Unable to install Big Sur Beta due to space

How much storage is required to install? I have 73.83GB of 120GB available and I am still getting an error about not enough storage.

  • I partitioned 30-40 gigs and installed Big Sur there. I booted into that partition and cleared the main partition. I am attempting to install Big Sur back into the main partition of 200bg free space, but getting the same error. It is saying it needs 1.6gigs of space... There is no space to be save other than what the operation system is working under. I am guessing that the Partition which performs the installation needs to be large enough to boot the installer, which then transfers it to the larger partition... In this case I am kind of in a jam, as I cannot resize the smaller partition, and the main partition is wiped...

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Once I updated to the latest beta version of Catalina I was able to install the Big Sur Beta no issues.

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That's odd, you would only need around 20GB freespace on your main drive.
I've deleted couple of stuff on my HDD and manage to get the installation continue without any issue.
It's odd that you have so much free space and yet can't install the OS
I have the same problem, too. Is there any other way to install Big Sur rather than Install macOS Beta App?
Same error here. I have 150g available, but the installer sees “only’ 40g available and tells me I need an extra 9.84g
I have the same error, in my case I have 80 GB free space but the issue is 40GB is under purgeable, so I have deleted time machine local snapshots and then it worked. Check if you have any system caches or time machine snapshots and then delete them it should recover most space from purgeable
I have updated to the latest version of macOS Catalina Beta, then tried again to install Big Sur and problem seems resolved. It’s installing now.
Any suggestion? I am on latest Catalina beta and still hit the space issue
It's probably because of time machine local snapshots. Here's more on how to delete them: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204015
Once I updated to the latest beta version of Catalina I was able to install the Big Sur Beta no issues.
The issue was Time Machine local snapshots for me. I had 144GB free listed by the system but the installer app was only showing 22.34GB available. I ran the following command and cleared 8 snapshots, before successfully installing:

Code Block
tmutil deletelocalsnapshots /

Turning off Time Machine didn't work for me. This did:
Code Block
tmutil deletelocalsnapshots /

@nickelsey that was useful. Even though I run time machine from an external time capsule, this somehow fixed it almost immediately. I would recommend this to others EVEN IF they run time machine on external drives. It still keeps your latest backup as well.
Mine was the same but this worked straight away thank you!

tmutil deletelocalsnapshots /
Im having the same problem, saying I don't have enough space when in fact I believe I do