Running out of disk space

[msi_school]

We have a room of Mac's in music logging on via AD which has been working well for the last few years however we have started to find that they are running out of local disk space due to the user accounts local files. 

 

On the PCs we use a Group Policy to remove local data after 30 days , is they a way to do this on the Mac?

 

Thanks

 

Mike

Edited October 23, 2025 by msi_school
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[Gongalong]

There may be ways to do it with MDM scripts, but I couldn't find any other way of doing it when we had the issue a year or two ago. We checked with the teachers whether any user folders had to be kept e.g. GCSE work, and then manually deleted all the others. We use MDM to map to the students' home folders on the server, so they're supposed to save all work there anyway. We have Logic installed on our Macs, and after a version change it seemed to reinstall itself, leaving 80GB+ files somewhere on the disk that couldn't be removed in any straightforward way, so we ended up having to wipe them as well because they were filling up so quickly. That meant ensuring that all students doing exam work had to have their user folders backed up, another can of worms! Very much a case of come back Windows, all is forgiven!

[3s-gtech]

Which version of MacOS? 15?

 

I just manually remove them, when I know there are no needed files. Was far, far worse when we were stuck on 10.13 - bloody OS would just clog up the storage. 12 and up much better but we only have 120GB or 240GB SSDs

[msi_school]

We originally saw this in 15 and it seems to be continuing with 25. Students are saving there work to Google Drive but their profiles are too large for the 256 GB disks.

 

I can manually delete these folders but its time consuming and I dont have a good way to tell when the account was last used.

 

Its starting to look like Apple dont understand multi user devices 

[dhicks]

2 hours ago, msi_school said:

Students are saving there work to Google Drive but their profiles are too large for the 256 GB disks. I can manually delete these folders but its time consuming and I dont have a good way to tell when the account was last used.

 

We have the same / very similar issues. Pupils log on to our Macs using their Google credentials. We use Moysle as an MDM, this allows us to present the login-with-Google process (complete with 2FA step for staff) as the login mechanism. As you've found, the machines seem to be filling up with profiles quite quickly, even though pupils should mostly be using Google Drive for storage. I need some time to sit and investigate a bit better, my plan being to have a login / periodic script that does a basic "disk free" check and, if below a certain threashold, clears out the oldest user profiles (going by creation / modified date of the folder in /users). Moysle scipts seem to be written in Bash, which I find slower to write.

[Gongalong]

If you figure out a script it would be fab if you could share it! 😃

[Davit2005]

3 hours ago, msi_school said:

Its starting to look like Apple dont understand multi user devices 

If either of them understood this there should be an inbuilt method to remove unused profiles after certain amount of days with the flexibility to ignore specific profiles if required.

[paulkerton]

3 hours ago, msi_school said:

Its starting to look like Apple dont understand multi user devices 

I'm sure it was reported when iPad was released that when asked what about multiple users profiles on an iPad, Apple's response was to buy another iPad.

[LeMarchand]

2 hours ago, paulkerton said:

I'm sure it was reported when iPad was released that when asked what about multiple users profiles on an iPad, Apple's response was to buy another iPad.

 

Why support multiple users when you can get them to buy another machine?

[msi_school]

To be fair an iPad is a single user device with no log on provision. 

 

Macs are general purpose machines with various options for multi users out of the box.