WHY I can't update my mac
My Mac air 13 it says disk is full I don't know what should I do, even thought I bought more space on I cloud. what can I do? my Mac is so slow and it's still new
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 11.6
Question marked as
Top-ranking reply
iCloud capacity has no bearing on local drive needs. If your drive is full, there's only one way to reclaim space: delete data. And that must be user data not system files. Generally things like movies, lots of pictures and many user documents are the culprits. Apple has guidance on reclaiming space, but the fact remains, if the file is on your drive it's consuming space.
You can move data to an external drive or to a web cloud storage plan. iCloud is not a long term storage plan, it's an interactive service.
I prefer external drives as they can be both storage and backups. TimeMachine backups need to be dedicated drives; not shared.
Spinning platter hard drives, as opposed to solid state drives (SSDs), have never been cheaper and there are many good brands. Once user data is copied to an external drive, or cloud storage, and confirmed as good copies, you delete them off your internal drive.
Keep in mind, an OS needs room to operate and that generally means 10-20% free space on the drive never used for anything. If you're trying to upgrade to Monterey, you'll need a minimum of 33.5GB to do so.