Disk full, but I can't delete any files because my disk is full

StreetKnowledge wrote:

Please I'm getting insane. I need to delete files to free up space in my MacBook Pro. But I can't. Because I need more space to free up space…

So far, I've tried… :

- …to (force) delete files without using trash. Didn't work.

- to use the terminal and sudo rm rf. But I c'ant even type anything because I don't have enough space!

- I even tried to use a third party app I already had but it did'nt work…

- CCleaner doesn't even work!

I am lost, and I'm really scared to shut down/restart the computer because I don't want to lose any data. I use that Mac for work. I didn't even use TimeMachine or clone that computer for a long time/

Please, help me… It's urgent

[Link Edited by Moderator]

you can try booting into safe boot mode How to use safe mode on your Mac - Apple Support

you can try from booting Single user mode if you know what your doing there: Command S

Boot modes of an Intel-based Mac with an Apple T2 Security Chip - Apple Support

You can try transferring your files to external media, but even this may not be possible if that media was not mounted before you ran out of free space because mounting external media does require creating a mount point. Maybe try using AirDrop to another Mac, iPhone, or iPad which may be able to rescue some items.

You can try thinning or deleting an APFS snapshot, but this requires booting into Recovery Mode (Command + R) or possibly Internet Recovery Mode (Command + Option + R).

View APFS snapshots in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support

https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2018/04/07/reclaiming-drive-space-by-thinning-apple-file-system-snapshot-backups/

If you are familiar with the command line, then you can use the command line to transfer files to external media while booted into Recovery Mode or Internet Recovery Mode.

You can try putting this Mac into Target Disk Mode in order to connect it to another Mac so this "broken" Mac appears as an external drive. It may be a bit tricky locating the files using this method depending on whether either Mac ever had more than one macOS user account, whether the host Mac is running the same or newer version of macOS, etc., but it should be possible to access the data on the "broken" Mac this way. However, due to no free space being available on the "broken" Mac, you may end up needing to use the command line to manually mount the "broken" Mac's SSD as read-only. Even if you are already familiar with Target Disk Mode, make sure to read the instructions as things have changed somewhat if either Mac is running macOS 12.x+.

If you don't have access to another Mac, then you boot into Recovery Mode to modify the security settings to allow booting from USB. Then install macOS to an external USB3 drive, boot from the external macOS USB drive in order to try the suggestions I mentioned earlier for transferring files from the "broken" Macs internal SSD to the external boot drive.

If these tricks don't work, then you can try contacting a professional data recovery service such as Drive Savers to see if they can recover the data for you, otherwise, you will lose any data that was not backed up since at that point the only way to fix things is by erasing the SSD of the broken Mac and reinstalling macOS...erasing the SSD will destroy all data on the SSD.

People should always have frequent and regular backups of their computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data. This has never been more critical than when using SSDs and especially the 2018+ Macs. There are a lot of ways to lose access to your data with the recent Macs and recent versions of macOS with all the new security features, plus with 2018+ Macs it may be impossible to recover data if the 2018+ Mac has any hardware issues especially with the Logic Board.

FYI, you should always have at least 20GB of free storage space available at all times for the normal operation of macOS. For some workloads you may need to keep even more free space available since even 20GB can disappear very quickly with some workloads.

StreetKnowledge wrote:

note: Trash is a hidden directory, the command line should read

cd /Users/YourUserID/.Trash

MacBook-Pro .Trash % 

MacOS requires about 9GB of disk space just to start up. If you start in Recovery instead, it creates MANY RAM disks for temp files, and leaves the drive mostly free. You don't have access to Finder.

There should be enough space to start up into Recovery, and you can launch Terminal.

Use the terminal cd command to move to each of these two suggested directories:

cd /Users/YourUserID/Trash ..this is the Trash of your UserID, which is only a portion of all that is "in the Trash". but it might be enough to get you un-stuck

cd /Users/YourUserID/Downloads ..everything in this directory came from a download, so should be able to be re-downloaded later, when it is not an emergency.

ls .. to get a list of files at the current directory

rm filename ..or

rm *.* ..to remove everything there (except sub-directories).

leroydouglas--

You are quite right. I stand corrected.

I made that mistake because Finder shows its name Plain, (but grayed out when showing all files).

I thought is was inherently invisible as a special case, like Library. My mistake is that it is invisible because its name literally starts with . like other invisible directories.

Other invisible directories like .local .config .cups show the leading period in Finder views.