MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2017), 16 GB RAM, macOS High Sierra (10.13.6), 1TB drive
I’m puzzled. I’ve used Macs for a long time (Apple IIs before that) and don’t recall having this problem … ever. I have put off upgrading from High Sierra for long enough. I don’t think I have ever been this far behind on upgrading. At any rate, I know that I need to have at least 35GB of free space on my drive and I really want more.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve worked to move files to an external drive, to get rid of files, to delete 32-bit apps. I was doing some of that manually, but then had a chance to install CleanMyMac with our church’s 5-station license. That was completely unhelpful. At one point, CleanMyMac said it was clearing out 25+ GB of stuff and I ended up with less free drive space than before.
Last weekend, I decided to work really hard to get this done. I copied 27.45GB of document files onto an external drive, did a random check to make sure they copied correctly, then deleted those files from my laptop. I only gained about 10GB of free space.
Later, I copied 126.45GB of “home movie” files to the external drive, deleted and trashed those movies from within iTunes, emptied the trash and it made absolutely no difference in the amount of free space on my internal drive.
Yesterday, I copied 4.72GB of movies to an external drive, then deleted them from iTunes. I started with only 6.99GB of free space on my hard drive; after emptying the Trash, I only had 7.73GB of free space. I ran Clean My Mac to clean out “Junk Files” and then CleanMyMac/Maintenance/Free Up Purgeable Space and ended up with only 7.09GB of free space. This morning, the Finder is showing 8.43GB of free space.
I have logged out and logged back in, I have rebooted multiple times, I used CleanMyMac to try to clear out iTunes junk. All to no avail. I should have 150-200GB of free space on my drive, but it’s stuck at a much smaller amount.
I really feel dumb. What am I missing that I should be doing? It appears that something must be writing files back to my hard drive or Trash isn’t actually cleaning out files.