This can be one thing of an edge case, however because it precipitated me to waste a substantial period of time Googling ‘Recovering Mac storage’ earlier than the issue solved itself, I believed I’d share.

Having just lately accomplished a 16-minute micro documentary, one of many issues that shocked me was simply how a lot drive area is eaten up! Whereas the ultimate minimize was round one minute of interview per particular person, and the same quantity of dance footage, I in fact shot extra …

I shot round 20 minutes of interview footage with every particular person, and about 12 minutes of dance footage. All the things was shot in 4K, to have some framing flexibility within the 1080p edit, and the dance footage was additionally shot at 50fps for retiming to 24fps slo-mo. There was additionally music, a number of bits of graphics, and separate audio recordsdata for the interviews.

In all, the full drive area occupied was 1.4TB!

Certain, there are workarounds for this, together with conserving the recordsdata on exterior drives and dealing with proxy media, however I’m fairly paranoid in relation to backups. By conserving the whole lot on the interior drive throughout the mission, it meant I’d all the time have a Time Machine backup, in addition to an off-site copy on Dropbox, and each could be updated with out me having to do something. (I additionally did guide backups of all of the recordsdata onto two exterior SSDs.)

I used to be very a lot wanting ahead to recovering that area as soon as the mission was lastly full!

So, having triple-checked that I had copies of the most recent variations of the whole lot on exterior drives, I lastly dragged your complete folder to the bin, did a last test, then emptied the bin. I checked the information on my inside SSD, wanting ahead to seeing an additional 1.4TB of space for storing obtainable, and located … nothing!

For each used and obtainable storage, the numbers hadn’t modified in any respect! I did a restart. Nonetheless nothing. I appeared in Disk Utility; no enlightenment. Then began Googling.

Most options instructed deleting caches within the Library, however there was solely 20Gb of Ultimate Minimize Professional caches. I zapped these, however that was all it recovered. I attempted MacClean; nada.

The subsequent troubleshooting step for any Brit is to make a cup of tea. This, it turned out, solved the issue! My 1.4TB area was again!

What apparently occurs when deleting very massive recordsdata or folders is that it takes macOS a while to really realise that the area is accessible. So if you end up in the same state of affairs, recovering Mac storage could imply ready some time – although making tea might be advisable, simply in case.