I couldn’t do anything with this partition while booted into macOS, so I booted into Recovery mode, wiped the VM partition and recreated it again.įrom diskutil list, I could see that the VM partition was /dev/disk1s4, so to erase it I used diskutil again: diskutil apfs eraseVolume disk1s4 -name VM diskutil listĢ: Apple_APFS Container disk1 499.9 GB disk0s2Ġ: APFS Container Scheme - +499.9 GB disk1ġ: APFS Volume Macintosh HD - Data 213.6 GB disk1s1ĥ: APFS Volume Macintosh HD 10.9 GB disk1s5 This was really strange as looking in /private/var/vm showed one sleepimage file and two swapfiles, taking up a total of 3 GB. Poking around with diskutil showed that there was a VM partition taking up 273 GB – more than half the disk. Then I had to start digging a lot deeper to see what else could be going on. As this location is a cache, so shouldn’t contain any critical data, I went ahead and deleted it – and the free space on the disk didn’t change at all. This identified a massive file in /System/Library/Caches// that was named data and it was over 100 GB in size. The first was able to be identified by running a utility like WhatSize to find big files on the disk. ![]() There were two unusual things going on with this MacBook Pro. Snapshots can take up significant amounts of space, and free space may not increase when deleting files… Copy-on-write means multiple copies of a file don’t necessarily take up space until they’re written to. ![]() Partitions share space dynamically with other partitions. Files can show a size, but be taking up a different amount of space on disk. He let it slide for a while, and then started to prune his data when space got really low – things like deleting 26 GB from Documents/Microsoft User Data with an old Outlook 2011 profile, but no matter what he did, the free space kept reducing.Īs it turns out, with Catalina there is some powerful juju going on behind the scenes and what you see is not always what is actually happening. I had a very unusual problem recently with a client – his MacBook Pro running Catalina was constantly running out of disk space.
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