MacBook Pro: Can't download 32GB folder, but I have 100GB storage available

tzikeh wrote:

Thanks for your answer -- I have follow-up questions!

You're welcome.

Here is the expanded view. This includes the "free space" which is 55.77 GB. I don't understand - when I pull up info on my hard drive, it says it has a capacity of 494.38 GB, and Available 95.48 GB. Why aren't "available" and "free" the same amount? (I see it says 39.78 GB purgeable, but "purgeable space" has always been a mystery to me. How do I access it and remove things?)

Disk Utility and Terminal are the only consistently accurate ways to view the free space of your startup drive. You can't rely on the numbers provided by Finder or Storage.

You bought a Mac with only a 500 GB startup drive and didn't give yourself any room for future growth.

The best way for you to clear storage space is to use an external drive and move transfer some of your stuff. Another option may be to use iCloud and move some of your files into that.

Is my only option for creating more free space off-loading a bunch of stuff to external drives? And what is that 36GB called "other volumes"?

Is that your only option? No. But it's probably your best option.

That 36 GB "other volumes" is a normal part of the file system that macOS uses. The typical startup drive has these five volumes: Macintosh HD, Macintosh HD - Data, Preboot, Recovery and VM.

Three of them usually remain in the background and you'll only find two listed by Disk Utility: Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD - Data.

MacOS system files are installed on the locked and secure Macintosh HD volume.

Your own user and personal files live on Macintosh HD - Data.

Finder uses macOS magic to show you these two volumes as a single drive on your Desktop named Macintosh HD.

What you can do to create more free space:

• Empty the Trash in the Dock. 

• Empty the trash in the Photos app.

• Delete unused and unneeded application installers from your downloads folder and desktop. No need to store on your Mac what you can freely download any time.

• Reboot your Mac at least weekly. Let the OS do its housekeeping.

• Transfer files that you don’t use daily to an external drive and then delete them from the startup drive and empty the trash. Files that take up the most room are movies, images and music.

This from Apple on the subject of freeing up space:

Free up storage space on Mac - Apple Support

tzikeh wrote:

Thanks for your answer -- I have follow-up questions!

Here is the expanded view. This includes the "free space" which is 55.77 GB. I don't understand - when I pull up info on my hard drive, it says it has a capacity of 494.38 GB, and Available 95.48 GB. Why aren't "available" and "free" the same amount? (I see it says 39.78 GB purgeable, but "purgeable space" has always been a mystery to me. How do I access it and remove things?)

Is my only option for creating more free space off-loading a bunch of stuff to external drives? And what is that 36GB called "other volumes"?

First, as others have pointed out, the Mac needs to have at least 15% free space for normal operations. Especially for ongoing, dynamic virtual memory paging to disk and other housekeeping operations. Your Mac actually has only about 50 GB (roughly 10%) free space, it appears. Purgeable doesn't count, that is a rough estimate of the MacOS of what it might be able to remove to increase free space but that is a dynamic, not deterministic process that the user has no control over.

To download a 32 GB folder, your Mac needs additional space to unpack and sort and move the downloaded folder and files within it. I don't know if the download source has such a large folder as a zip or dmg file or it is compressed in some other way. But during the download process, additional temporary files are created are utilized, which means you physically need more than that 32 GB. But you are already below the minimum safe available free space. The Mac probably does a rough calculation of this additional required space and what you have is likely not meeting the minimum criterion.

If you want to be downloading 32 GB files, you need to configure your Mac so that there is at least 100 GB free AFTER the download. This means you have to take a look at moving large files/folders (e.g. Music [which is the largest category of storage you are using], Photos) to external drives. You screenshot also shows space taken by iOS files. If those are iPhone backups, those can be stored in iCloud, saving space on your Mac. If they are downloaded iOS updates, those can be deleted. Also, Apple offers options to store Documents, Desktop files, etc. in iCloud. In hindsight, you should have obtained a Mac with 1 TB or more storage, but that's water under the bridge at this point. One has to pay one way or another -- either a Mac with more capacity, or one has to pay for external drives and/or more iCloud storage.

In Disk Utility take a look at the number associated with "Free". That's the critical number, and I suspect it's only ~52 GB. "Available" is one thing and "Free" is another.

You've truncated the view of the DU windows so we can't see that.

Your disk is getting critically low on Free space.

A good rule of thumb is to always keep 10%-15% of the total drive capacity open as Free space. This allow the OS room to do what it needs to keep running smoothly.

If you let the drive fill up too far, eventually the Mac will refuse to startup and then you're really in a pickle.

Make use of an external drive and move a good chunk of your data to that for storage so you can delete it from the startup drive before it's too late.

Apropos of some details other than the download, remember to connect to your Time Machine storage, or get a NAS with Time Machine server if you want to skip the cables.

tzikeh wrote:

The plan was to host my 170 GB Music (iTunes) library on an external drive. I didn't know that Apple had removed a user's ability to host the Music library on an external drive - 500 GB internal storage would have been more than enough if I could host my Music library externally. They let us move our movie library and photos library, but the Music app won't work if the music library isn't hosted on the computer.

It sounds like you are doing your best.

Here is a link that explains how move the Music Library (which is very large for you) to an external drive:

How to move Music to an External Hard Dri… - Apple Community

Your screenshot post: