SensehacK | Kay's Second 🧠

    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

    System Files

    AssetsV2 folder taking up nearly 50Gb of space

    The reason you can't delete that folder is because it contains components that are part of the MacOS operating system. No matter what changes you make to your permissions, it will not allow you to delete that folder. The MacOS software secures that folder so it can't be deleted, since doing so would cause the computer to no longer work properly.

    AssetsV2 folder are system files for easy macOS recovery, remember that option when u do safe boot, where it allows the mac to wipe its clean slate and fresh installation unlike windows Vista / 7 recovery disks circa 2006 - 08'ish.
    At the expense of some default backup / recovery storage on MacOSX, we get this perk of ever doing a fresh install. Neat for normal consumers, no wonder even grandpa's can fix their mac from home instead of driving their Buick to the nearest BestBuy Geek squad appointment to fix this stuff.