I had this happen few times on a Mac and every time I was shocked that if disk gets full you cannot even delete a file and the only option is to do a full system reboot. I was also unable to save any open file, even to external disk and suffered minor data loss every time due to that.
This just happened to me. I got the best error message I've ever seen. Something akin to "Can not remove file because the disk is full." This wasn't from the Finder, this was command line rm.
On the Mac it's also exacerbated by the fact that swap will use the system drive and can fill up the disk, and can not be stopped. If you have some rogue process consuming RAM, among other things, your disk will suffer until it is full. And, as mentioned, macOS does not behave well with a full disk.
And, even if you've remedied the swap issue (i.e. killed the process), there's no way I know to recover the swap files created without restarting.
Just seems like the design is trouble waiting to happen, and it has happened to me.
When this last happened, somehow it managed to corrupt my external Time Machine volume.
I've been living with this for the past few years. The only remedy is to do a full system reboot. Sometimes I reboot a few times a night.
One way to buy yourself some time is to disable the sleep file. I'm not sure what it's called -- it's a file that MacOS uses to let the computer hibernate when there's no power. It's a few GB, which (like the blog post stated) is a nontrivial amount of freeable space.
> I'm not sure what it's called -- it's a file that MacOS uses to let the computer hibernate when there's no power. It's a few GB, which (like the blog post stated) is a nontrivial amount of freeable space.
Should be /var/vm/sleepimage and the same size as your RAM.
This just happened to me. I got the best error message I've ever seen. Something akin to "Can not remove file because the disk is full." This wasn't from the Finder, this was command line rm.
On the Mac it's also exacerbated by the fact that swap will use the system drive and can fill up the disk, and can not be stopped. If you have some rogue process consuming RAM, among other things, your disk will suffer until it is full. And, as mentioned, macOS does not behave well with a full disk.
And, even if you've remedied the swap issue (i.e. killed the process), there's no way I know to recover the swap files created without restarting.
Just seems like the design is trouble waiting to happen, and it has happened to me.
When this last happened, somehow it managed to corrupt my external Time Machine volume.