Not Enough Disk Space in Library Folders?

All Discussions > Steam Forums > Steam for Mac > Topic Details

mchenry Aug 14, 2018 @ 5:58am

Let me start this off by saying I am not good with computers by any means. I opened up Steam for the first time in a year now that I have a little more free time for gaming and decided to buy XCOM 2. When I clicked to install it in the Steam client, I kept getting hit with an error saying that I don't have the necessary disk space needed (29.5GB), which was strange considering that I have 120GB of storage free on my drive.

Here's a screencap of the error: https://imgur.com/a/sFsKUOT

Here's my available storage space: https://imgur.com/a/gmx0hxd

After a couple hours of checking for solutions, I realized that my Steam Library Folders were for some reason capped at around 28.5GB of free space. I tried making new folders in different locations on my drive but for some reason all those folders seem to be capped at the same free space "limit," for lack of a better word.

Example: https://imgur.com/a/MZdsq3u

I've never run into this problem before, not even with the last game I purchased and played which was Company of Heroes 2 (which required roughly 35GB of space and cannot be downloaded on my computer now). I've already done some simple things like uninstalling/reinstalling Steam, clearing the download cache, disabling my antivirus, restarting my computer, etc. that don't seem to be working.

Has anyone encountered this problem before and have solutions? I'm not sure if this is some sort of Mac OS issue or if something is wrong with the Steam Client itself. I've looked around but haven't found any Reddit posts or forums that help. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

< >

Showing 1-6 of 6 comments

SeraphSword Aug 14, 2018 @ 3:00pm

You might find a solution in this thread, there are a few different suggestions:
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/1621724915808101152/

mikela

Aug 15, 2018 @ 10:16am

You may want to give the Steam beta client a try:
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7021-EIAH-8669

If you happen to be running High Sierra (macOS 10.13) you may be running in to a new feature of the filesystem that High Sierra updates your OS install to (APFS) that essentially keeps track of two different free disk space counts, one for the amount currently available that can be used immediately by any applications, the other the amount that can be freed up for use on demand, though is not currently actually available for use. macOS reports the larger "can be freed to" amount in Finder and in the Storage tab of About This Mac. You can see the amount actually available in Disk Utility where it lists both the amount available and the amount that can be immediately freed on demand (called Purgeable space).

You can see an example of this from my disk at: https://imgur.com/a/T973jPP

I made a change in the latest beta to use a different method for checking available disk space that should take this Purgeable space into account so it may work for helping fix this issue.