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If you ever used disk diagnostic tools such as DaisyDisk you might have noticed there’s a file of equal size to your machine’s inbuilt RAM. This file is being created due to the hibernate mode when your MAC goes into sleep mode and contains the content of your RAM.

Since I frequently ran low on available HDD space I used to delete this file like this:

sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage

However, the file was still rebuilt by the system. Thus I decided to search for a permanent solution and I found this could be accomplished by changing the hibernate mode from 3 to 0.

Default value: 3

pmset -g | grep hibernatemode

Value to disable the sleep image entirely: 0

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

If it still gets created you may also delete the sleep image, create a blank file and make it immutable like this (workaround):

sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage
sudo touch /private/var/vm/sleepimage
sudo chflags uchg /private/var/vm/sleepimage