macOS installations shows less space than I have

Question

I cleared my system to install the BigSur beta:

So I have 62 GB free space.

But when Im in the installation process its shows the following:

Just 28 GB free space. How can I fix this?

when I look up my HDD via finder it shows me:

So that 34 GB should be purgable. But how to delete this stuff since my recycling bin is empty.

Its not a beta since im on catalina and was trying to install big sur. — gurehbgui, Jul 03 '20 at 10:43

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 03 '20 at 10:42

2

I found a solution: I just created a new APFS parition and reserved as much space as possible. Then the space which was shown as purgeable was deleted automatically. After that i removed the partition again and had all the free space.

answered Jul 03 '20 at 10:42

gurehbgui

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This would be super useful if you put in a screen shot or command how to do this, I think we’ll need quite a few threads like this to help everyone that’s not seeing APFS containers and purgeable space as something that can be managed / cajoled when needed rather than just letting the system prune things when storage pressure time arrives later. +1 even without extra details or an edit. – bmike Jul 03 '20 at 11:01
Works perfectly in MacOS Catalina :-D. If anyone is interested here's a step by step tutorial: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/disk-utility/dskua9e6a110/mac – Gajotres Sep 27 '20 at 07:06

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 03 '20 at 08:52

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I think there is a problem with your startup drives... Just boot into Recovery Mode and run First Aid.

NOTE: First Aid will temporarily lock the startup volume.

answered Jul 03 '20 at 08:52

laurayuan

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This I also tired but it did not work. – gurehbgui Jul 03 '20 at 10:43

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 05 '20 at 14:53

Time machine local snapshots have been known to take up lots of purgeable disk space. Try entering this in Terminal.app

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

if you see a list of things printed, those are likely using up your space. They are programmed to remove themsleves as your space fills up. Here is a thread with more info on this topic.

If you just want to remove them, you can run this command

for d in $(tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates | grep "-"); do sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots $d; done

and then after a few seconds go over to Disk Utility.

macOS installations shows less space than I have

3 Answers3