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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
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.
Thanks, I tried booting into safe mode and this did recover 6GB but the problem of emptying the trash hasn't gone away. Just tried again by deleting 2GB of files but the remaining disk space is still the same.
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.
Another point worth mentioning is that this is the first system update I did with Time Machine turned on. Is it possible TM kept a massive snapshot of the old system? That sounds crazy stupid to have users see their disk space plummet after a system "upgrade" but maybe that's possible?
use "tmutil listlocalsnapshots /" in the terminal (Google for deleting Time Machine local snapshots and you'll see lots of results). I also happened to have Carbon Copy Cloner installed and it had a nice GUI for deleting the snapshots, otherwise you'll have to do it manually in the terminal.
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.
You were right, I deleted the snapshots and got back 100+GB of space. That's a really sneaky thing Time Machine does and I'd turn if off if I could.
Probably in snapshots. Not new to Catalina.
Probably in snapshots? What does that mean? Please send any related links.
This just started on Catalina yesterday though and I've deleted 50GB of files now and available space keeps going down. That's obviously not right.
Had the same problem, but with an external hard drive. Deleted 800GB, emptied the trash, but didn’t get the space back.
How did you find the snapshots?
After macOS Catalina upgrade emptying trash doesn't restore disk space
