Stop receiving "Your disk is almost full" notification

I may try that, but I’ve already removed over 120 gb in files. When I do a properties inquiry on my SSD I show 129.93 gb available and 129.88 purgeable.

ngartke, i think just wait for answers that points to your question and ignore all the rest. I read answers like these especially forums related to  products and services all the time and there is just not much you can do. Once we realize how so different we all are, maybe some understanding will come to see we all use our machines differently, even if the machines are all the same. I've been running between 2GB to 3GB for over 4 years now and have managed this very fine. It's something i praise  for because i also use windows on an HP laptop and man that chap is slower than a snail. Sometimes actually can't work on it but they are other windows machines that manage. My MBA runs optimally, so  have done a very good job. It's just the nagging notification that's the headache :-D. Lets hope a future updates gives us the option to turn it off.

Your question is very specific and glad some here in the forum get what you want an answer to.

I'm with you, Rockstar, the condescension here is mind-blowing. I have 600 gigs free on a Terabyte disk - that's 60% free - and I just got the message. I'm doing Mac IT work for 25 years and know what I'm doing. Does somebody here want to lecture me on the importance of freeing up disk space? Maybe you should rail at Apple's heavy-handedness in treating us all like morons who cannot manage our machines.

Additionally, we do not get paid and most of us volunteer because we want to help; however, we are not obliged nor do we get paid to be the recipients of some posters' attitude. The advice directed at the OP was spot on.

Your case would be odd - definitely - and if you had asked providing necessary technical and relevant details, I would have genuinely tried to help. As it is - good luck.

It is clear your case is an error - please re-read the original post & you should see that the situation is not the same as yours. I suggest you create a new topic for help with this as it is pointless trying to troubleshoot an unrelated issue, especially as this one is confounded by people looking for a solution that does not exist.

nomadcat wrote:

Maybe you should rail at Apple's heavy-handedness in treating us all like morons who cannot manage our machines.

Being a Mac user for so long you really should be used to it by now, it's not like Apple has suddenly started doing this is it? It's probably one of the most consistent principles of the company 🙂.

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?