I can’t upgrade to Monterey, the installer claims I don’t have enough disk space and demands more space. Surely 300 GB free should be just about enough
Monterey Installer asked for about 30 GB more space, I deleted stuff although there was already ~250 GB free. The amount it asked to be deleted went down with every deletion. Since I reached “an additional 3 GB is needed to install on this disk” the amount goes UP again, it’s currently asking for 5.2 GB more free space.
That is the system signed/sealed snapshot, which modern versions of macOS (version 11, Big Sur, and later).
There should only be one of those.
Snapshots of your content would be on the Data volume. If you click on “Macintosh HD - Data”, on the left side, you’ll see Disk Utility present a list of snapshots. You can choose to delete some or all of them from there, should you choose to do so.
You probably have 24 hourly Time Machine snapshots - these are created by TM once per hour, with any snapshots older than 24 hours being deleted. If you deleted a significant amount of content (maybe a large file or directory of files), the storage occupied won’t become free space until every snapshot referencing that content also expires - which will be in 24 hours if you only have Time Machine snapshots.
There is little harm to deleting Time Machine snapshots, because they auto-re-create, one per hour. Especially if you have an external Time Machine storage volume that holds backups of the same files.
Thank you @Shamino
It looks as if there is something else afoot. When I mark Mac HD DATA , there is still nowhere any snapshot displayed by Disk Utility. Used space reported by Disk Utility and in System Report vary wildly. And the 24 hrs since I did indeed large deletions are long over.
Yes there are snapshots, but not much luck yet when I try to remove them.
I keep getting “is not a valid disk”.
I read elsewhere that Howard Oakley recommends CCC as a sensible tool in such circumstances, but I can’t find any commands in CCC (v5.x) to do anything of the kind.
deletelocalsnapshots {mount_point | date} If a date is specified, delete all local Time Machine snapshots on all mounted disks for the specified date (formatted YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS). If a disk is specified, delete all local Time Machine snapshots on the specified disk.
You’re providing the name of the snapshot file when what the command calls for is the mount point or the date. That’s why it’s saying “not a valid disk”—a filename is not a disk.
The command you need would be either tmutil deletelocalsnapshots / to delete all (or tmutil deletelocalsnapshots /Volumes/foo, with foo being the volume name of the disk you want to delete from, if it’s not the boot volume), or tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2024-10-05-XXXXXX to delete specific snapshots (XXXXXX being the timestamp on the individual snapshot).
(The way the man entry is worded makes it uncertain whether leaving out the timestamp (i.e. using just 2024-10-05) would work; it says it would delete all matching the specified date, but it still says you need to include a timestamp, and it doesn’t specify whether the timestamp portion would be ignored in identifying which snapshots to delete. I have local snapshots disabled, so I can’t readily test this. Anyone else tried this and can provide insight?)
One thing that’s confusing is there’s two meanings for local snapshot: one is “an APFS snapshot on this volume”, the other is “a Time Machine local backup”.
Another way to view and delete APFS snapshots is the following. Not sure if this works on Big Sur.
diskutil apfs list to get the volume id of the Data volume. Let’s say it is disk1s1.
diskutil apfs listSnapshots disk1s1 to list the snapshots. You did that above, assuming that disk1s1 is the Data volume.
diskutil apfs deleteSnapshot disk1s1 -uuid snapshotUUID where “snapshotUUID” is the UUID found in the previous command, to delete each snapshot
The released space may not show until you unmount and remount the volume. For the boot drive this means a restart.
Thank you @Quantumpanda This was successful. The first two snapshots disappeared instantly, the third one took a few minutes and only after this step I saw in Disk Utility much more free space.
The Monterey upgrade is now underway.
I’m afraid I did not understand step 3 by @mschmitt, sorry. A restart was however not required to release the space.
How and where can I set this? Should I even do this?
Are you running Disk Utility while macOS is running on the boot disk? If so, boot into Recovery and run Disk Utility from there against the internal disk drive.
If you still get unrepairable errors when running Disk Utility from Recovery, my thought would be to back up the Data partition, delete the macOS volume group containing the root and Data partitions, reinstall macOS, and restore the Data partition from backup using Migration Utility.
I faced something similar with my M1 Mac mini when it was new. It had errors that Disk Utility run from Recovery could not fix. My Mac seemed to be running fine, but I decided to err on the side of caution. I wasn’t going to take the chance that these errors would turn into something more major in the future. I wiped the system volume group and re-installed/restored. Disk Utility verification hasn’t reported any problem since.
I do not know what these specific errors mean, but there is no way I would personally continue using my machine with them. I would backup, erase, and restore at the earliest possible opportunity. Continuing to use the Mac with the errors risks future data loss or the corruption getting worse to the point where you can no longer successfully boot. I know how disruptive wiping and restoring is, but it’s much less disruptive and better to do it now in a controlled manner than in an emergency situation where you might also lose data and are using a backup that is some hours or days out of date.
Sometimes creating a symbolic link instead of an alias to the App and placing it the Applications folder can help. There are 3rd party tools that can do this, some of them are contextual menus.
If it has a high speed port consider adding an external SSD in a case and running macOS from it, especially if you do not need portablilty. It also saves the internal SSD. SSD’s have a finite number of read/write before they go bad. If you internal SSD goes bad you will likley have to replace your computer and without a decent backup, might lose personal data.
Get a large USB plugin SSD or flash drive and keep your personal files on it, of course also keeping a good backup on a regular basis. That way you will have more room on your internal SSD. Additionally if your computer goes bad or you wish to upgrade, you do not have to worry or go through the hassle of transfering your personal files to the new computer.
