Thursday, March 12, 2015

Items can't be copied to a Mac because there is not enough free space, even when disk information shows plenty of free space

When attempting to copy 50GB of data onto a Mac Air that was reporting 210GB of space available the copy failed on an error "not enough free space available".

The root cause was Time Machine backups utilizing the local drive.  Even though the person never used Time Machine it was still enabled and apparently backing up to the local HDD.  Turning off Time Machine freed up the space and we were able to copy the data successfully.

Looking under  System Information/System Report/Storage we saw the backups taking up a massive amount of space; only 4kb was left available.

You can also disable Time Machine from the command line:

sudo tmutil disablelocal





 



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