Snapshots and High Sierra keeping free space hostage

[Coffee4ever]

I just got a new 1TB SSD thinking I would have more space but I don't know what's going on lately. I deleted 60GB in files earlier, then 45GB of a windows Parallels VM and 55GB in Mail since mail was also driving me nuts. Not a single GB of space was freed up today though.

I use time machine and unchecked to automatically back up, I just do it once a day from the app icon in the menu bar. I did a back up and restarted, shut down, still no free space given back to me. I have 234GB free now but still 160GB is a lot of space for the system to keep a hold of.

I don't know if its held up in snapshots or its the result of using time machine? I like time machine but if it means I will never know truly how much space I have free I can't live with this. At least in the Apple Menu and view storage it should show us how much space its hiding. I remember I would see purgeable space there before but I don't see it anymore.

Is this just how it is now on APFS? Or can I help my trouble by not using time machine anymore? As a geek I just want more control over things but too much going on behind the scenes is bothering me when I want the storage I just paid so much to install in my Mac to be under my control.

 

[Coffee4ever]

I thought I would update here... I remembered Carbon Copy Cloner shows snapshots so I went into there and looked at my main drive and there were many some 41GB in size alone in a single snapshot. I deleted them all and turned off snapshots in CCC and went from having 234GB free to 491GB free in a few seconds. I know CCC added this feature recently but I need to read the documentation better. I would consider my problem solved now though.

For any process to be holding 257GB of space I can't touch is so frustrating though and I don't think it should of happened. I'm grateful I can easily delete that in CCC but I don't know if I deleted CCC's snapshots or the Mac. I will check in the terminal.. yes, I just typed tmutil listlocalsnapshots / and none were listed compared to earlier when I did it and there were 21 of them. Why the OS or time machine thinks they need to keep 21 is beyond me.

 

[Trees]

Article below indicates that Time Machine takes hourly backups. May be why you are seeing 21.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250