The bar chart in Storage Settings shows most of your startup volume is full of System Data. What does it mean, and what use is it? Is its measure of used and free space accurate?
free space
Knowing a little about sparse and clone files in APFS is dangerous, as it can lead you to draw the wrong conclusions.
How much free disk space could you recover if your Mac is short of space and you need more to upgrade to Sonoma? Should you try flushing its caches in Safe mode?
Should you just try to upgrade in the hope that your Mac’s storage has sufficient free space? What can you do to free up a bit more if needed?
After studying thousand of log entries in less than 2 seconds, this is how macOS updates its values for purgeable and available space. But who uses them?
Free that space before macOS has to purge it for you. Using housekeeping, moving Documents and media libraries, but not relocating Home folders.
Deleting two large files from a volume triggered the updating of figures for purgeable and available space within 9 seconds. Yet 6 minutes later, the Finder didn’t show those updated figures.
One volume has 60 GB of purgeable space, giving 295 GB available; the other has only 15 GB purgeable, so 250 GB available. How can they be in the same container?
Good space management doesn’t bring new emoji, but it makes a big difference when the Finder doesn’t give completely inaccurate figures for Available space. A practical demonstration of its gross errors.
Can we trust the figures the Finder provides for used and available space on a volume? What does it count as purgeable?
The Eclectic Light Company 