After upgrading to 10.13, my 500GB SSD is nearly full. With 10.12 i always had ~200GB free. Looking at AboutThisMac->Storage->Manage, i see "System" using up nearly 300GB. However, looking at my SSD in finder, i cannot see any folders that would sum up to this size.
Does anyone notice this as well and is there a workaround?
radar://32782835
I'm seeing a similar issue- no matter how many high GB files/apps I delete I keep on losing disk space until it drops down to ~4 GB available. After moving XCode to an external drive I never even saw the 'new' space fully available- I was immediately under 10 GB available and dropped steadily until hitting the 4 GB mark. Watching the Disk Activity monitor doesn't show anything that would be using the space.
Same here.
My console is filled with:
CacheDelete | error | deleted | volume validation failed for <<(null)>>
Same for me, but only for a few days now. Things were fine at first. At the same time, and probably related, Time Machine stopped working, saying it couldn't create a folder, or something on those lines.
I tried Single User FSCK, and that showed an error about apfs sum snapshots being incorrect. Said there should be 1 but there was 0. Or vice versa, not sure.
Exactly the same issue here.
APFS apparently "forgot" about some snapshots (tmutil listLocalSnapshotDates returned no snapshots)
it was a pain to get fsck to work correctly
- for anyone needing it, the only way to fsck the APFS container is to boot in Safe Mode (CMD+S) and run fsck_apfs -y /dev/diskXsY
- if you first run fsck_apfs -n or something else, it will fail saying it's mounted writeable (not true), and the same error is returned in Recovery mode
fsck "corrected" the number of snapshots (3->0), but still no space was freed
now similiar messages can be seen in dmesg when I "delete" something:
apfs_update_phys_range:2459: Attempted to dereference range 23977274+520 but it isn't entirely there! (found gap at 23977274, next range at 23977794+32)
apfs_update_phys_range:2459: Attempted to dereference range 23978154+508 but it isn't entirely there! (found gap at 23978154, next range at 23979193+1)
apfs_update_phys_range:2459: Attempted to dereference range 23978928+246 but it isn't entirely there! (found gap at 23978928, next range at 23979193+1)
apfs_update_phys_range:2459: Attempted to dereference range 23979315+1030 but it isn't entirely there! (found gap at 23979315, next range at 23981118+5)
apfs_update_phys_range:2459: Attempted to dereference range 23980619+467 but it isn't entirely there! (found gap at 23980619, next range at 23981118+5)
While I'm still hoping the system would "fix itself", I wouldn't bet on it, and the correct way to resolve it is to restore from backup.
Btw backups stop working because APFS refuses to create new snapshots with "out of disk space" message - not sure if that's a side effect of it being b0rked, or whether it needs/wants more free space to be safe.
P.S. while the free space is constantly decreasing as time goes on, sometimes a few MBs are freed, so maybe not all hope is lost...
Some news from me. Not good news. Will just write about it here in case Apple do read these threads.
The System had increased its use of my 1TB SSD to almost 700GB. Drive space had gone down to 3GB. I decided I was going to have to wipe my drive and go back to Sierra.
When I set about doing that it looked for a moment that doing a reinstall of High Sierra might fix things. But alas it got stuck. Not surprising given there was only 3GB of drive space by then, even after deleting 200GB of files.
Time Machine was no longer working either, so I manually copied all of the files I could imagine needing to an external drive, before then trying to erase my SSD for a fresh start.
Unfortunatly, a side effect of the main issue is that the drive can't be unmounted, to be erased or partitioned. To get around that I installed Sierra on my external drive, boot from that, and then could erase my internal drive.
I installed Sierra on my internal SSD, then attempted to migrate from Time Machine. It wouldn't have it, said that the backup was made from a more recent system.
With no choice I then updated the SSD to High Sierra, but this time around I chose not to update the drive to APFS. That went ok.
I used Migration Assistant to migrate from my Time Machine, asking for all applications and documents. Many hours later I was greeted with a message saying that some files couldn't be transferred. It showed a list of only one file, so I wasn't complaining!
As I excitedly looked for all my stuff I found that nothing had been migrated. Mail and Internet accounts were not there, no applications, no documents, etc. The SSD had about 900GB of free space.
Folder by folder I did a restore of files from Time Machine, and reinstalled apps that I could get online. After a day of working on this I'm nearly at the point where I can do work again.
Hopefully this losing drive space issue will be fixed before they do a public beta.
You may want to keep an eye on your ~/Library folder. The new disk space manager dialog appears to classify the contents of that path as System, minus key content, such as your Mail folder. It certainly isn't counting the 17.8 GB in Library here towards my personal Documents total, which is only 14.02 GB. It is counting 6.96 GB of it towards Mail, which lines up with the Library/Mail folder being 7.09 GB.
My ~/Library folder is ~37GB yet "System" shows as ~300GB
Y'all checked your sparsefiles?
"System" is actually whatever is not accounted for elsewhere.
In this case, the space is not used anywhere, it's just gone.
Where are the sparsefiles located?
