So currently I'm running the first PUBLIC BETA of 10.13 High Sierra (with APFS) on my 2015 MacBook Pro with 128 GB of storage space. I noticed today that there was an update available in the App Store for the second public beta, and so I tried to install it. It gave me a error saying I needed more storage space in order to install the update. I thought that was a a bit strange that I was out of space seeing as I thought I had 60 gigbytes of storage left. Upon a check in About This Mac and in Disk Utility, I saw that apparently I only had 1.73 GB left of storage space. Now that I mention it, I do remember occasonally getting a low storage space notification, so this extremely low storage problem has been going for at least a week before today. And this isn't the only thing that's really bothering me about this beta - time machine was apparently temporarily disabled by Apple in the first public beta due to some problem or whatever. So then I figured maybe the .MobileBackups folder was the culprit of taking so much storage space, and it turns out that's not the case. So then I decided I would calculate the storage space of each folder in Macintosh HD by hand, and the results are below.
Applications - 14.81 GB
Library 13.49 GB
System - 11.04 GB
Users - 9.17 GB
.DocumentRevisions-V100 - 25.6 MB
.fseventsd - 5.3 MB
.MobileBackups - 11.13 GB
.Spotlight-V100 - 481.6 MB
bin 4.9 MB
private - 7.5 GB
sbin - 2.3 MB
usr - 1.13 GB
Those numbers are accurate (I checked them) and they include all hidden files and system folders seeing as a I turned on hidden files in terminal and I calculated the totals as root. All of those folders above I calculated by quick looking the folder. However, the "private" folder wouldn't load on quick look/Get Info, so I ran "cd /" and "du -hsc private" in terminal, which told me it was 7.5 gigs. I did the math, and according to finder/terminal, I have actually used ~68.77 gigs, which means I should have 51.7 GB left at least.
So then I figured that this new 2nd public beta update would fix the time machine and low storage space problem, so I transfered every single file of my own onto an external drive. This includes everything in Documents, Music, Pictures, Movies, Desktop, and Downloads. I also moved what wouldn't hurt the system/it's apps from the ~/Library folder onto my external drive. I even deleted Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. So now, almost every file that can go off my Mac's drive is on my external drive, but when I moved ~15 gigs worth of iPhone backups and iTunes libraries, those 15 gigs did not show up as additional free space, but everything else did. Even after all that, I now only have 3.88 gigs free, which isn't enough to install the update from the App Store.
Anyways, my Mac isn't that useful right now because of the data it is lacking from it's internal drive, I still don't have enough storage to install the update, and I've moved pretty much every possible file I can off my external drive. And because I moved ~18 GB of data off, and I only have 3.88 left, I can't even re copy that data back onto my internal drive. Plus at the moment time machine isn't working, or I would feel more safe to backup my Mac, then restore my Mac to factory defaults and then restore back to that time machine backup.
Is it safe to use "sudo rm /.mobilebackups" to delete the local time machine snapshots? I've already tried "sudo tmutil disablelocal" to attempt to turn off and delete the local snapshots, and that gave me a error, probably because I'm on 10.13 now. I then tried "sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots <the date of one of the local backups> to try to delete that specific backup, and it didn't work.
I'm completely stuck. What do I do??
