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A personal anecdote: when upgrading my High Sierra to the latest version (security fix to the passwordless root fiasco) macOS automatically made an APFS snapsho

A personal anecdote: when upgrading my High Sierra to the latest version (security fix to the passwordless root fiasco) macOS automatically made an APFS snapshot of my computer in case something went wrong. This is fine, except the snapshot was never removed. There was absolutely no documentation on this all happening, let alone any UI indicating it (even in Disk Utility!!!). All I saw initially was ~80GB of space used by mysterious “system files” (according to the system profiler). Except they weren’t files at all, it was all hidden in the file system. So there was literally no way to diagnose this issue without using poorly documented Apple-proprietary command line utilities. Even fdisk didn’t reveal the issue! If I, a computer science student, have to spend hours trawling forums to solve what should be a trivial issue, then I don’t know how the hell Apple expects the lowest common denominator to cope.

newman314 9y ago
Can you share what you did to remove the snapshot? This could explain why I suddenly saw a bunch of storage show up as used.
- flafla2 9y ago
  To identify snapshots on your machine: $ sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots / To “thin” (basically force an auto delete) local snapshots: $ sudo tmutil thinLocalSnapshots / 10000000000 4 ... where the big number is the size in bytes you want to delete. To delete specific snapshots (identified with the first command): $ sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots [date] ... where [date] is the timestamp of the snapshot shown in listlocalsnapshots Source: man tmutil, and [1] [1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/solution-reclaim-storage-back-from-system.2073174/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/solution-reclaim-storag...