{"id":24968,"date":"2019-04-11T15:43:05","date_gmt":"2019-04-11T19:43:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=24968"},"modified":"2019-12-20T13:41:49","modified_gmt":"2019-12-20T18:41:49","slug":"quantum-computing-and-apfs-free-and-used-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/11\/quantum-computing-and-apfs-free-and-used-space\/","title":{"rendered":"Quantum Computing and APFS: Free and Used Space"},"content":{"rendered":"

Howard Oakley<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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In APFS, snapshots are made as part of Time Machine backups, on some occasions such as prior to installing a macOS update, and when the user initiates them. What happens when an APFS snapshot is made is that a complete copy is made of the file system metadata, which is very quick indeed and doesn’t involve the copying of any other file data.<\/p>\n

However, to preserve all the files at the moment that the snapshot is made, as those files subsequently change, their original data are retained so long as the snapshot is kept. Let’s say that, in one snapshot, there’s a certain file of 1 GB in size, which then changes completely so the whole 1 GB is rewritten. So long as that snapshot is retained, its original 1 GB of data is retained, as well as its new 1 GB. So although the snapshot itself doesn’t take up much space, it stops a lot of old data from being freed up for reuse.<\/p>\n

Time Machine purges old snapshots automatically, but by default retains the last 24 hours of hourly snapshots, which will take a total space similar to the amount of data backed up over that period. In my case, that’s typically around 30 GB at any time, but if you manipulate large media files, or old snapshots aren’t purged properly, it could easily require hundreds of GB.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I find the whole idea of free space confusing with Mojave and APFS. Last week, after updating Xcode, I started getting warnings that my MacBook Air’s SSD was almost full. I deleted about 20 GB of files but saw little improvement in the amount of available space reported by Finder. And I continued to get the warnings. As far as I could tell, based on reports from OmniDiskSweeper and trying to figure out which files had been deleted and added, I should have netted about 14 GB more free space than I started with, yet Finder showed about 6 GB less<\/em>.<\/p>\n

My first thought was that the culprit was snapshots, but Disk Utility showed no purgeable space, and tmutil listlocalsnapshots<\/code> showed no snapshots. I guess this indicates that the disk really is almost full, but I can’t figure out why.<\/p>\n

My current theory is that the problem is due to a 20 GB proxies<\/tt> folder in Photos’s library (which is strangely not included in Manage Storage’s report). I don’t have a measurement of how large this was before, but I suspect it used to be much smaller. It’s not clear how I might compact it or why Photos isn’t automatically deleting old data now that it can tell that the disk is almost full. I will probably end up deleting the Photos library and syncing a new one down from iCloud. But that’s only a potential solution because this Mac doesn’t contain any Photos projects; those are not stored in the cloud and so would be lost if I were to attempt this.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n