Stop receiving "Your disk is almost full" notification

Okay, I apologize if I came off as gruff. I should have counted to ten first. I appreciate the work of you all in the support community here. Aside from my paid work, I do a lot of volunteer Mac IT and troubleshooting and I know what it's like to confront ingrates and people with attitudes, so I am sorry I came off snarky. I discovered this thread after searching, as it was the first time I had ever gotten the "almost full" message - in 25 years of dealing with Macs. I have always been scrupulous about my disk usage, but some of my clients are not and I still have not seen it. What got my dander up was that I clicked on the notification and it instantly led me to the new pane that lets you invoke Apple's space management tools. I guess I am still philosophically uncomfortable with letting them decide these things for me and with their implementation of how they would handle my disk space. Anyway, I was ****** off and apologize. I don't know if I had some memory leak or a sleep image problem or what, but I restarted and will monitor the situation which, as you all know, is one of the best initial things we can do. I wish you all well.

The only solution I found is to turn off the entire notification system...

maybe a bit harsher than what you want, but it also drove me nuts.

As soon as Apple sells a 4Tb Macbook (12 inch - it needs to be less than 1kg), or even an unimpressive 1Tb, I will immediately order.

While in the past this message popped up sporadically, now it NAGS every 10s. Very annoying if you need work done on the upper right corner of the screen. CLEARLY an UNINTENDED BUG!

So here it is:

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui.plist

But i remember it used to only pops up again in a while (hours, or days?) after i clicked 'Close'. Now it's 10 seconds. I'm not refusing to clean up my disk. I just need to finish what I'm doing currently so I can optimize my disk! I can't click on some of the tabs in my browser because of this stubborn notification. And I have to search for a long time to get an answer in order to get rid of this notification so that i can keep working on my current work thus be able to have the free mind and free time to clean up my disk.

I don't see how this behavior of the notification popup (reappearing after 10 seconds) helps. What's wrong with providing an option to bring the notification back in one hour / ten hours / tomorrow, which is applied to many other notifications in Mac OS?

so that i can keep working on my current work thus be able to have the free mind and free time to clean up my disk.

I don't see how this behavior of the notification popup (reappearing after 10 seconds) helps.

The point here is:

If your disk is actually and really full, then there is NO room for it to continue working/writing to disk anything at all you are trying to do. The notification only changes to short term interval when the situation is critical.

A spinning hard drive is much like a CD or DVD: absolutely everything you do (write/copy/delete/save/edit, etc, etc) is followed by action on your hard drive. So, if it is full - much like a CD you just recorded songs to - there is no room for anything else unless you make some room now.

The alternative is that your drive will simply stop working. At which point, your computer will no longer be usable. The only solution at that point is to boot from another source and attempt to access files for deletion from there.

Two additional options. You can turn on "Do not disturb" mode from notification center by pulling down (or up) on the side bar to reveal the option toggle at the top of notification center. Another easy option if you have either a 13 inch MacBook Air, MacBook Pro with Retina Display, or an iMac with an SD card slot... you can by a JetDrive (google it), a flush mount SD card of sorts that expands the storage capacity of the Mac in a way that doesn't appear to the mac as external storage. This way, no drag and drop. However, if you prefer to put the scratch on a SD, make sure to get the fastest available SD card. SD Card bus is supposed to be as fast as the USB bus and if you have USB 3.0 it may work alright for you. This is of course, while we all wait for Apple to give us an option to tell this thing to shut up because we don't need to know every 10 seconds where our storage is at.

ngartke, you asked a clear question and got a lot of unwanted advice on what to do with your computer and no easy fix; at least not easy for the average user. FYI I have 250G of solid state with 200G free. Yes, only 50G used and I still get the stupid message. It looks like a sleezy way for Apple to push their cloud storage to me.

2012 Macbook Pro, 10.12.3

Honestly, after years of swearing by Mac, this might be the issue that pushes me over the edge. For years we'd get a notification, ONE NOTIFICATION, when the space got under 300 MB. Now it's under 5 GBs and it pops up 10 seconds!!! You know, sometimes we don't have time to clear harddrive space. Sometimes we are trying to work!!!

Honestly I miss Snow Leopard! They screwed up preview and there have been all sorts of buggy Windows like glitches and problems that Macs NEVER HAD before. It was the perfect computer. Now it's so buggy and so annoying, and treats you like you're a total moron. Where do we complain? Who listens to us? No one!

