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
When you usen Carbon Copy Cloner to back up... the backup disk is APFS or HFS+ ? I have cloned MacintoshHD to external hard disk in HFS+ with Carbon Copy.... but now this drive is not bootable
Not to nitpick, but command+s during bootup is single user mode. Safe mode is achieved by holding down the shift key during bootup.
Technically speaking. 😉
Apologies, my wording was poor. Is there any workaround that you know of that may remedy the situation?
Thanks, I tried DaisyDisk but it just marks it as missing space. There's no apparent way to purge the snapshots.
Since beta 3 is now available: Any updates on this bug?
I'm having the same issue since beta 2, but can't update to beta 3, since I only have 100MB space left, no matter how much files I'm deleting. :-/ Is there a workaround to install the update?
Try re-indexing Spotlight
And resetting the NVRAM
let someone try the Disk Utility of the beta 3 to repair disk!
Beta 3 supposedly fixed the issue with this storage bug and I couldn’t install it because I didn’t have the space.
Here’s what I did:
1. I needed 2GB of free space.
2. I found a larger than 2GB file to delete.
3. As soon as I emptied the trash, I immediately spammed the update button in MAS. It went through and now it is installing.
So, Release Notes for Beta 3 (17A306f) tells that:
Resolved Issues
Time Machine no longer fails to remove snapshots on disks formatted APFS.
So I suppose Apple fixed that bug caused system to "eat" all storage of our devices.
If someone checked that - tell us please!
It's been fixed. I just barely managed to free up enough space to install beta 3 but after the update, I recovered 218GB of missing space.
No signs of the problem reoccurring so far.
How did you free up disk space? I already deleted 25GB but nothing changes. It is so frustrating.
This is related to a bug in Time Machine. Please check again after updating to the beta version of macOS issued on July 10th. This fixed it for me.
Successful solved!
The Disk Utility in the 10.13 beta 3 USB Installer has free up the space for me!
Run First Aid?
I found you had to catch it in the right mood, sometimes I'd delete stuff and it's had zero effect, try again with other files and it took a while to creep back up again.
In the end I reformated to HFS and restored. Have beta 3 on now, still HFS but based on findings here I might convert to APFS but to be honest I can't see the point of a fancy filesystem on 512GB laptop, never had issues with HFS or felt the need for anything better. Xserve might be different, need to dig my three 2009 ones out, with the Xserver RAID.....
Where to download this? Don't even have enough space for downloading the installer package from MAS 😟
Try downlaoding beta 3 to another Mac, create a USB installer, boot from it on affected Mac, start DU, run firstaid on the system disk, should remove the snapshots and free up space, reboot from system disk and carry on!
Disk Utility won't completely fix an APFS disk - first aid does not complete properly. You need to back up the contents of the disk (Carbon Copy Cloner works well and has a free trial) and reformat the disk as HFS+ (NOT APFS). Then you can install Beta 3 from the boot disk and reconvert to APFS, then restore from your backup.
I tried First Aid using a USB 10.13 Beta 3 installer and it didn't work for me. I only have 1.6 G left on my disk when trying to backup to TM and the TM reports not enough disk space to create snapshots.
Yeah I have the exact same problem as you. Except that I have only a 128 GB SSD so this is MUCH more of a problem for me. I'm running the first public beta of 10.13, and System for me is taking 115 GB. My thinking now is to update to the 2nd public beta, but because I have no storage space left, I can't download the update. I have already removed pretty much every single file I can in order to make space for this 2nd public beta update, but every file I remove doesn't free up storage space. The used space just seems to stick there no matter what I do. I'm really at a loss of what to do at the moment. Any suggestions??
The biggest problem for me is that I can't restore my MacBook Pro back to 10.12 with Time Machine/Migration Assitant because of a problem/bug with time machine that started when I updated to the first public beta. Basically, time machine backups will not start for me at all, no matter what I've done. Someone told me that Apple intentionally (temporarily) disabled time machine on the first public beta. I'd rather not have to restore my Mac if I don't have to, ESPECIALLY if I don't have a time machine backup of it right now that I can always come back to if I need.
