App Store: "There is not enough disk space available to install the product."

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I booted from recovery and did Disk First Aid just last weekend after I first had the trouble with updating Mimeo Photos. DU found no problem with the drive. I also ran fsck from the command line while in recovery mode with the same result. No errors. And, I tried booting from a clone and running DU on the boot. Nothin'.

I tried deleting the Group Container files for both Mimeo Photos and Spark. (And, I emptied the Trash.) App Store still won't reinstall them. Same error message.

I've never used either of those apps, so this is not an urgent problem. But, it vexes me that App Store produces such a deceptive error message. And, it might matter later when I'm unable to update an app that I actually need to use.

(I never solved the self-assigned IP address problem, either. Sadly, some problems have no solution.)
 

chscag

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The solution was to turn off TM. That has the effect of erasing all of the snapshots TM takes and frees up the space immediately. Might that be part of it?

@Jake: I'm not sure that still works. I have experimented with snapshots from TM and it appears that the only way I could remove the snapshots was to use a terminal command. I believe the snapshots remain as long as there appears to be sufficient space on the drive. I know that it worked at one time, however, it may have changed since High Sierra or Mojave.

Try it yourself to see if it still works that way.
 
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Turning off automatic backups on Time Machine didn't work for me. The local snapshots remain:

MrMuscle:/ mnewman$ tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
com.bombich.ccc.DECD93DC-5CF4-4307-B0A3-451276C71353.2019-10-19-011012
com.bombich.ccc.529A0CF9-6681-496F-8671-AE3D4E838674.2019-10-20-144930
com.bombich.ccc.08A0D36C-2DAD-496D-9090-A655B3BE32C9.2019-10-22-182850
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-24-074752
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-24-132425
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-24-142425
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-24-152520
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-24-162522
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-24-172401
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-24-182406
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-24-192308
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-24-202357
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-24-212308
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-24-222257
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-24-232356
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-25-002446
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-25-012351
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-25-022354
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-25-032302
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-25-042356
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-25-052307
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-25-062415
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-25-072315
 
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@Charlie: I'm not in Catalina and I have TM off normally, with it only coming on twice a day under TimeMachineEditor. So I can't test if it works because I only have two and the TM system is off.

- - - Updated - - -

@Ratsima, I think if you do a TM backup the snapshots are then purged. That might free enough that if you immediately try the install it works? Again, straws...
 
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@Ratsima, I think if you do a TM backup the snapshots are then purged. That might free enough that if you immediately try the install it works? Again, straws...

But why am I worried about freeing up space on a drive that has 160GB free?

Code:
MrMuscle:/ mnewman$ df -h /
Filesystem     Size   Used  Avail Capacity iused               ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk1s1  466Gi  295Gi  160Gi    65% 2787237 9223372036851988570    0%   /
 
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Straws... That's about all I got.
 
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Now, this is troubling. How is it that "System" takes up over 240GB of Storage?

Screenshot 2019-10-25 10.22.36.jpg
 
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I think the snapshots are considered "System" files. Plus any scratch/spool/paging space. You might try running OnyX to clean out some of the cache, etc.
 

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@Jake:

I think if you do a TM backup the snapshots are then purged.

That doesn't work for TM or CCC.

Notice that @Ratsima has both CCC and Time Machine snapshots taking up space. With the number of snapshots he's showing, I'm betting the space it's taking up is substantial.

This will purge them for sure:

tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates / |grep 20|while read f; do tmutil deletelocalsnapshots $f; done

or

sudo tmutil thinLocalSnapshots / 10000000000 4
 
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That doesn't work for TM or CCC.
Wow, that's a bug! Nowhere does anything from Apple say to delete these snapshots manually. In my system, the snapshots are deleted when it makes a backup, although it then creates a new one just before TME turns it off again. For example, here are the only snapshots on my system:
Screen Shot 2019-10-24 at 11.32.16 PM.png
If TM doesn't automatically delete snapshots when it makes a backup, then I would expect to see hundreds, literally hundreds, of snapshots as I have not deleted a snapshot in over 10 months. That would be 600 snapshots or more. But I have two. So some system is deleting them.
 
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Notice that @Ratsima has both CCC and Time Machine snapshots taking up space. With the number of snapshots he's showing, I'm betting the space it's taking up is substantial.
Although he has a lot of backups, they are all within 24 hours, so it may be just that he has not connected the TM drive in the last day. Those snapshots *should* be relatively small, unless he's editing video or massive files. My understanding is that snapshots just capture the changed files, waiting for a backup to occur so they can be integrated into the TM backup data from before.
 
