# Space Constrained Volumes Error Message



## dfisher (Jul 2, 2020)

- When I open Lightroom, I see a progress dialog called 'Moving Your Photos' that states:
 Macintosh HD to (External Hard Drive)
 Moving photo n of 917

- After a while, an error dialog box appears that states:
Unable to Move Some Photos
Space Constrained Volumes
"External Hard Drive..." is out of disk space. Please clear some space and try again, or change your local storage settings.

- A red banner appears that states:
"External Hard Drive..." is full. Please clear some space or change your local storage settings. (Learn More)

- There is an exclamation point on the cloud icon in the upper right corner. When I click on it it states:
Out of Disk Space

- Under Preferences->Local Storage, it states:
Available Space on Macintosh HD: 106.73 GB
Required Space: 5.55 GB
Photo Cache: 20.24 GB

- I had selected 'Store a copy of all originals at the specified location', and I had selected a 2 Terabyte external hard drive. Usage on that hard drive is:
Used: 898 GB
Free: 1.1 TB

So, if I understand correctly, I am trying to transfer 917 photos from the cloud to an external hard drive with 1.1 TB of free space, and my local hard drive has 106.73 GB free (Disk utility says it is only 81 GB, but still ....). I think I need some under the hood guidance on how to address this issue.  I do have 20,000 + photos stored in the cloud, and most of them have also been stored (by Lightroom) on my 2 TB external drive. But somewhere, I've hit some limit, and I can't imagine where it is. It doesn't really seem to be a disk capacity issue.

Any ideas?


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## Victoria Bampton (Jul 2, 2020)

Yeah, for some reason it thinks the external hard drive is full. What else is on that drive, and what does disk utility show? I'm wondering if there's some hidden files taking up space on there, for example, Time Machine was invisibly taking up loads of space on my boot drive a while back and wasn't showing that space everywhere.


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## clee01l (Jul 2, 2020)

Victoria Bampton said:


> Yeah, for some reason it thinks the external hard drive is full. What else is on that drive, and what does disk utility show? I'm wondering if there's some hidden files taking up space on there, for example, Time Machine was invisibly taking up loads of space on my boot drive a while back and wasn't showing that space everywhere.



I believe TimeMachine uses a special file system and you can’t even share the disk with regular files without splitting the disk into two partitions. TimeMachine was my first thought too. It really is a bad practice to store critical data files on a TimeMachine EHD. When the TimeMachine EHD fails, you lose both your master data files and the TimeMachine backup. 


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## Johan Elzenga (Jul 2, 2020)

Time Machine does not use a different file system, but it uses so called 'hard links'. These are not aliases or symbolic links, but an extra entry in the file allocation table (or whatever that is called in HFS+). The result is something unique: the Finder will show you that there are two files or folders, but in reality there are two paths leading to the same bits on the disk. So imaging you have a 750 GB folder on a 1 TB disk. If Time Machines creates a hard link to that folder, you will see two separate 750 GB folders on a 1 TB disk, even though that seems impossible. As a result, other applications will get hopelessly confused about how much disk space is left. And what makes it so unique is that you really do have two folders, not one folder and one link. You can delete either of them, and then the other one will still be the complete 750 GB folder.


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## clee01l (Jul 2, 2020)

Johan Elzenga said:


> Time Machine does not use a different file system, but it uses so called 'hard links'. These are not aliases or symbolic links, but an extra entry in the file allocation table (or whatever that is called in HFS+)..


. That is what I meant by Special filesystem


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## dfisher (Jul 2, 2020)

I suspect your answers are still valid, but my External Hard Drive is actually a 2 TB Western Digital drive attached to an Airport Time Capsule. Occasionally, Lightroom will actually move a few files (5 - 12) before I get the error message. So, what do you think is the solution? Attach the Western Digital Drive directly to my Mac with a USB cable whenever I use Lightroom?


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## clee01l (Jul 2, 2020)

The Time Capsule is just another NAS  dedicated to  TimeMachine.   I'm not sure but I think Apple uses a different filesystem for the TimeMachine  disks. If not it should be HFS+ and not APFS unless it is a very new  Time Capsule.
When you say "a 2 TB Western Digital drive attached to an Airport Time Capsule". Does the Time Capsule show up in Finder as a Location and can you navigate to the 2 TB Western Digital drive? Can you in Finder Navigate to the 2 TB Western Digital drive attached to the Airport Time Capsule and copy a bunch of files to a folder there with out error?
Do you use the a 2 TB Western Digital drive attached as a TimeMachine host?
I don't think moving the EHD to your Mac will make a difference.   Is there a possibility that the 2TB drive is full? 

FWIW, I have a 5TB disk attached to my TimeCapsule    I can copy fils from my Primary drive to it using Finder. I have not tried using Lightroom.

Determine the free space on a TimeCapsule Volume using the Airport Utility.


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## dfisher (Jul 2, 2020)

It looks like my system is configured like yours. 'Data' is my Time Capsule storage, and 'ExternalHD' is the WD drive where I want to store all my Lightroom Photos.

When I open Finder, I see 'Airport Time Capsule' under Locations, and from there I navigate to 'ExternalHD'. And yes, I can move files freely there without error. I am certain that the 1.34 TB of free space on that drive is pretty accurate. (I used to use Lightroom 5, and had stored all my files there. When I migrated to LightroomCC, I deleted all the Lightroom 5 files - so lot's of free space. I can't tell if it is HFS+ or APFS (it doesn't show up in Disk Utility).


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## clee01l (Jul 2, 2020)

dfisher said:


> It looks like my system is configured like yours. 'Data' is my Time Capsule storage, and 'ExternalHD' is the WD drive where I want to store all my Lightroom Photos.
> 
> When I open Finder, I see 'Airport Time Capsule' under Locations, and from there I navigate to 'ExternalHD'. And yes, I can move files freely there without error. I am certain that the 1.34 TB of free space on that drive is pretty accurate. (I used to use Lightroom 5, and had stored all my files there. When I migrated to LightroomCC, I deleted all the Lightroom 5 files - so lot's of free space. I can't tell if it is HFS+ or APFS (it doesn't show up in Disk Utility).
> 
> View attachment 14894



Yes, the Airport utility is vague on the file system used. This is not important though as you have plenty of free-space and the Disk Full message is not valid. Since you can copy files there with finder but not Lightroom suggests a dilemma. The TimeCapsule is no different from any other NAS. I will move file in my Lightroom Catalog to my NAS to see If there are issues here.


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## Victoria Bampton (Jul 3, 2020)

Bingo. There are reports of increased issues between 3.3 and NAS drives and there's now an acknowledged bug https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lightroom-3-3-storage-location-on-nas


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