iMac Help

wibbly

wibbly

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Dave
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Encountered a rather strange issue this morning on my iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017)

I've been using without an issue, but now it appears to have updated itself the Catalina and I have no space left on the disk. If I look at the storage it shows I have 345GB of 1.03TB left, but when I go into Disk Utility it shows 2 disks, a Macintosh HD disk showing 11.3GB used, and 17.35GB free. I also have a Macintosh HD -Data disk which is showing 991.56GB used & 17.53GB free.

Each program I open I get an error message saying there is not enough space in your home folder to save information.

To say I totally in the dark as to what to do to fix this is beyond me.

Any experts out there have an idea as to what I need to do to fix this issue?
 
Is there anything in the recycle bin? I'd empty that first. Check downloads folder for anything large that could be deleted.
 
Not an expert and I’m not at my Mac now but don't Macs normally show something like that now? I mean that there is always the recovery partition which you don't normally see and they do something different with the rest of the drive which shows as two partitions. I expect there an Apple page that explains it. Off to have a look.

Edit to add, yep Mac HD & Mac Data:

Disk Utility User Guide for Mac

Learn how to use Disk Utility on your Mac to manage APFS volumes, test and repair disks, erase disks and more.
support.apple.com

That doesn’t explain your missing space though, agree about emptying trash.
 
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(I believe) There are files that take up space but are considered expendable by the OS, so they show in some measurements, but not others.

snapshots, caches, etc.

having said that, when the OS says there’s no room, I’d take note and look to offload some large spaces users to a backup.
 
wibbly said:
Thanks for the comments, a fresh install and an upgrade to the latest software seems to have solved the issue and released the space I had showing!
Click to expand...
I don't use macs very often... however, whenever my colleagues and I have any problems, we usually start with this approach first.... and then see where we are.

In all honesty, a fresh install usually solves our issues.
 
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