An Apple Mac expert has written at Six Colors about an unfathomable issue one of his children faced after trying to download a Steam game to an M2 MacBook Pro with an almost full SSD. You might think the problem would be like water off a duck’s back for Seattle-based technology journalist Glenn Fleishman, but increasingly technical and sophisticated attempts to free up space on the SSD failed. Poking around the Finder, issuing commands in the Terminal, and delving into the Disk Utility all drew blanks. Ultimately, Fleishman resorted to drastic measures – completely wiping the SSD for a fresh start.
The MacBook Pro in the headline was equipped with a 1TB SSD, and was part of a home network with regular Time Machine backups scheduled. Before asking dad to banish the Mac’s disk full alert, their offspring had tried the most obvious thing – emptying the trash to make room on the disk. Fleishman tried that again, and was greeted with the unhelpful message “The operation can’t be completed because the disk is full.”
Expert Mac user unsheathes his sharpest tools
Attempts to use Terminal, the Mac’s powerful command line interface, also fell flat, with the system grumbling about lack of space. Moving to the disk utility hit a brick wall, with the same “No space left on device” error.
Fleishman still had some tricks up his sleeve but, you guessed it, restarting and clearing caches was fruitless, as were subsequent recovery disk shenanigans.
Drastic measures were obviously called for. Erasing the drive and installing various versions of the MacOS was the next step – ‘safe’ in the knowledge that there were a series of Time Machine backups to restore or part restore once everything was back to normal.
However, the version of MacOS on the restored machine was found to have an issue with “the SMB/Samba-based networking mount procedure for Time Machine restores,” wrote Fleishman, and most exasperatingly “no one had found a solution.”
Luckily his offspring didn’t seem to care about many of the old files created, saved, or downloaded. So, they seemed quite happy to start afresh after grabbing a few files salvaged from a Time Machine backup saved on an external 1TB SSD.
“Systemic, cascading failures”
Fleishman’s conclusion is that perhaps he would have tried further recovery techniques, but after already sinking a day of effort into resolving this disk full issue, enough was enough. He hates to think about how less experienced Mac aficionados would cope with “systemic, cascading failures like this,” as do we.
