How much free space needs to be available in order to download from iCloud Drive? Yesterday I discovered an unfortunate thing: iCloud Drive had apparently detected that I had too little free disk space for its tastes, and then it had decided to upload my ~180 GB VM image to iCloud and delete it from my local hard drive.

Since then, I have freed lots of space, totaling around 280 available GB – but iCloud Drive refuses to download my VM, saying that I have too little available disk space!



To make matters worse, the web-based download accessible here consistently fails after having downloaded a few GB. I am of course trying to download the file to a file that is not synchronized by iCloud Drive.

Does anyone know 1) How much space does iCloud Drive actually need in order to be able to retrieve a file?, and 2) Is there any other way for me to retrieve the file?
The current belief is that it starts complaining about free disk space somewhere around 20% left. So if you have 282 GB free and are trying to download 185 GB, that would leave 77 GB free, which is less than 20% of your 500 GB hard drive.

I don't believe there's anywhere that codifies what "low" means in this context, though, so I can't point you to an official source that says it's 20%.