Disk_Utility

NTFS

Mounting NTFS

Utilizing app called Mounty

brew install --cask macfuse
brew install gromgit/fuse/ntfs-3g-mac
brew install --cask mounty

Had to enable / disable system extensions for macOS.

Storage

You can check why your macOS is low on storage.

Few good links about macOS caching about everything in its system directory.
One single Xcode installation can go up to 60gigs of storage. This is pretty bad for apple hardware where Memory costs like Caviar be it Volatile (RAM, L1.*x Cache) or Non Volatile (Disk / SSD / ROM).

Luckily apple provides us two options

  • One is there System Preferences -> Storage with some option to delete unused storage and cleanup extra support libraries.
  • It tries to upsell iCloud Storage packages to offload mac / device storage to Cloud. Seamless integration or anti competitive - forced planned obsolescence type of stuff. You can be the judge.

I recommend few things

Support Files

Delete Phone old OS device support files, for example if you had an iOS / iPadOS / Apple TV / Vision Pro or any apple development device on a specific OS and then you upgraded from iOS 16.4 -> iOS 17.4 then Xcode or macOS has old iOS 16.4 device support files for Obj-C / Swift Headers or just for debugging symbols. That's why every time you connect a new device to xcode -> it performs this process of Preparring for Device support

Turns out if you have like 4 - 7 development devices for one Xcode the storage support files goes up to 20Gigs+ usually each device + OS combo accounting for 2 - 4 gigs.
You can delete them in Apple -> System preferences app -> Developer -> Delete Device Support Files

Terminal Commands

du (disk usage) and df (disk free) commands

df -h | grep Gi

# Output
# /System/Volumes/Data 124Gigs 

This grabs space occupied by Gigs and then you can sort that data

du -h /System/Volumes/Data | grep "G\t" | sort

and if you want breakdown of the folders / directory use

du -h -d 1

Clean my Mac

Clean my Mac - MacPawx
Just make sure to disable everything else like analytics, full disk scanning, protection stuff etc & auto login. I usually use this app once in 30 days.

Update

side observation - I updated from macOS 14.4 -> 14.5 and before the update my storage was showing free 44 Gigs and now it shows 98Gigs It seems apple macOS updater does some housekeeping to clear old cache? / or delete system files / old downloaded updates.

References

avg antivirus | Clear macOS cache