:

I planned to try the things that BDAqua had suggested but was busy for a few days. When I got back to check on my daughter's computer again, the space had already been cleared and she had around 800GB of usable space on the drive, as I had hoped.

I suspect that with time and a few restarts, the deleted user data was cleared from internal storage.

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Answer 3

BDAqua

Level 10

250,031 points

Sep 8, 2022 04:21 PM in response to candez

Good to hear. :)

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Making more space available by deleting unused User

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