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My TM drive is always connected and mounted. I do not edit videos very often (a few times per year) nor do I edit other massive files. The TM drive is 1TB and is always almost full.

Thinning the snapshots might be worthwhile in the short term. But, they will just get recreated as time goes by. Since my boot drive has a lots of free space, TM just goes ahead and fills it up with snapshots. ("Local snapshots as space permits") That's what it's supposed to do. I have to admit, though, some surprise at how many there are and how much space they take up.

I first saw this when I booted into recovery mode last weekend and ran First Aid. After checking the disk, it checked each snapshot individually. I think at that time there were 17 of them. It took a long time. No problems found.

I really doubt that the snapshots are what is preventing the App Store from updating certain apps. (Other apps, like Xcode, updated automatically with no problem at all.)
 
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The thinlocalsnapshots doesn't delete snapshots, but it tries to reduce their size by eliminating duplicate files (I think). But, when I tried it, it really didn't do much. As you can see, when it thins it doesn't reduce the number of snapshots:

Code:
MrMuscle: mnewman$ tmutil listlocalsnapshots / | grep TimeMachine -c
22
MrMuscle: mnewman$ tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 21474836480
Thinned local snapshots:
MrMuscle: mnewman$ tmutil listlocalsnapshots / | grep TimeMachine -c
22
MrMuscle: mnewman$ df -h /
Filesystem     Size   Used  Avail Capacity iused               ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk1s1  466Gi  300Gi  155Gi    66% 2781078 9223372036851994729    0%   /

Earlier today:

Code:
Filesystem     Size   Used  Avail Capacity iused               ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk1s1  466Gi  295Gi  160Gi    65% 2787237 9223372036851988570    0%   /

I didn't make this urgent, so maybe more thinning will take place as time goes by.
 
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Nope. Three hours later there's actually about the same free space:

Code:
MrMuscle:/ mnewman$ df -h /
Filesystem     Size   Used  Avail Capacity iused               ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk1s1  466Gi  299Gi  156Gi    66% 2781426 9223372036851994381    0%   /
 
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I’m sorry, I haven’t read through the entire thread, but did you try either NVRAM or SMC reset?

Another thing I wanted to ask is, are you running Mojave or Catalina?


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I’m running Mojave. I did do both NVRAM and SMC reset at the same time I did the restart in recovery mode. That was last weekend.
 

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Just a FWIW comment.

I’m on Mojave. I turned off Automatic TM backups and do these manually about three or four times a day.

What’s more, I have two TM Drives so TM backups up to each alternately. Using Terminal, I find that I never have more than two snapshots, one for each TM Drive. Each time I do a backup, it erases the previous snapshot and replaces it with a new one.

As regards CCC, I have snapshots turned off, which usually means that there is just one which gets replaced at each backup.

I notice that the above applies to my older iMac running High Sierra.

Ian
 
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@Jake:

That doesn't work for TM or CCC.

Notice that @Ratsima has both CCC and Time Machine snapshots taking up space. With the number of snapshots he's showing, I'm betting the space it's taking up is substantial.

This will purge them for sure:

tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates / |grep 20|while read f; do tmutil deletelocalsnapshots $f; done

or

sudo tmutil thinLocalSnapshots / 10000000000 4
Given what Charlie said, that TM does not delete snapshots after making a backup, does anybody know HOW they get deleted by the system automatically? I've never run those terminal commands, yet I only have two snapshots, one at each time I have TM automated to be turned on, make a backup, and then turn off again. I never see more than the two snapshots, rolling through the day. So *something* is deleting them, and it's not me.

I thought snapshots were temporary backup files created by TM when the backup disk is not attached and that once the backup gets made, the snapshots are not longer needed and are therefore deleted. But this article: About Time Machine local snapshots - Apple Support seems to say that the snapshots are deleted after 24 hours, backed up or not. That activity would be consistent with what I see, that is, two snapshots in the previous 24 hours. So is that it? Just a clock? That would mean that if you don't have the TM drive attached while traveling, for example, for a week, you have NO backups of the six days of the start of the week when you return home to the TM drive.

Seems to me that would be something pretty important to know in a business environment. Just sayin'.
 

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I'm not seeing the other issues, but the XCode update error persisted when I tried a few times. I finally did some searches and it seems that's a known issue with Xcode updating from 11.0 to 11.1 on Catalina. So the "fix" is to delete the existing installation of Xcode 11.0 and install 11.1 from scratch.
 

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