ventura 13.4 update fills up my hard drive

Here are some basic tips on cleaning up the hard drive:

Free up Drive Space

It is highly recommended to NOT use 3rd party utilities to clean your Mac or to use Antivirus software as they end up causing more problems than they are worth.

Here is a rundown on cleaning up the drive space:

Free up Drive Space

It is generally considered ‘best practice’ to alway keep at least 15% to 20% of the Total Drives’ Capacity to be kept as Empty Space, to allow the system to do general housekeeping tasks. Allowing the computer to drop below these levels will eventually cause reduced or poor system performance.

The following links can assist in identifying what is taking up space on the Internal Drive and provide possible ways to remove data that is using excessive amounts of drive space. 

➡️  Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac

➡️  What is “Other” storage on a Mac, and how can I clean it out?

➡️  Free up storage space on your Mac

➡️  How to delete Time Machine snapshots on your Mac 

➡️  See used and available storage space on your Mac

rkdash wrote:

I tried to do a hard refresh, with no luck

I'm assuming you successfully reinstalled macOS, but you still have only a little bit of Free storage space?

Did you perform a clean install by first erasing the drive (or rather deleting the "Volume Group", or "Restoring" the firmware)? Or did you just reinstall macOS over top of itself?

When you did the "hard refresh", did you restore from a backup? If so, did you check out everything before doing so to see how much storage was being used? Do you use iCloud? If so, turn off iCloud because maybe you are downloading lots of items stored in the cloud.

See if there are any APFS snapshots.

View APFS snapshots in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support

Please run the third party app EtreCheck and post the complete report here so we can see the system configuration & layout. The report will also include performance metrics and summaries of system logs which may provide us some clues.

As a comparison, have a similar sized M1 machine that has upgraded from original macOS 11 Big Sur to macOS 12 Monterey and now on macOS 13 Ventura 13.4.1(c)

The drive is showing only 30 GB of the 248 GB Drive Capacity Used

There is Purgeable Space and there is Empty Space.

Purgeable Space which is Controlled by the Operating System. When the Operating Systems decides the computer needs additional Empty Space, it will move a portion of the Purgeable to Empty space

AFAIK - there is no User Actions to hasten this transition from Purgeable to Empty Space

It can day or longer before this will occur  

The links below will assist in identifying what is taking up space on the Internal Drive and provide possible ways to remove data that is under the direct control of the User ( Home Folder ) .

Have edited my usual full version of finding where the space is used because another Contributor has already supplied that information 

OmniDiskSweeper Safe to use

GrandPerspective 

➡️ How to delete Time Machine snapshots on your Mac.  

Often caused if the Time Machine Drive has not been attached  to the computer and TM Backup is set to run on a Schedule. 

TM Backup will make Snap Shot on the Internal Drive awaiting the TM Backup Drive to be attached. 

Only then will the Snaps Shots be transferred to the External Drive and deleted the Internal Drive. ⬅️

➡️ Locate backups of your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. ⬅️

Notation - If the user is using a cloning software like Carbon Copy Cloner - suggest tweaking the Safety Net Feature in this software. It may be making additional Snap Shots that are not being Cloned to the Eternal Drive. If this should be the case, these Snap Shot could be using additional space on the drive 

The final word from Apple on Managing the " Other/ System Data “ Category

Other / System Data: Contains files that don’t fall into the categories listed here. This category primarily includes files and data used by the system, such as log files, caches, VM files, and other runtime system resources. Also included are temporary files, fonts, app support files, and plug-ins. You can't manage the contents of this category. The contents are managed by macOS, and the category varies in size depending on the current state of your Mac.

The information shown in the Storage Management area is known to be incorrect many times. How much free space does Disk Utility show for the "Data" volume?

"Documents" should be data you control within your home user folder. This may be in the base of the home user folder, "Desktop", "Documents", or "Downloads" folders. You can try using OmniDiskSweeper to locate the largest files/folders, although there may be areas within Ventura will even this third party app may not be able to provide accurate information (I have seen a few instances, but never had time to investigate).

Also, when deleting data on an APFS volume, you may not immediately see any increase in the "Free" space being reported because that data you just deleted may still reside in hidden APFS snapshots usually created by backup software like Time Machine. These APFS snapshots will usually be deleted automatically within a week after the backup has successfully been transferred to external media. The data in these APFS snapshots would may appear in the "Other" category, but I'm not certain and may be reflected in the "Purgeable" or "Available" section as well.

Did you reinstall the OS? Often people do this incorrectly and end up with two "Data" volumes...

Open Disk Utility, do View->Show All Devices and post a screenshot. How many "Data" volumes are there?