My system profiler and disk utility is only showing 13GB of free space, and no matter how much additional data I delete it won't change (I'm trying to update OS to Sequoia) If I click on the hard drive and show information, it's sure enough showing 87+ GB of free space, but my profiler and system won't budge from 13GB. See attached windows side by side. Any ideas?
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 12.7
Pay close attention the different terms being used in those two screenshots. Free is not the same as Available as you have discovered although at first glance people believe they are synonyms. Unfortunately Apple pushes the very misleading "Available" value everywhere, but that should be ignored. The only important and relevant storage value on macOS these days is the Free storage value as shown in the System Profiler (left screenshot) or in Disk Utility. Even the "Used" space can be misleading under certain circumstances due to how the APFS file system works.
You can calculate the actual Free storage space from the right screenshot:
Free storage = Available storage - Purgeable storage
Purgeable storage will be deleted by macOS at some unknown time in the future.
Strange update... after multiple restarts and some time passing, the 13GB in the system profile>Storage updated to 62GB free, still not the 87GB showing in the finder info window, but enough to update my OS. Strange.
Thank you for that response. Af first I ruled that out, because as I kept deleting older large files I didn't need, it wasn't immediately showing up in the free space, but once I restarted a few times and waited for a bit, it seems like it reflected correctly so it was just a matter of waiting after deleting files.
The first one
System showing different storage then finder, can't update OS
