Installer thinks there’s no room on my HD to install?

[ErikGrim]

I know APFS has ridiculous issues with displaying the actual space remaining, but this can’t be right? I’ve deleted about 80GB and restarted the computer and the installer still thinks there’s only 17.2GB available on my main drive?

[automerge]1592873476[/automerge]
Deleting anything doesn’t change the available space in the installer either.
[automerge]1592873633[/automerge]

Disk Utility seems to have the same issue. Also: “Shared by 5 volumes”??


SOLUTION: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/solution-reclaim-storage-back-from-system.2073174/

 

[Jab00]

Oh my gosh someone with the same issue I had!

First question: If you Get Info on your HD or look at disk utility does it have an insane amount of "purgeable" storage?
(quite possibly your 17GB of free storage + the purgeable storage should equal what About My Mac shows as free?)

Assuming you have a giant amount of purgeable data the way I got mine to clear up was by starting a Bootcamp Assistant. Load the app, Press continue, and let it clean the hard drive.

This got rid of a ton of time capsule captures and other iCloud cached data. It freed up over 150GB of storage for me but I did need to download any folders I had stored on iCloud Drive (Desktop/Documents).

I have no idea if that is the 'Correct' answer but its what worked for me and I was in an almost identical boat as you about an hour ago

 

[ErikGrim]

Oh my gosh someone with the same issue I had!

First question: If you Get Info on your HD or look at disk utility does it have an insane amount of "purgeable" storage?
(quite possibly your 17GB of free storage + the purgeable storage should equal what About My Mac shows as free?)

Assuming you have a giant amount of purgeable data the way I got mine to clear up was by starting a Bootcamp Assistant. Load the app, Press continue, and let it clean the hard drive.

This got rid of a ton of time capsule captures and other iCloud cached data. It freed up over 150GB of storage for me but I did need to download any folders I had stored on iCloud Drive (Desktop/Documents).

I have no idea if that is the 'Correct' answer but its what worked for me and I was in an almost identical boat as you about an hour ago

Had to get rid of the ™ local backup manually. Just disabling local backups didn’t help.

 

[Jab00]

Local iOS/iPadOS backups?

If so then thats what caused my issues too except I "deleted" them through the storage manager window which seemed to do about half of the job. Regardless glad you got it figured out!

 

[ErikGrim]

Local iOS/iPadOS backups?

No, local time machine snapshots.

 

[kcwjr]

I know APFS has ridiculous issues with displaying the actual space remaining, but this can’t be right? I’ve deleted about 80GB and restarted the computer and the installer still thinks there’s only 17.2GB available on my main drive?

View attachment 926256
[automerge]1592873476[/automerge]
Deleting anything doesn’t change the available space in the installer either.
[automerge]1592873633[/automerge]
View attachment 926258

Disk Utility seems to have the same issue. Also: “Shared by 5 volumes”??


SOLUTION: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/solution-reclaim-storage-back-from-system.2073174/

I had this same issue - About this Mac said I had 200gb free, but disk utility only showed 21. Found out it was 5 local snapshots from Time Machine that were hogging all the space - I found this helpful https://www.macworld.com/article/3260635/how-to-delete-time-machine-snapshots-on-your-mac.html
I used their terminal commands to delete the local snapshots as they say, and bingo the diskutility and about this mac matched on the amount of free space. Then it will install. Hope this helps.