iTunes iPhone Back Up Now to iCloud not enough free space on this computer

macOS Mojave iTunes cannot backup iPhone XI because "not enough free space is available on this computer"


  • iPhone XI is 256 GB with 181 GB free.
  • Macbook Air Pro has 270 GB free
  • iCloud has 1.7 TB free


I cannot fully migrate my iphone to my other laptop until I complete a full back up and something is making iTunes think there is no free space, when by all appearances, there is PLENTY of free space.



iTunes error:


iTunes indicator for iPhone XI storage


Macbook Air Finder free space indicator


iCloud free space indicator



Posted on May 2, 2021 9:15 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on May 3, 2021 3:10 AM

I spent hours compressing or deleting files until I freed up another 100+ Gb from my MacBook Air (+275 Gb free) and attempted to backup my 256 Gb iPhone (with ~50 Gb of pics, music, data, files, etc) and it did not work.


I declared shenanigans and gave up trying to make more free space.


I then decided to upgrade from Mojave to Big Sur and (using finder) tried once more to use the Back Up Now to iCloud feature…again.


The back up was painfully slow - took 1.5 hrs - but it worked.


I had been backing up my phone directly to iCloud but after this upgrade the Back Up Now to iCloud feature transferred my purchases and completed successfully.


meh.

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4 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

May 3, 2021 3:10 AM in response to johnnymac69

I spent hours compressing or deleting files until I freed up another 100+ Gb from my MacBook Air (+275 Gb free) and attempted to backup my 256 Gb iPhone (with ~50 Gb of pics, music, data, files, etc) and it did not work.


I declared shenanigans and gave up trying to make more free space.


I then decided to upgrade from Mojave to Big Sur and (using finder) tried once more to use the Back Up Now to iCloud feature…again.


The back up was painfully slow - took 1.5 hrs - but it worked.


I had been backing up my phone directly to iCloud but after this upgrade the Back Up Now to iCloud feature transferred my purchases and completed successfully.


meh.

May 2, 2021 10:01 PM in response to johnnymac69

We cannot trust the Storage report as to where the usage really is, 4 suggestions, especially what {Other” is…


Have you emptied the trash lately?


Look for iOS backups…

/Users/[USERNAME]/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup


OmniDiskSweeper shows you the files on your drive, largest to smallest, and lets you quickly Trash or open them.

https://www.omnigroup.com/more/


Purging local backups

Please note that although this doesn't affect your remote backup from Time Machine, this will get rid of the redundancy (at least until the next Time Machine backup) that a local backup disk will provide. If you need such redundancy or are worried about the recovery of your data then you would be best served to let macOS determine when to purge these files.

Start Terminal from spotlight.

At the terminal type tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates. 

Hit enter.


Here, you'll now see a list of all of the locally stored Time Machine backup snapshots stored on your disk.

Next you can remove the snapshots based on their date. I prefer to delete them one at at time. Once my "System" disk usage is at an acceptable level, I stop deleting but you can delete all of them if you want to reclaim all of the disk space.


Back at the terminal, type tmutil deletelocalsnapshots YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS , where will be one of the dates from your backup. This will be in the form of xxx-yy-zz-abcdef. Try to start with the oldest snapshot.

Hit enter.

Repeat for as many snapshot dates as required


http://www.thagomizer.com/blog/2018/03/27/cleaning-up-time-machine-local-snapshots.html

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iTunes iPhone Back Up Now to iCloud not enough free space on this computer

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