need some clarifications about my storage on my MacBook

[mrgreeneyes]

Hello,

right now I have 2 different photos shows that I have three different free storage available.

first one shows my desktop with the Storage manager, it shows I have 265gb of free space, and in the same photo in the right top corner, the Macintosh hd shows I have 148gb free.

then when I am trying to do a reinstall on Monterey it tells me I need an additional 13gb of space, and in the photo it shows that I only have 14gb of free space.

my question is, what the hell is going on? and also when I delete items on my Mac and empty the trash, the Macintosh hd free space does not go up at all.

 

[jtopp]

Hello,

right now I have 2 different photos shows that I have three different free storage available.

first one shows my desktop with the Storage manager, it shows I have 265gb of free space, and in the same photo in the right top corner, the Macintosh hd shows I have 148gb free.

then when I am trying to do a reinstall on Monterey it tells me I need an additional 13gb of space, and in the photo it shows that I only have 14gb of free space.

my question is, what the hell is going on? and also when I delete items on my Mac and empty the trash, the Macintosh hd free space does not go up at all.

Is iCloud reserving the space for backup? Can you backup your music and restore it later?

 

[jtopp]

Is iCloud reserving the space for backup? Can you backup your music and restore it later?

One way to free up your purgeable space is to disable iCloud drive optimization. As you can see, iCloud backups were the part of that “invisible” space on your Mac. It also helps if you empty your Trash — one more purgeable category of storage.

 

[Mike Boreham]

One way to free up your purgeable space is to disable iCloud drive optimization. As you can see, iCloud backups were the part of that “invisible” space on your Mac. It also helps if you empty your Trash — one more purgeable category of storage.

This is wrong. All that disabling "Optimisation" will do is reduce the purgeable space by turning it into unpurgeable used space, which won't help the OP at all. He needs to increase free space by actually purging the purgeable space.

"Optimisation" allows macOS to save local space by replacing full size files with stub files, leaving the full size file on iCloud. Disabling optimisation forces all iCloud files to have local full size copies, so will have the opposite effect to what the OP wants.

OP: "Free space" is very difficult to pin down, and can vary from hour to hour as well in different places. Time Machine snapshots on the boot drive are supposed to be purgeable but IME sometimes are not treated as such by the OS. This is a common cause of unexpected low free space. This is the reason you do not see free space increase when you delete items. The space is reserved in a snapshot until it is purged.

You can easily delete the local TM snapshots from Disk Utility. Click "Show APFS snapshots" in the view menu, and they will appear under the main window. You can select and delete them from there.