Monitoring and space analysis

DeltaSnap can watch important folders for unusually rapid filesystem activity and use its snapshot index to estimate which old file versions are holding space.

Mass-change alarm

The helper watches selected folders with FSEvents. The defaults cover each user's Documents and Desktop folders. Deletes count three times as much as ordinary edits, and indexing exclusions reduce noise from caches, build output, and dependency trees.

Configure the feature in Settings → Monitoring:

• enable or disable monitoring;
• choose Low, Normal, or High sensitivity;
• edit watched folders; and
• decide whether an alarm should take a safety snapshot automatically.

Sensitivity maps to a rolling 60-second threshold: Low is 600 weighted changes, Normal is 300, and High is 120. After one folder raises an alarm, that folder remains quiet for three minutes. A burst spanning several watched folders on the same volume becomes one alert and one snapshot, with no more than four automatic alarm snapshots per volume per hour.

When activity crosses the selected threshold, DeltaSnap records the event, posts it to the in-app notification inbox as a critical notification, and, when enabled, takes an auto-expiring safety snapshot labelled for the monitor. With email notifications configured, the alarm is emailed within seconds, so an unattended Mac can still reach you.

If the automatic safety snapshot itself fails (a read-only or full volume, for example), the alert says so explicitly and the activity record is marked failed, so you know those changes have no checkpoint and can create one manually. An alarm is evidence of unusually rapid change, not a malware diagnosis, and it does not identify which process made the changes.

Analyze Space

On the Snapshots tab choose Analyze Space with no selection for the overall volume, or one selected snapshot for a drill-down. DeltaSnap ranks deleted and replaced paths whose older data may still be held by retained snapshots.

These rows are upper-bound estimates derived from path history. The APFS private size and snapshot usage measurements remain the storage ground truth because block sharing and compression mean item estimates do not add up exactly.