MacOS Install - space not available

Voiddreams · February 2020

On a Macbook Pro 256GB (Formerly 34GB free and running ESO on the system) Launcher will not run because it says there is not enough free space. The KB article calls for a Minimum 135GB on a Mac. I had to delete files to get to the 175GB free space as per the "Apple - Storage" report, and no ESO installed. It still will not run and calls for more space. Doing a further dive it looks like the OS is holding the freed up space as "purgeable". It shows 28GB free and ~150GB as purgeable.

alterfenixeb17_ESO · February 2020

My guess is you have 150 GB of files in Documents or Desktop folder, and also you have enabled storing it in iCloud? In such case unfortunately with 28 GB system decides that you have plenty of space and therefore no need to store those files only in cloud while apps such as TESO cannot tell that you have so much of space that can be freed automatically. With that being said you may want to try something like instruction below (just make sure that you create those files outside of Documents and Desktop so nothing is synced to iCloud):

Open your terminal by searching for terminal in spotlight (open spotlight with cmd+spacebar)
In the terminal, execute mkdir ~/largefiles.
execute dd if=/dev/random of=~/largefiles/largefile bs=15m count=1000. This will create a new file called “largefile” in your largefiles folder, which contains the random output from /dev/random. Size of this file should be roughly 10GB. NOTE: this command will cause your terminal to appear like it is frozen… that is expected, as the command is running!
In the terminal, run the command cp ~/largefiles/largefile ~/largefiles/largefile2
This will copy the largefile that was created in step 3 to a new file called “largefile2”.
Remember, this is different than just running cmd+d or cmd+c/cmd+v on the file… it’s forcing the file to be copied over in its entirety, filling up more space on disk.
Continue to run the copy command from step 5, changing the name of the copy destination from largefile2 to something different each time.
Change the copy destination name to something like largefile3, largefile4, etc…
Periodically check for purgeable space. Also you may get disk space critically low message in the process. Just make sure that system does indeed free some purgeable space.
Once completed execute rm -rf ~/largefiles/. This will delete all of the largefiles from your system.
Make sure you empty the trash bin as well, or the files will just sit in there taking up space!
Open disk utility by searching for disk utility in spotlight
You should see either no amount of purgeable space, or a very small amount of purgeable space remaining in your hard drive snapshot