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I can't update my system because it says I don't have enough drive space. I copied two 13GB folders to a backup drive, then deleted them from my hard drive. But it didn't free up any space on the hard drive. Why not, and how do I free up space?
See if the following support article can assist you with how to free up space on your Mac's system drive:
See if the following support article can assist you with how to free up space on your Mac's system drive:
Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac
Or Force a Reindex via Terminal Command “ sudo tmutil -E / “ without Quotation Marks
What is “Other” storage on a Mac, and how can I clean it out?
Free up storage space on your Mac
How to delete Time Machine snapshots on your Mac
See used and available storage space on your Mac
Locate backups of your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch
Notation - If the user is using a cloning software like Carbon Copy Cloner - suggest tweaking the Safety Net Feature in this software. It may be making additional Snap Shots that are not being Cloned to the Eternal Drive. If this should be the case, these Snap Shot could be using additional space on the drive
The final word from Apple on Managing the " Other/ System Data “ Category
Other / System Data: Contains files that don’t fall into the categories listed here. This category primarily includes files and data used by the system, such as log files, caches, VM files, and other runtime system resources. Also included are temporary files, fonts, app support files, and plug-ins. You can't manage the contents of this category. The contents are managed by macOS, and the category varies in size depending on the current state of your Mac.
I deleted all my TM snapshots, but only gained about 10GB of space. Almost all my files are in iCloud or on external drives, not on my startup drive. I don't understand why there's no space on my drive!
The Rebuilding the Spotlight index may have performed negatively on increasing the Empty Space on the drive - that I agree to.
But it also gives a much more accurate overview of the Empty Space on the drive.
That can and would lead to the other options available to the user to explore - which you have mentioned you will try at a later date.
John Haley1 wrote:
I can't update my system because it says I don't have enough drive space. I copied two 13GB folders to a backup drive, then deleted them from my hard drive. But it didn't free up any space on the hard drive. Why not, and how do I free up space?
Because the operating system will keep those deleted files in a local snapshot. It may take a day or two for the local snapshots to be automatically deleted and the files permanently removed.
However, 13 GB is an insignificant amount of storage. If that is all you have left, you are out of storage space. You do not want to try to update your system in this condition. If you can delete two chunks of 130 GB, then you'll have some room. You may need to purchase and external hard drive to archive these files or purchase iCloud Drive storage and start using that. Time Machine is a good backup, but it should not be used as an archive. If you delete files, they will eventually be deleted from your Time Machine backup too.
I deleted all my TM snapshots, but only gained about 10GB of space. Almost all my files are in iCloud or on external drives, not on my startup drive. I don't understand why there's no space on my drive!
I rebuilt the Spotlight index, but it not only didn’t help, but I ended up with less free space than before. Some of the other links in your response look promising. Thanks for the advice!
Hard to delete two 130GB chunks of data from the paltry 250GB drive that came on my Mac Mini. Still, it sounds like the snapshots for the data I deleted will disappear soon.
How do I free up space on my startup disk?
