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A migrated Mac often carries a second home folder nobody uses

Migration Assistant and old accounts leave complete home folders on the disk, invisible from your own Finder. How to find and remove them safely.

5 min read

This is the largest single thing that can hide on a Mac, because none of it appears anywhere in your own Finder windows. A second account's home folder can be a hundred gigabytes and you will never see a file of it while browsing normally.

Look at the Users folder

ls -la /Users
sudo du -sh /Users/* 2>/dev/null | sort -h

Everything there other than your own account and the Shared folder belongs to someone else or to a past version of you. The three common cases:

  • A Migration Assistant copy. Migrating when an account name clashes creates a second account rather than merging, and the old one keeps everything.
  • A family member's account from a Mac that used to be shared.
  • A deleted user whose home folder was kept. macOS offers to save the home folder as a disk image when deleting an account, and that image sits in /Users/Deleted Users.
sudo du -sh /Users/Deleted\ Users/* 2>/dev/null

Before removing anything

Check what is in it, because the reason it exists is usually that something was not copied over. Photos, documents and mail are the three things people discover afterwards rather than before.

sudo du -sh /Users/olduser/* 2>/dev/null | sort -h | tail -10

Copy out anything you want, then remove the account through System Settings, Users and Groups rather than by deleting the folder. Deleting a home folder by hand leaves the account record behind, and macOS then has an account pointing at nothing.

The right order

  1. Log in to the old account once if you can, and check Photos, Documents, Desktop and Mail.
  2. Copy anything worth keeping into your own account.
  3. In System Settings, Users and Groups, remove the account and choose to delete the home folder.
  4. If the account was already deleted and a disk image was saved, remove that image from /Users/Deleted Users once you have checked it.

If the disk is still full afterwards, the next places to check are the ones that hide in plain sight in your own account, which is what the disk is full and there is nothing to delete works through.

Common questions

How do I find out if another user account is using disk space?

Run sudo du -sh /Users/* to list every home folder with its size. Anything other than your own account and Shared belongs to another user, and none of it appears in your own Finder windows.

What is the Deleted Users folder on a Mac?

When an account is deleted, macOS can save its home folder as a disk image, and those images are kept in /Users/Deleted Users. They are complete copies of the account and are often several tens of gigabytes.

Can I just delete an old user's home folder?

It is better to remove the account through System Settings, Users and Groups, which removes the folder and the account record together. Deleting the folder alone leaves an account pointing at nothing.

Why did Migration Assistant create a second account?

Because the account name on the old Mac clashed with one on the new one, so it created a separate account rather than merging them. The result is two complete home folders, and the older one is often forgotten entirely.

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