I'm sorry guys, no one is ignoring when their space gets low. It just NEEDS TO STOP TELLING US OVER AND OVER AGAIN. Just stop the notifications. We will address the issue when we have the time!

Maybe I should use a backup to downgrade to Yosemite... If I didn't have a newer computer I'd downgrade to Snow Leopard when Macs actually worked the way they were supposed to!

They want us to store everything in the cloud and they want us to pay for it. We pay for the computer. We pay for the internet connection, and now we need to pay for online storage that we might not always have access to... great idea, IF IT WERE A BACKUP and free. My computer only came with 250 GB. My Mac had 3 TB in it. They don't sell 3 TB of the new hard drives. Mac used to be such a great computer. Now they just want to push "the future" on us. Yeah, Beta was supposed to be the future. Laserdiscs were supposed to be the future. Firewire was supposed to be the future. Don't tell us what the future is, let us decide!!!

You capture my sentiments exactly. Preview is messed up. Now when I print from preview, it spits out all kinds of gibberish. The reason i loved  computers is that it was like am outsourcing the IT challenges to  while i focus on my core business. But that is not the case anymore and it's becoming more and more apparent. Anyway, for me they are still by far the lesser of many evils ;-). I also run windows and on mobile, have an Android phone and so far, no compelling reasons to switch. However if this trend continues over the years, it becomes hard to remain with  .

It's not an easy job in my view, balancing between maintaining good quality and satisfying the shareholders at the same time. For me, and this is my personal opinion, capitalism in the long run, runs contrary to quality and it takes a person with a sound intuition to balance the two. Time will tell if time is not already telling. I mean just look at the thought of replacing humans with machines. That is what it breeds in the long run, where more is never enough.

I also loved Yosemite but won't downgrade because of the flow through continuity as am able to work seamlessly from iPhone to iPad to Mac.

beanlynch wrote:

They want us to store everything in the cloud and they want us to pay for it. We pay for the computer. We pay for the internet connection, and now we need to pay for online storage that we might not always have access to... great idea, IF IT WERE A BACKUP and free. My computer only came with 250 GB. My Mac had 3 TB in it. They don't sell 3 TB of the new hard drives. Mac used to be such a great computer. Now they just want to push "the future" on us. Yeah, Beta was supposed to be the future. Laserdiscs were supposed to be the future. Firewire was supposed to be the future. Don't tell us what the future is, let us decide!!!

Beta was never supposed to be the future, what are you saying.

Beta means unfinished, Beta means untested.

And who exactly are 'they', do 'they' live?

In my case I have a lots of photos in iClould. Apple Photos used to manage well what to store in the clould and what to have locally. Recently it started downloading enough photos to make the notification pop up.

So I free up my disk. Photos sees the new space and downloads more pictures from iClould. The notification pops up again. I guess I'll stop using Photos on my Mac.

Not sure what you mean, but I'm talking about "Optimize Mac Storage. Store full-resolution photos and videos in iClould. Originals will also be stored on this Mac if you have enough storage space" option.

I have attached the screenshot here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/552666/screenshot-photos.png

So once I have enough storage space it downloads originals and I'm running out of storage space again (no completely, but enough to make the notification popup).

Drew Reece wrote:

Eventually you can lose data or get into an unbootable state.

Mac OS doesn't need fewer resources -- it needs more space over time.

That's why there is no option to turn off the dialog.

Rather than circumventing the warning, it's easier to buy an external drive.

Really apple's products became very buggy since couple of years ago. I remember hackintosh (snow leopard and mountain lion) running on my Asus laptop and it was very good about 4 years ago. Now I use MBP 2015 (Skylake) and it is running Sierra and this notification seemed to be made by Apple for selling their storage in their d a m n iCloud. Also windows that are hanging window system when trying to use split view and kernel crashes time to time. Also OS takes mostly all RAM (8gb) at start (excluding my programs). Also I'm using Windows 10 LTSB and it is not so buggy for sure on my old laptop (that is based on old sandy bridge core i5) and it is working better and faster.

And i am agree, that free space more than couple of GB is OK. Hope apple will fix it or smb will fix it without disabling all notifications.

OS X from Yosemite on is designed to make use of all of your RAM (because RAM that is not used is useless), this has been the way for some years.

Buying a machine that has insufficient storage space is on you, the system is behaving as it should, you just need a bigger drive to put things on.