finder showing incorrect figure for used hard disk space

The difference may be due to what space is "free" vs merely "purgeable".

If you select your drive in the Finder and press Command-I, you may see something like

Available: X GB (Y GB purgeable)

If there is a lot of space that is marked "purgeable", that means it should be made available as needed, but macOS does not usually release it as fast as it should.

You can do your bit to try and get at least some of that space.

First, make sure that Time Machine backup is up to date.

Local "snapshots" may be kept in the system drive while TM cannot access the backup drive.

Sometimes, even after the backups are done, the local snapshots may be left behind.

Open Terminal and paste the following

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

and tell us what the output is.

You can see how many local snapshots you have and delete some of them with Disk Utility as shown here:

Just select those you want to delete and use the "-" button. The one time I deleted them I left the last two most recent and deleted the rest.

HughGardens wrote:

What should I do?

I recommend revisiting those "various minor issues".

Reinstall the operating system, by itself, isn't going to fix anything. It is more likely the erasure of the hard drive that would result in noticeable improvements. However, the key here is that you can't restore anything. If you do, it will restore all of that data and put you right back at square one. So you are looking a few days to a few weeks out of your life for little to no change.

That being said, you have run out of storage, which will cause all kinds of minor issues. The easy solution is to make more storage available. (Yes, I know Apple has chosen to make this problem so much more difficult than it should be. Such is life.) But you need to delete some files. 200 GB would be a good start. Some of that may be in local snapshots. Those should go away after a day or so and you'll reclaim the space. However, that isn't guaranteed. There is no way to say that you have any local snapshots at all. An easier solution is to delete another 200 GB of storage. Then you know you'll have at least 200 GB. Again, you'll need to wait a day for two for Apple to actually delete those files as per your request.

I'll add a note in your other thread. It sounds like you are taking out your favourite shovel and looking for deep rabbit holes to dig.

As etresoft indicated, yes you need to clear some space, other than the snapshots. If you look at the dates, you will see that they are essentially in the last 24 hours, so that's perfectly normal, and not some leftovers that somehow remained.

Looking back, I don't see you mentioning how much space was "purgeable". If these snapshots take only about 10GB or so, you definitely need to clear space some other way.

So, you should have plenty of space!

The problem in this case, as unfortunately often happens, is that large purgeable space.

Try restarting in Safe Mode, then restart normally.

Anyway, with about 70GB reportedly free, that should be enough to not cause immediate problems.

Could this be new in 13.4? I am on 13.3.1, I just confirmed using Terminal that I have several snapshots, but I still don't see them in Disk Utility as in your shot.

No. Disk Utility is just hard to use. You have to have Disk Utility in “View All devices” mode and you have to select the correct container.

But this is not a solution. If a user has run out of free storage, this is only a temporary reprieve. How would the average user even know they are out of storage anyway? Usually this is because they can’t download some system update. As you know, that would be a crisis. So once they delete these snapshots, the very first thing they do is download a 7 GB update and fill up the hard drive again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It’s not like I have an answer though. The only solution is to reduce the storage being used. That’s practically impossible with Apple’s inventive nomenclature and penchant for hiding 100s of GBs of useless and critical data in various Library folders.

Thanks, Old Toad!

Until today, I did not know one could manage these snapshots in Disk Utility.