Hi I have recently upgraded from Yosemite to Monterey but when I log in it gives the message Your hard drive is almost full. Allow min. 1GB
I checked in Storage but it shows 65GB available. Is there any reason for this?
I have tried disk first aid but that didn't make any difference.
MacBook (2017)
I suggest starting with this support article to see if it can help:
There may still be some residual system files, that were created during the upgrade process, that may need to be "cleaned out." One of those, could be the macOS Monterey installer ... which, by default, is placed in your Mac's /Applications folder.
Thank you however I have discovered a couple of other issues such as Mail failing to migrate and web browser issues, so I am going to do a clean install of macOS rather than trying to troubleshoot all of this. Thankfully I made a backup of the data beforehand.
"Available" is not the same as "Free" space. I believe Disk Utility will show both "Available" and "Free"...."Free" is what is important. You always want to keep at least 20GB+ of free space on the boot drive at all times for the normal operation of macOS. Some workloads may require you to have even more free space available....the 20GB is just for basic macOS usage.
FYI, If you ever completely run out of free space on an APFS volume, then you will be unable to delete any files in order to free up space due to how the APFS file system works.
The Storage Management is known to show incorrect information. I'm on Ventura and I don't see a "Free" designation in the Storage section.
The best place to see the amount of "Free" space is by checking Disk Utility. You will clearly see that Disk Utility shows both a "Free" value and "Available" value which usually are different with the "Free" value being the smaller of the values and the more meaningful value. The "Available" value usually has a "purgeable" value in parenthesis which is what will become "available" at some point once macOS releases that storage area (no one knows exactly when that storage will be released and converted to the "Free" space).
You will see the "Free" + "Purgeable" = "Available".
Edit: I believe the information in the Storage Management area is calculated based on the Spotlight indexing, but I'm not entirely sure. I thought that is what some other more knowledgeable contributors mentioned previously.
I was looking under the Storage section under About this Mac, that is the same as Free space?
Disk almost full after upgrading to Monterey
