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Low Disk Space Alert with Plenty of Purgeable Space

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Title says it all really. I am starting to see the "Your disk is almost full" warnings on my Macbook Pro, however there is plenty of purgeable disk space available.


I understand that we cannot manually remove purgeable space which is fine. We're not supposed to care. Wonderful, I don't want to have to care... I just want to carry on with my day, but MacOS keeps bothering me with this alert about low disk space.


I have submitted a bug via developer bug reports, as well as apple.com/feedback.


In the meantime, anyone know of any workarounds?

MacBook Pro TouchBar and Touch ID, macOS High Sierra (10.13.2), null

Posted on Dec 13, 2017 12:35 PM

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Posted on Dec 13, 2017 2:39 PM

The solution to disabling the "almost full" and "full" notification is to disable the daemon responsible for it:

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

Alternatively, if you only want to prevent the "almost full" from appearing so often then you can lower the GB threshold via:

minFreeSpace (int) - minimal free size in GB. Default: 20

The default 20GB is too high for small SSDs and a possible bug causes the alert to be shown every day rather than just once, so as a workaround you can lower the free space before the alert appears, e.g. to 10GB:

defaults write com.apple.diskspaced minFreeSpace 10

The daemon only reads its prefs on startup so you need to restart it if you have system integrity turned off:

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

Otherwise kill it:

killall diskspaced

In case you are interested in the other preferences for these disk alerts you can view some of them using the help param:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/StorageManagement.framework/Versions/A/Resources/diskspaced help --- Domain: com.apple.diskspaced Supported keys: debugLog (BOOL) - log additional debug information. Default: NO checkAllVolumes (BOOL) - check all volumes. Default: NO minDiskSize (int) - minimal disk size in GB. Default: 128 minFreeSpace (int) - minimal free size in GB. Default: 20 minPurgeableSpace (int) - minimal purgeabe space size in GB. Default: 20 --- Commands: removeAllNotifications - Removes all scheduled and delivered user notificiations.

And here are a couple of hidden ones:

warningInterval (integer default 0) lastWarningDate (string e.g. 2018-05-05 16:48:29 +0000)

7 replies
Question marked as Best reply

Dec 13, 2017 2:39 PM in response to JeremyTM

The solution to disabling the "almost full" and "full" notification is to disable the daemon responsible for it:

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

Alternatively, if you only want to prevent the "almost full" from appearing so often then you can lower the GB threshold via:

minFreeSpace (int) - minimal free size in GB. Default: 20

The default 20GB is too high for small SSDs and a possible bug causes the alert to be shown every day rather than just once, so as a workaround you can lower the free space before the alert appears, e.g. to 10GB:

defaults write com.apple.diskspaced minFreeSpace 10

The daemon only reads its prefs on startup so you need to restart it if you have system integrity turned off:

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

Otherwise kill it:

killall diskspaced

In case you are interested in the other preferences for these disk alerts you can view some of them using the help param:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/StorageManagement.framework/Versions/A/Resources/diskspaced help --- Domain: com.apple.diskspaced Supported keys: debugLog (BOOL) - log additional debug information. Default: NO checkAllVolumes (BOOL) - check all volumes. Default: NO minDiskSize (int) - minimal disk size in GB. Default: 128 minFreeSpace (int) - minimal free size in GB. Default: 20 minPurgeableSpace (int) - minimal purgeabe space size in GB. Default: 20 --- Commands: removeAllNotifications - Removes all scheduled and delivered user notificiations.

And here are a couple of hidden ones:

warningInterval (integer default 0) lastWarningDate (string e.g. 2018-05-05 16:48:29 +0000)

Dec 13, 2017 2:30 PM in response to Kappy

@Kappy, apologies, that wasn't my intention. If we're being overly sensitive though, posting links with no other effort to actually address the issues raised (which is what we come here for) could also be considered rude, and in fact makes the assumption that I'm too stupid to have done any previous googling.

Low Disk Space Alert with Plenty of Purgeable Space

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