Disk space not freed up after deleting files and emptying Trash
I had approximately 50Gb of Windows VMs on my MacBook Pro internal SSD (128Gb) (OS X 10.7.3).
I copied them to an external drive, then deleted them from the internal drive, then emptied the Trash.
When I look at disk usage in Activity Monitor it shows the same level of usage as it did prior to deleting 50Gb of files.
Any ideas why the space hasn't been freed up?
The answer relates to changes to Time Machine backups in Lion.
My understanding is that when a TM back up is attempted when the back up disk is not connected, a back up is made in /Volumes/MobileBackups.
These back ups do not go away the next time TM runs with the back up disk connected. I am not sure if the OS will eventually reclaim this space.
You can disable the local back ups by running one of the following commands (depending on your version of Mac OS):
sudo tmutil disable localsnapshot
# for older versions:
sudo tmutil disablelocal
After you run this command /Volumes/MobileBackups is deleted.
I'm sure there is a good reason for the local backups and I don't necessarily recommend disabling them, but they were - in combination with some large deleted folders - the cause of disk space appearing to be still in use.
You can re-enable mobile backups by running:
sudo tmutil enablelocal
More info here - http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars/18
On Mojave 10.14.4 I was able to reclaim 50GB of space with:
sh-3.2# tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-04-03-103122
sh-3.2# tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2019-04-03-103122
Deleted local snapshot '2019-04-03-103122'
Local snapshots are typically created during Time Machine automatic backups. It is not clear why this local snapshot was created, because automatic backups are disabled on my Mac Book. One possibility is that Mojave upgrade automatically made that snapshot.
On High Sierra the command will be: sudo tmutil disable localsnapshot.
Launch the app System Information.
Then select Window > Storage Management.
This will launch a utility designed for managing and observing storage.
Critically, this screen seems to refresh the system disk space calculations. The free space shown in Disk Utility immediately went down.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206996
