My MacBook pro 13 shows a disk space issue, which led me to
assume it was full of photos and documents, but when I delved deeper and
assessed, I noticed that my system was taking up some space. I'm having trouble
in installing, updating new apps and running different websites, including
Medifusion. Please suggest something valuable that will assist me in resolving
this tangled situation.
MacBook Pro
I hope you don't have just a 120GB SSD as that has barely enough room for macOS and a small amount of personal files. If you have a 120GB SSD, then you will most likely need to move enough files to external media in order to update/upgrade macOS and your apps. You always want to keep at least 20GB of free storage space available at all times, although you may need more depending on your workloads. FYI, if you completely run out of free storage space on an APFS volume, then you will be unable delete any data to free up space due to how the APFS file system works.
Storage with APFS volumes is very complicated and difficult to assess. The only number that matters is the amount of free space reported by the Finder when you "Get Info" on the volume or what is reported as "Free" within Disk Utility. No other values are important or accurate.
Not to be insulting, but make sure the Trash has been emptied.
First try rebooting the laptop as this can sometimes release some temp & cache files to free up some space. Booting into Safe Mode can may also clear out a few more temp & cache files. Web browsers can tend to have a huge cache which you can usually clear through a menu in the browser, or possibly in the browser's settings (each browser locates this option in different places).
Also make sure all your backups have complete transferred to external media so that the backup snapshots are deleted automatically. These snapshots likely contain data that you had previously deleted since the last backup.
You can check to see if any APFS snapshots exist and delete them:
View APFS snapshots in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support
If you copied any data to another folder within the same APFS volume, then that data was not really copied (it finished the "transfer" in seconds because it just created another link to the data being copied in order to conserve space. However, when you go to move/delete data in this situation, only the link is removed leaving the data behind because the other link still exists. In order to free up storage space each of the "links" must be moved/deleted so the original & single copy of the data is move/removed. Hard to find a decent article describing it:
https://mac-optimization.bestreviews.net/the-magic-behind-apfs-copy-on-write/
Maybe you have some cloud file syncing service which is filling the drive.
One solution is to back up all your important data on a external hard drive,and then do a clean install of MacOs Monterey. Do not update to Ventura yet.
My MacBook pro disk space issue
