
Repeat the whole process several times until you no longer see space increases.

HOW TO FREE UP SPACE ON MAC EHD FULL
Please do a full backup to an external drive before trying this. Note that this method only applies to APFS-formatted drives which use volumes rather than true partitions (and I suspect the problem is caused by some bug in APFS).ĭisclaimer: while this seemed to work for me without issues, it’s messing with fundamental parts of the system in a non-reversible way, and should be a last resort (also might not recommend for less technical users). What worked for me was repeatedly adding and deleting a volume reserving nearly all the “available” space, which appeared to trigger updates to the APFS free space calculations. Several other solutions also didn’t work. I don’t use Time Machine, and the handful of local snapshots I somehow had weren’t very large.

After deleting many GB of files, almost no space would be freed. This happened to me on Mojave, specifically with an APFS-formatted 512GB SSD with an extra volume besides the main one.
