MacBook Air states not enough space to update, but there is.

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MacBook Air states not enough space to update, but there is.

I have a MacBook Air 2019, the way that I understand that I have it set up, everything is saved directly on iCloud, One Drive, or an external wifi hard drive.

I have attempted to update the software, however I get the error message that there is not enough space on Macintosh HD.

If I look at About This Mac, and select Storage it shows that I have 67 GB of space available.

In Disk Utility for Macintosh HD it shows that I have 11.29 GB used, other volumes 88.69 GB used leaving 21 GB free.

Macintosh HD Data shows things the other way round, I can't seem to locate where all this used data is, anyone have any ideas?

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Aug 12, 2020 1:16 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Kappy

Level 10

361,837 points

Aug 12, 2020 1:35 PM in response to NJA7

Are you saying that there are no disk icons showing on the right side of your Desktop? If so, then do the following:

Click your cursor anywhere on the Desktop. From the Finder menu select Preferences. Click on the General button in the toolbar. You will see four checkboxes. Check all the buttons by clicking the mouse in each checkbox. A checkmark will appear if you did it right.

As a new Mac user, you will need the macOS User Guide.

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Answer 2

Kappy

Level 10

361,837 points

Aug 12, 2020 1:20 PM in response to NJA7

Get Correct Storage Information

Do not use the information from the Storage section of the About This Mac dialog. Ignore the Storage information as it is typically wrong. To find out the correct information for any disk: Select a Desktop disk icon. Press Command-I to open the Get Info window and look at the topmost panel displayed. You will find the disk information displayed for Capacity, Available, and Used. If you have more than one disk/partition then repeat for each one on your Desktop.

The categories found in the Storage section of About This Mac is simply an arbitrary way of displaying files on your drive. There are no such categories actually on the drive.

Assuming you really have 21GBs of free space, that will not be sufficient during the update. You need to free up at least another 10-20GBs of storage space. Much of the space used is returned as free after the update is completed.

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