It’s the second time this happens, but I have no idea what’s going on:
My disk had 8GB free, then I emptied the Trash:
iCloud has plenty of space too:
Eventually it resumed, but is there a reason for this?
I will try to answer, but I am not 100% sure if I am right.
8 GB free space is “nothing”. 15.2 GB free space is better than 8 GB, but it still is not much.
My recommendation: try to always have at least 20% of your Mac’s disk space available. With a 256 GB SSD, this would mean 50 GB of free space is fine. You should not have any issues then. Less is not optimal. This is how I am doing it: my main Mac always will have local storage that is big enough to contain everything stored in iCloud.
This is the other option: if you are fine storing stuff in iCloud only, you can allow your Mac to decide what is being stored on your Mac and what is only available in iCloud. As long as you have enough storage available to you in iCloud, you should be fine as long as everything is working as it is supposed to in Apple’s cloud and within the apps that are running on your Mac dealing with this optimized storage. But even then, your Mac will have to work with stuff locally in order to offload stuff to iCloud that is not needed and to download stuff that is needed. The Mac needs space for that and other processes and tasks.
Eventually, it resumed, but is there a reason for this?
One of the reasons may be that potentially your Mac temporarily had so little space available that it was not able to do anything reliably (8 GB may be already too little storage space). When this storage space issue changed, everything could resume working again. Another reason can be that there were issues with iCloud or your connection to iCloud.
Glenn Fleishmann wrote a nice article on MacWorld back in 2024 about his experiences with Apple’s “seamless optimization of storage”:
It is worth a read.
This is one of the reasons why I try avoiding this feature altogether. Then again, I get that this cannot be done by everyone.
If others have no further ideas and if you stumble again into this issue, it may be an idea to contact Apple.
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As Christian said, 15GB is a very small amount of free space, do some cleaning or move some of your stuff to iCloud.
For your local storage, try to keep at least 100 or 50GB.
Alternatives: Buy an external disk
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I will go over my files and see what can be deleted, as having more external disks for storage is not an option for me at the moment.
Thanks for the feedback!