Tip: DEVONthink reports no disk space but Finder says a lot of it is available

Guilty should be the local stored Time Machine snapshots, that are not reported as used space to user but it is reported to applications. “Thinning” them should resolve the issue. A df from console should give you the tip: your main partition is almost full in “Capacity” column.

With CleanMyMac (I’m not fan of this program, but has some helpful tools), go to Maintenance → Reduce Time Machine Snapshots.

With command line, online search for tmutil listlocalsnapshots and follow any of the tutorials available.

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Thanks for the useful tip! Especially on APFS the reported disk space is not always very accurate unfortunately.

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Howard Oakley provides a lot of insight into Time Machine backups here:

In addition, I personally prefer to manage the snapshot situation by a combination of TM, Carbon Copy Cloner, and sufficient hard drive (SSD) storage to make sure I don’t run into problems. This approach might require acquiring Macs with large enough internal drives (i.e., 2 or 4TB vice 256 or 512GB, for example).

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