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After macOS Catalina upgrade emptying trash doesn't restore disk space

After upgrading to Catalina yesterday emptying the trash doesn't restore disk space, i.e. I put 30GB in the trash, emptied it but the remaining disk space is still 480GB. Yesterday before the upgrade I was at 550GB or so but it keeps dropping.


So far I have restarted in recovery mode and ran disk first aid but that still hasn't helped (unless I did it wrong).


Any ideas?

MacBook

Posted on Oct 9, 2019 11:34 AM

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12 replies

Oct 9, 2019 11:43 AM in response to thealchemistguild

Try booting into Safe Boot mode. I have found in the past that following an update or upgrade, that I have been able to recover a few GB due to System cache cleansing. Then reboot normally. You boot into Safe Boot by holding down the shift key until the customary progress bar appears. It will be a much slower boot process.

Oct 9, 2019 12:34 PM in response to thealchemistguild

Mojave and Catalina create snapshots of your content for quick access to restore. You can do a Time Machine restore even without Time Machine connected usually for the last 24 hours or so. The snapshots are not counted in the available space, and space is freed up as needed. When you delete a file the snapshot remains and content is in the count. It's kind of a weird system. Snapshots also allow for instant duplicates of some things. and other interesting functions with applications. For real accuracy of space and usage I'd recommend an application like Daisy Disk. I'll add that I'm not a programmer or developer and have only a cursory understanding of this system function.

Nov 20, 2019 6:48 AM in response to thealchemistguild

I have this problem all the time (The available disk space stays the same even though I have just deleted tons of huge files) and found a fix that works for me. I tried restarting, restarting is safe mode and running disk utility, none of it worked until I stumbled across the technique in another forum:


1 - Under the Apple manu go to "About this Mac"

2 - Toggle over to the "Storage" tab

3 - Wait 30 seconds.


It will autorefresh the 'snapshot' and free up the storage from the deleted files.

After macOS Catalina upgrade emptying trash doesn't restore disk space

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