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After upgrading to macOS Sierra, I'm getting the notification that "Your disk is almost full. Save space by optimizing storage.":
The options appear to be to store my files in iCloud, automatically delete files, or manually delete files:
My problem/irritation is that I have 80GB free of my 440GB volume.
The question: is there a way to silence this notification in a (semi-)permanent fashion, or to change the threshold it uses for the notification?
The solution to disabling the "almost full" and "full" notification is to disable the daemon responsible for it:
launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.diskspaced.plist
or
launchctl stop com.apple.diskspaced
Alternatively, if you only want to prevent the "almost full" from appearing so often then you can lower the GB threshold via:
minFreeSpace (int) - minimal free size in GB. Default: 20
The default 20GB is too high for small SSDs and a possible bug causes the alert to be shown every day rather than just once, so as a workaround you can lower the free space before the alert appears, e.g. to 10GB:
defaults write com.apple.diskspaced minFreeSpace 10
The daemon only reads its prefs on startup so you need to restart it if you have system integrity turned off:
launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.diskspaced.plist
launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.diskspaced.plist
Otherwise kill it:
killall diskspaced
In case you are interested in the other preferences for these disk alerts you can view some of them using the help param:
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/StorageManagement.framework/Versions/A/Resources/diskspaced help
---
Domain: com.apple.diskspaced
Supported keys:
debugLog (BOOL) - log additional debug information. Default: NO
checkAllVolumes (BOOL) - check all volumes. Default: NO
minDiskSize (int) - minimal disk size in GB. Default: 128
minFreeSpace (int) - minimal free size in GB. Default: 20
minPurgeableSpace (int) - minimal purgeabe space size in GB. Default: 20
---
Commands: removeAllNotifications - Removes all scheduled and delivered user notificiations.
And here are a couple of hidden ones:
warningInterval (integer default 0)
lastWarningDate (string e.g. 2017-05-05 16:48:29 +0000)
I didn't look too closely at but it is possible setting the last warning date to a date in the future would also prevent the alert displaying.
default for min space to a lower value. Is there a way to see which defaults you've manually changed, or should I keep track of something like this myself?
See: How to access a launch daemon's values/ system defaults value
On Sierra this command didn't work for me:
launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.diskspaced.plist
due to System Integrity Protection engaged, so to stop the diskspaced service, run:
launchctl stop com.apple.diskspaced
Note: Use start to start again or list to see the details (e.g. its PID).
If the service is restarting after a while, try the following command to stop it:
killall -STOP diskspaced
To change the user's default settings, here are some example commands:
defaults write com.apple.diskspaced freeSpaceWarningLevel 1
defaults write com.apple.diskspaced warningInterval 3600
defaults write com.apple.diskspaced debugLog 1
defaults write com.apple.diskspaced checkAllVolumes 0
Then restart the service:
launchctl stop com.apple.diskspaced && launchctl start com.apple.diskspaced
To see the loaded settings, run diskspaced, e.g.:
$(find /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks -name diskspaced -print -quit)
2017-08-04 18:32:27.943 diskspaced[92401:12312556] FreeSpaceWarningLevel: 1
2017-08-04 18:32:27.943 diskspaced[92401:12312556] WarningInterval: 3600
2017-08-04 18:32:27.943 diskspaced[92401:12312556] Check All Volumes: NO
I believe parameters mentioned by @malhal no longer exist. Here is a simple command to test this:
$ grep -A6 debugLog <(strings $(find /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks -name diskspaced -print -quit))
debugLog
freeSpaceWarningLevel
FreeSpaceWarningLevel: %ld
warningInterval
WarningInterval: %ld
checkAllVolumes
Check All Volumes: %@
Check the logs by this command for any warnings:
grep com.apple.diskspaced /var/log/system.log
launchctl list com.apple.diskspaced to find PID, then kill -KILL PID. Although none of the other kill commands worked in High Sierra, this one works.
I think this notification is a bug.
I have 760GB free on my drive (a 1TB drive) and still get this same notification every morning since upgrading to Sierra.
I enabled Optimize Storage (but not Store in iCloud).
deleted that purges caches and whenever it does, it sends a CACHE_DELETE_PURGEABLE_UPDATED distributed notification to all apps. Whenever that notification is sent, the "Your disk is almost full" notification shows up, so I think it's a bug in some app that's listening for that distributed notification.
Turning on Do Not Disturb mode for notifications will silence the "Your disk is almost full" notifications. There is a downside as this will silence all notifications.
This will not help with the underlying issue of your disk being too full if it is in fact too full. Additionally, you may need to turn Do Not Disturb on again. It looks like it may be possible to get it remain on for all but about one minute of the day, but I'm not sure the developers intended Do Not Disturb to be used continually.
