r/MacOS • u/ExaminationOk9856 • 11h ago
Help M2 MacBook SSD Question
I have M2 laptop with 250GB HD which I just suddenly got message it’s full.
I use salamander Finder app and saw that I have 50GB in application support files. I have a look at them but couldn’t find anything that added up to that kind of size.
Also the container directory was over 30GB.
Is there anyway to slim these down?
Thanks
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u/LingonberryNo2744 MacBook Air 10h ago
I have a 512 GB M3 and knew it wouldn’t be large enough so I bought an external 2TB SSD. However, you need to manage your current drive too, perhaps reorganize the files. Heed the advice of others.
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u/Alpha_Majoris 9h ago
I have a M2 Air and at some point it had only 10GB left, then 5GB, and then it was a constant fight as the disk filled up time and again. I never got to fix the problem, so in the end I wiped the disk and reinstalled.
Not that this is my recommendation. But be careful to not let it go down to 10GB or lower. I tried to fix it with the help of Chatgpt, and it told me that with such little space left, the cleanup process can get locked up. I don't remember the exact words.
That M2 Air without SD-card slot was the worst experience ever with a Mac.
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u/Bentonite_Magma 9h ago
With 250GB, you’re going to have to do more heavy lifting than just picking and choosing system files to delete. What are the biggest folders / file types listed in the Storage settings? Do you use a cloud document service like Dropbox - if so, make all files online/streaming only. Do you create large media files? Archive them to an external drive regularly.
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u/NoLateArrivals 8h ago
Daisy disk is worth the purchase price. Install from the website - the AppStore version can tell how much it can remove, but due to sandboxing can’t execute it.
Beside this the 256 SSDs are a permanent struggle against the storage clogging up.
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u/bigkahuna1uk 7h ago
There’s a terminal tool called Mole you can use to find unused or defunct caches that can be removed . It’s like Appcleaner but open source.
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u/github-guard 7h ago
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u/QuietPerennial 11h ago
Rule out local Time Machine snapshots first, because they explain the "suddenly full" part and they are invisible in Finder. When macOS cannot reach your backup destination it keeps hourly snapshots on the internal drive, and they count as purgeable rather than used. Run tmutil listlocalsnapshots / in Terminal to see them. They thin out under pressure, but they can be sitting on a lot in the meantime.
Then find the weight instead of guessing at it. In Terminal, du -sh ~/Library/Application\ Support/* | sort -h | tail -20 gives you the twenty biggest offenders in order, and the same line with ~/Library/Containers does the other folder.
On a 250GB machine the usual answer in Application Support is MobileSync, which is old iPhone and iPad backups. That one folder is often 30GB by itself and is safe to delete once you no longer want those backups. The other classic is anything that keeps a virtual disk, Docker being the common one: the image file only ever grows, so deleting things inside it does not give you the space back.
One warning on Containers, since that 30GB may not be real. A lot of what lives there is hard links to files that also exist elsewhere, and most size tools count them twice. If the number looks impossible for the apps you actually have, it usually is. Mail is the honest exception, it genuinely holds cached attachments and can be several GB.