These APFS snapshots are used by macOS and various backup utilities like Time Machine. If you are using macOS 10.13+ and the APFS file system, then the files you deleted may still exist within an APFS snapshot. The command returns Thinned local snapshots: I found a date in /Volumes//Backups.backupdb/MacbookPro I not only had to remove TimeMachine local snapshots, but also thin local backups: Not sure if this was necessary but after completing this process, I ran disk first aid on the APFS container itself and the individual volumes.

Repeat the whole process several times until you no longer see space increases.

Select your main volume again and you will probably see the “available” space has increased.

Select the new volume (double checking you’ve selected the right one!) and click - Volume in the toolbar to delete it.

Set the new volume’s reserved space to slightly under the supposed “available” amount of space (the max space and name don’t matter) and save.

Click the + Volume button in the toolbar.

Select your main hard drive volume and take a note of the claimed available space.

Please do a full backup to an external drive before trying this. Note that this method only applies to APFS-formatted drives which use volumes rather than true partitions (and I suspect the problem is caused by some bug in APFS).ĭisclaimer: while this seemed to work for me without issues, it’s messing with fundamental parts of the system in a non-reversible way, and should be a last resort (also might not recommend for less technical users). What worked for me was repeatedly adding and deleting a volume reserving nearly all the “available” space, which appeared to trigger updates to the APFS free space calculations. Several other solutions also didn’t work. I don’t use Time Machine, and the handful of local snapshots I somehow had weren’t very large. After deleting many GB of files, almost no space would be freed. This happened to me on Mojave, specifically with an APFS-formatted 512GB SSD with an extra volume besides the main one.

How to free up space on hard drive mac