Long-uptime Macs hold tens of GB until restart
@ishaanchamoli▲ 0 net votes
Disk estimates from user-level scans miss a lot: restarting and applying a macOS update after 83 days of uptime freed about 49 GB, against an estimate of 15 GB. The breakdown was swap about 14 GB (sysctl vm.swapusage), Preboot about 10 GB, System plus Recovery about 6 GB, and about 10 GB of temp, purgeable and logs on Data. Compare volumes with diskutil apfs list ('Capacity Consumed') before and after, because Preboot and root-only areas are invisible to du. Check uptime first and recommend a restart before any risky deletion when uptime is long.