There was a file called /.MobileBackups eating up alot of my space 65GB
Another option:
As mentioned in another post by Global Odey, use:
tmutil listLocalSnapshotDates /
... to determine how many local snapshots are stored on your root filesystem. Then you may try deleting them:
tmutil deleteLocalSnapshots <snapshot_date>
Or you may attempt to thin them some, using:
tmutil thinLocalSnapshots <mount_point> [purgeamount] [urgency]
I would have suggested reading deeper into that verb in the man page, but it doesn't appear to mention it. Maybe try the online documentation?
I have ~10 local snapshots. I deleted 5 of them but saw no change in free space or in the "System" footprint
Interesting. I just checked my APFS boot volume with DaisyDisk standalone, and there's 22GB of data that it can't scan, referred to as hidden files.
Same here...It filled up my 500Gb SSD on my MB Pro. The only way was to restore my backup from Time Machine, Update to macOS High Sierra without converting the SSD to APFS
Will be interestng to see what happens when Beta 2 is released, if the OS is reporting insufficient disk space when it comes to downloading and installing the dmg....
My 2014 rMBP 512gb SSD on APFS is reporting 2gb free despite deleting about 120gb of iTunes movies etc, and I'm getting diskspace, terminal buffer and swap warnings left, right and centre and can't even install the new iWork updates via App Store now.
I wonder how the Beta 2 will cope.....
I'm having this exact same issue. Has made the computer nearly unusable, so I'm backing up everything important to an external disk (*not* APFS formatted), and will do a clean reinstall using HFS+. As much as I want to be on the modern filesystem, I never had any major problems with HFS+, and I have Time Machine backups in case something DOES go awry. I'll retry APFS after a few more betas (or whenever it's confirmed that this issue is resolved), or just wait for the GM release. There's no rush to switch over just yet.
Below: DaisyDisk showing this "dead space" in purple. It's clearly just as puzzled about this as the rest of us are.
Well, I'm losing more disk space, slowly, but it doesn't appear to be due to snapshots, nor "hidden files" as DaisyDisk calls them. Heck, the "hidden files" total in DaisyDisk has shrunk by 1GB since I last checked a few days ago.
/private is growing, though.
/private/var/db/dyld - the dyld cache - 1.1GB
/private/var/db/diagnostics - 978.5 MB
/private/var/tmp - contains the four ~215MB sysdiagnose packages I've shared with Apple so far - 913.5 MB
/Users/<me>/Documents - seems to be downloading local copies of my iCloud documents, it's up to 12 GB now
This appears to be exactly the same issue.
tried fsck_apfs -y /dev/disk0s2
....
** Checking the snapshots.
error: fext_val : object (oid 0xac05): Bad phys_block_num+len for physical file extent record. phys_block_num 55505610 len 12288
Snapshot is invalid
** The volume /dev/disk0s2 could not be verified completely.
....
Having exactly the same issue.
The drive was showing about 10GB free so I deleted over 100GB of files, music, apple loops etc.
Whilst the folder size reports the change the overall free drive space remained unchanged as if the files were not deleted.
Viewing every folder in the root directory directly there should probably be less than 200GB total used on the drive but it is reporting over 478GB used of a 512GB drive.
There are 0 snapshots (using tmutil) on the drive so maybe either the snapshot references are getting lost/corrupted or there is some kind of file deletion/freeing issue.
Same issue for me too, started happening as the drive became nearly full.
Deleting nearly 200gb of data did not free up the space, the filesystem just isn't releasing it.
First Aid in Disk Utility passes without error, but fails with error 8 when run on the drive in Recovery.
Haven't had any luck using Recovery to install High Sierra on an external drive, connection to the recovery server fails, so I'm just about to head into the nearest Apple Store to reformat and reinstall back to HFS+.
I ended using carbon copy cloner to clone the 10.13 from the APFS to an external drive. Then used a 10.12 installer I put on a thumb drive a while back to format the interal drive to HFS+. Then booted to the clone and cloned back from the external to the internal drive. Now 10.13 works like a charm on the HFS+ formatted drive. It took a while to copy all the files, but everything seems like its working fine.
I really didn't need APFS for anything I code.
Has somebody found any ability to clear up space?
Now I have only 250 MB left & I'm simply afraid that I won't be able even to download Beta 2 which maybe will resolve this issue completely.
I was thinking the same thing. I managed to move about 40 GB of stuff to an external drive and the freespace hasn't changed.. I am still able to download iOS updated in iTunes and I've had a few other MAS updates go through successfully. But, those have all been under a couple GB's. Was hoping that Beta 2 would correct this, but a lot of good it'll do if I can't even download it to install it.
The problem really is snapshots.
That means:
1) Deleting files that have snapshots is pointless
2) Overwriting them results in more space used
3) Deleting files created _after_ the snapshot frees space normally - I was able to free a few gigs to upgrade to Beta 2.
And no, Beta 2 doesn't fix this. FSCK doesn't care, kernel doesn't care, messages are still the same:
apfs_update_phys_range:2464: Attempted to dereference range 91127985+1 but it isn't entirely there! (found gap at 91127985, next range at 91128302+6)
So if someone else was holding on hoping it would get fixed... better luck next time :-(
