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<blockquote data-quote="jpdemers" data-source="post: 1902973" data-attributes="member: 117810">I have that same 2020 MB Air, running Mojave OS, and to date have had no luck creating an external boot drive for it. The Mac will not recognize any external drive, other than an OS installer, when I go to select the startup drive.&nbsp; I've enabled external booting, and tried every trick from every source, but so far no dice.&nbsp; If it can be done, it's not the trivial task some people make it out to be.That said, the OS is not all that large - maybe about 18 MB - so there's no reason to keep it anywhere but on the internal SSD. I have my larger &quot;User&quot; folders (photos, movies, work files) on an external drive, and have aliases pointing to them in place of the actual folders on the internal drive. So far, all of my applications (including MS Office) have fit onto the internal drive.&nbsp; It's a fairly seamless solution.&nbsp; One caveat: Time Machine has to be configured to pay attention to the external drive, and backups require both drives to be attached, so a full battery charge is advisable when running TM.If you can't find the files that are consuming space on the SSD, there's a free program called Onyx that is quite reliable; you can ask it to &quot;clean up&quot; the drive and it will delete a lot of invisible/unnecessary/redundant detritus.&nbsp; If that doesn't do the trick, you can try restoring the OS from the recovery partition.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="jpdemers, post: 1902973, member: 117810"] I have that same 2020 MB Air, running Mojave OS, and to date have had no luck creating an external boot drive for it. The Mac will not recognize any external drive, other than an OS installer, when I go to select the startup drive. I've enabled external booting, and tried every trick from every source, but so far no dice. If it can be done, it's not the trivial task some people make it out to be. That said, the OS is not all that large - maybe about 18 MB - so there's no reason to keep it anywhere but on the internal SSD. I have my larger "User" folders (photos, movies, work files) on an external drive, and have aliases pointing to them in place of the actual folders on the internal drive. So far, all of my applications (including MS Office) have fit onto the internal drive. It's a fairly seamless solution. One caveat: Time Machine has to be configured to pay attention to the external drive, and backups require both drives to be attached, so a full battery charge is advisable when running TM. If you can't find the files that are consuming space on the SSD, there's a free program called Onyx that is quite reliable; you can ask it to "clean up" the drive and it will delete a lot of invisible/unnecessary/redundant detritus. If that doesn't do the trick, you can try restoring the OS from the recovery partition. [/QUOTE]

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