Explaining everything that I have tried again in this post would be kind of a waste of time, so just check out the links below to see more details about what's going on and what I've already tried. As I was scrolling throught these posts, I noticed a couple suggestions about verifying the TM backups via the option key and the TM menu bar icon, and running fsck_apfs on single user mode. As for the verify backups option, when I hold down the option key and click on the TM menu bar icon, the Verify Backups button is greyed out, which I think is because I use a Seagate USB external drive for time machine rather than a network apple-made time capsule. Is that true or no?
2 posts above mine (nick101's post on July 12, 2017 at 8:35 am) - I am willing to try that one, but only if I can make a time machine backup right now first.
In case your interested, or if anyone has any suggestions on how to solve my 2 problems, here are links to developer discussion questions I posted.
Time Machine backups fail - https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/82024
I have no storage space left due to System taking 115 GB - https://forums.developer.apple.com/message/244774#244774
Here's a couple more things I thought I should mention about what I DID NOT TRY YET.
- Resetting the NVRAM
- Re indexing spotlight
- fsck_apfs in single user mode
- deleting /.MobileBackups using Finder or Terminal
- Booting into safe mode
- Running first aid from recovery mode
Note that I DID try RUNNING FIRST AID from disk utility ON MY NORMAL USER ACCOUNT.
I've kinda concluded that most of my problems should be solved in the next beta update, but I can't update to that new beta because I don't have enough storage space to do so. One more thing - /.MobileBackups is taking up 11 GB. Would running "sudo rm -rf /.MobileBackups" in Terminal work to remove those local TM backups (they are from mid-June). Like would doing sudo rm forcefully remove those files and recover drive space, or will it just do nothing to recover drive space like every other file I tried deleting/moving. also would that command hurt macOS or time machine in any way, shape, or form?
I don't mean to advertise, but if anyone has any suggestions whatsoever on how to help me with this storage problem or the time machine bug, please respond to this post or to my 2 posts linked above. Any help is much appreciated. Thx everyone!!
You will not be able to make a time Machine backup. This should be done with CCC as I described above. No single problem here.
As someone else has said - you *cannot* make a viable Time Machine backup. It just does not work.
For a good backup, Carbon Copy Cloner in its 10.13 compatible version is the only viable option. There 's a free trial, so you don't have to pay for it.
I had *exactly* this problem - 128GB MBA with about 1.3GB space available - i.e. not enough to donwload the installer. Here is a recipe that will work:
1. Install Carbon Copy Cloner and back up your disk. You will find that the total backup size is less than the disk space used on the MBA.
2. Download the 10.13 installer from the developer download pages to an external drive.
3. Make an sinall USB - you'll need a dedicated Usb Stick (creating the sintaller reformats the disk). There are pleny of Googleable insructions to do it manually or you can use the excellent Boot Buddy app from here: https://sqwarq.com/boot-buddy/
4. Boot from the USB installer. Using Disk Utility on the boot disk, reformat your hard disk *as HFS+* - a reformat as APFS WILL NOT WORK
5. Install 10.13 from the boot USB; you can choose APFS as the disk format during the install. On Beta 3, this rpoblem has been resolved (I have over 50GB free now).
6. Restore from your CCC backup.
I hope this helps
“Download the 10.13 installer from the developer download pages to an external drive.” Where can you find the installer? The developer downloads page just gets the beta enrolment dmg, which then allows a MAS download. The High Sierra download on there is 14mb, and doesn’t allow a createinstallmedia.
Apologies - I had not realised that this beta series is being handled in a different way from previosu ones. This link has information that will help:
Thank you for that. I ended up downloading the Sierra installer and making a bootable USB and then deleting the apfs container from the terminal in the installer. This article was helpful: https://www.macobserver.com/tips/deep-dive/macos-sierra-delete-apfs-partition-right-way/
