Hi, my 2-year-old MacBook Air keeps showing “startup disk full” notifications. I’ve deleted all large files, including movies and photos, and even checked in safe mode, but only 3 GB of space is free. The storage still shows 35 GB of movies and 25 GB of pictures, plus a lot of space under “Other,” but I can’t find what’s taking up space. I used WhatSize to delete large files, but the issue persists. Any advice?
You can check to see if the files in the Trash are empty, if not, they are still on your Mac boot disk and taking up disk space. After that, you can check whether the available space has increased in Disk Utility.
I think you can try rebuilding the index, because sometimes the Spotlight index has a problem, causing the stored information to display incorrectly. How to do it: Go to System Preferences > Spotlight, then add your hard drive to the privacy list, remove it, and let the system re-index it.
If you have Time Machine backups enabled, local snapshots may be created that take up significant space. You can list these snapshots by running the Terminal command tmutil listlocalsnapshots. To delete a specific snapshot, use tmutil deletelocalsnapshots <snapshot_name>.