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My Mac shows disk full while I save nothing

Time Machine keeps local snapshots until an external backup lands. On a MacBook without external drive these grow to tens of GB.

Try this first

  1. 1List snapshots with tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
  2. 2Remove the oldest with tmutil deletelocalsnapshots date
  3. 3Attach a Time Machine target so snapshots cycle properly
  4. 4Or disable local snapshots with tmutil disable only if you back up elsewhere

When to bring us in

For a large dataset without a backup target: deploy a NAS or external SSD with Time Machine immediately.

See also

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