2013 Macbook Pro - hard drive always full! I have spoken to Apple support but didn't make any progress. I have very little stored on my SSD but for years it's consistently full. It seems like its replicating itself as when I last deleted some obsolete files the space increased but then decreases again soon after. Most of my work is in the cloud and I back up to a time capsule.

I've read that time machine sometimes saves itself locally when time capsule not available, if this is correct how can I find these and remove them.

I'm now stuck as I cannot upgrade pages as requires iOS upgrade but App store isn't offering me any such upgrade.

Any thoughts appreciated. 

Currently running Yosemite 10.10.5
The first step is to get two different tools to examine where the space is allocated, and then dig into it a bit.

I would recommend using Daisy Disk since it’s much faster than spotlight and Apple. Then I would get a second opinion on Apple’s system information window - run through the Apple cleanup steps so you know to an approximation - how many tens of GB are allocated to the big buckets.

The level of detail you have provided isn’t going to be helpful for people to offer specific advice, but there will be dozens of great questions and answers once your situation can be mapped into the questions here on how to customize space allocations or avoid cached copies in specific.

Or you might find Daisy Disk’s documentation lets you find, diagnose, and optimize / solve your issue.

Same for Apple’s tools - the documentation is quite good now on how to optimize your mac.


https://support.apple.com/guide/system-information/optimize-storage-space-sysp4ee93ca4/mac