MaintenanceTool free space problem
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Has anyone else experienced MaintenanceTool or the unified installed refusing to do an install or add something because it says there isn't enough free space when the Finder in OSX clearly has several times the amount of space free that it needs? The installer thinks there's only 13GB free when the Finder says there's 109GB free.
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Okay, so here's what's going on. If you use Time Machine, backups happen to the local internal storage even though you may be using a NFS storage device. These can be very large. OSX considers this space to be purgeable and it will appear in Finder windows that you have a lot of free space. However, when you look at the drive in Disk Utility, you won't see all of that free space. Time Machine eventually frees up this space for regular use. You can accelerate this process by using tmutil in Terminal. For example:
tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
Snapshots for disk /:
com.apple.TimeMachine.2023-05-05-125631.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2023-05-05-135413.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2023-05-05-145603.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2023-05-05-160247.localShows the backups but it doesn't show their size. tmutil thinlocalsnapshots lets you delete snapshots of a certain size. tmutil deletelocalsnapshots lets you delete specific ones. (Google these commands for the details).
Now, is this a bug or a feature as far as MaintenanceTool is concerned? That's debatable. Whatever low-level free space call Qt is using is clearly using something different than what the Finder itself is using. If Qt used the same call, would the OS then purge those local backups as needed? Who knows?
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Okay, so here's what's going on. If you use Time Machine, backups happen to the local internal storage even though you may be using a NFS storage device. These can be very large. OSX considers this space to be purgeable and it will appear in Finder windows that you have a lot of free space. However, when you look at the drive in Disk Utility, you won't see all of that free space. Time Machine eventually frees up this space for regular use. You can accelerate this process by using tmutil in Terminal. For example:
tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
Snapshots for disk /:
com.apple.TimeMachine.2023-05-05-125631.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2023-05-05-135413.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2023-05-05-145603.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2023-05-05-160247.localShows the backups but it doesn't show their size. tmutil thinlocalsnapshots lets you delete snapshots of a certain size. tmutil deletelocalsnapshots lets you delete specific ones. (Google these commands for the details).
Now, is this a bug or a feature as far as MaintenanceTool is concerned? That's debatable. Whatever low-level free space call Qt is using is clearly using something different than what the Finder itself is using. If Qt used the same call, would the OS then purge those local backups as needed? Who knows?
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C Christian Ehrlicher locked this topic on