2013 Macbook Pro - hard drive always full!

Solution 1:

The first step is to get two different tools to examine where the space is allocated, and then dig into it a bit.

I would recommend using Daisy Disk since it’s much faster than spotlight and Apple. Then I would get a second opinion on Apple’s system information window - run through the Apple cleanup steps so you know to an approximation - how many tens of GB are allocated to the big buckets.

The level of detail you have provided isn’t going to be helpful for people to offer specific advice, but there will be dozens of great questions and answers once your situation can be mapped into the questions here on how to customize space allocations or avoid cached copies in specific.

Or you might find Daisy Disk’s documentation lets you find, diagnose, and optimize / solve your issue.

Same for Apple’s tools - the documentation is quite good now on how to optimize your mac.

• https://support.apple.com/guide/system-information/optimize-storage-space-sysp4ee93ca4/mac