Deleting Files Doesn't Free Up Space

[jacobsilver]

I've been having this same exact issue with a cloned drive (NVME) I was using as my new boot drive in 10.13.5. I could see that the snapshots existed, but running the tmutil deletelocalsnapshots command in terminal wouldn't actually delete the snapshots. The only way I could delete them was by opening up Carbon Copy Cloner, selecting the drive in question (make sure the sidebar is open). From there, there was a list of the snapshots CCC made. Right clicking on them gave me a 'delete' command. I deleted both of them, freed up almost 50gb.
Hope that helps!

 

[bighugs]

Finally found the solution to this...

CCC again. I've had so many issues with this program over the years telling me I'm out of space with backups. I've had to contact support multiple times. Their default settings are a headache for anyone who deals with large amounts of data to backup daily.

Now I find they create Snapshots wasting space on APFS volumes? What is the purpose of this?

I've been looking for a solution for this for months!!!

Why would I want a snapshot filling my drive with wasted backup information if I'm already backing up to a second drive?

I've just changed CCC Snapshots "Delete the oldest snapshots when free space is less than "suck it".

Sorry for the ranty post, I've lost DAYS of work time chasing this problem down, reformatting drives to free up space. Actually reinstalled my OS out of desperation to try and fix the problem. FML... CCC...

 

[YoshiMac]

Finally found the solution to this...

CCC again. I've had so many issues with this program over the years telling me I'm out of space with backups. I've had to contact support multiple times. Their default settings are a headache for anyone who deals with large amounts of data to backup daily.

Now I find they create Snapshots wasting space on APFS volumes? What is the purpose of this?

I've been looking for a solution for this for months!!!

Why would I want a snapshot filling my drive with wasted backup information if I'm already backing up to a second drive?

I've just changed CCC Snapshots "Delete the oldest snapshots when free space is less than "suck it".

Sorry for the ranty post, I've lost DAYS of work time chasing this problem down, reformatting drives to free up space. Actually reinstalled my OS out of desperation to try and fix the problem. FML... CCC...

thank you so much for this... was having the same problem ..far out ...had no idea about these snapshots of ccc

 

[cin0]

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2018-05-06-212528

Thank you so much, I've freed more than 200gb from my nvme... Couldn't figure out what was going on. Many thanks!

 

[zebrum]

I was unable to delete the snapshots inside Carbon Copy Cloner, it said "CCC was unable to delete some snapshots. Try removing the snapshot(s) after restarting the system."

Also the tmutil utility can't delete snapshots that are com.bombich.ccc.

Figured out you can do:
diskutil apfs listsnapshots /
then using the information displayed you can run a delete command similar to this one:
diskutil apfs deleteSnapshot disk2s1 -xid 470

 

[ski4evr]

Whoa! I had a huge System Storage when looking at About This Mac -> Storage. It was 675GB. I couldn't figure it out for hours. I tried third party apps to track the culprit files down. It turned out to be the snapshot feature of Carbon Copy Cloner. I had snapshots going back to 10.14.2 on my boot drive. I've been on 10.14.6 forever. Well over a years worth.

I disabled snapshot in CCC and then deleted the previously made snapshots. Boom! Fixed. Thanks for the info @bighugs

 

[ski4evr]

Under your CCC task for your boot partition, right click on the SOURCE drive and select "Manage snapshots on..."



Then, turn OFF the CCC Snapshots. You can then delete the snapshots listed above (I deleted my snapshots before writing this) to free up the space. I had 32 snapshots on my primary drive and 41 snapshots on my backup drive.



My System Storage went from 675GB down to 35GB!