A disk so full, it couldn’t be restored
My younger child’s MacBook Pro was unsalvageably full. Only a complete wipe would suffice—and then Time Machine failed us.
I love my children, but they do sometimes forget what I do for a living: answer questions and write books about the most troubling problems people have with their Macs, iPhones, and iPads. But when something goes truly wrong, they suddenly remember, “Hey, Dad might know how to fix it!”
So it happened that my younger asked for my help when their M2 MacBook Pro’s storage filled up while they were downloading a (legitimate, purchased) game using Steam. No problem! I could just empty the trash. Nope, they tried that. Well, what about finding some caches and…nope. I could just go into the Terminal and…ok, that didn’t work either.
Turned out, my kid had managed a neat trick, though they were not alone: they had filled macOS’s startup volume storage so full that the operating system was incapable of deleting files in any fashion. Instead of halting the massive Steam download when the drive became disastrously full, macOS continued to write files until there was just 41K free on the drive.
