MacBook Pro fills HDD and crashes on restart

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Level 1

8 points

MacBook Pro fills HDD and crashes on restart

I have. a late 2013 MBP running Mojave with 8GB/256GB I think. About a month ago I got the warning that there was no HDD space left and so tried restarting. The computer got stuck in a constant restart-crash mode. I tried going into safe mode but it failed to restart there too. In recovery mode I could see only a few kb of HDD space available, whereas there should have been >15GB. I ran first aid but there were no errors. I tried a brief foray into terminal but couldn't workout where I was in the directory structure and none of the commands I'd found online to see or remove any lurking giant files worked. So I reloaded from my backup via Time Machine. It well except it took about 22 hours over wifi.

Now it has happened again. Yesterday morning I went to look at my email and got an error. I saw I had 3GB HDD space remaining whereas I usually have around 20. I've kept an eye on HDD space since the first episode and see it decreases steadily over the course of a few days so am restarting more often. I thought a restart is necessary before I get too low on HDD, but no, straight into the restart-crash loop and a no-go in the safe mode either. Starting in recovery and I've got 82kb HDD left. It's Saturday so while a pain, I can restore from my backup. 24 hours later I am only 1/3 reloaded and have 53 hours to go! This is pathetic - I wish I had brought my ethernet adapter home!

This machine has been rock solid for the almost 7 years I've used it until the first episode above (although the rubber feet have fallen off and the trackpad only works near the bottom for clicking).

Something recently has decided to eat up all remaining HDD. What could it be? I've done the most recent software update between these issues.

Is there anyway out the the restart-crash loop? I do a restart, the progress bar gets about 1/10 of the way along then the error message pops up saying the computer needs to restart, rinse, repeat - forever.

This computer is supplied by my institution so upgrading the HDD is difficult and somehow I suspect whatever software issue has crept in it will continue - just take longer to use up a TB. I don't recall loading any new software recently but will take another look when I finally get it back to working.

I'm probably going to archive more older data to free up a bit more space - I've already had a round of this - and will likely take the jump to Big Sur.

Thanks

BM

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.14

Posted on Jun 13, 2021 8:21 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

BDAqua

Level 10

240,125 points

Jun 15, 2021 9:51 AM in response to Warren Hill1

Generally TM creates a Snapshot every hour & if a TM Backup drive is not connected or useable they just build up.

TM is supposed to delete old backups but doesn't always, & may require reformatting the TM Drive or moving to a larger one.

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Answer 2

BDAqua

Level 10

240,125 points

Jun 13, 2021 11:27 AM in response to Warren Hill1

We cannot trust the Storage report as to where the usage really is, 4 suggestions, especially what “Other” is…

Have you emptied the trash lately?

Look for iOS backups…

/Users/[USERNAME]/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

OmniDiskSweeper shows you the files on your drive, largest to smallest, and lets you quickly Trash or open them.

https://www.omnigroup.com/more/

Purging local backups

Please note that although this doesn't affect your remote backup from Time Machine, this will get rid of the redundancy (at least until the next Time Machine backup) that a local backup disk will provide. If you need such redundancy or are worried about the recovery of your data then you would be best served to let macOS determine when to purge these files.

Start Terminal from spotlight.

At the terminal type tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates.

Hit enter.

Here, you'll now see a list of all of the locally stored Time Machine backup snapshots stored on your disk.

Next you can remove the snapshots based on their date. I prefer to delete them one at at time. Once my "System" disk usage is at an acceptable level, I stop deleting but you can delete all of them if you want to reclaim all of the disk space.

Back at the terminal, type tmutil deletelocalsnapshots YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS , where will be one of the dates from your backup. This will be in the form of xxx-yy-zz-abcdef. Try to start with the oldest snapshot.

Hit enter.

Repeat for as many snapshot dates as required

http://www.thagomizer.com/blog/2018/03/27/cleaning-up-time-machine-local-snapshots.html

tmutil deletelocalsnapshots / # deletes all the snapshots

And a fifth...

Mail >Window>Connection Doctor, uncheck Log Connection Activity.

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Answer 3

Warren Hill1 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jun 15, 2021 9:25 AM in response to BDAqua

Thank you BDAqua

Yes, trash emptied frequently so no buildup there.

Last night the backup said about 15hours to completion, but thankfully it was done this morning, so about 70 hours to restore ~200GB. I've decided to get a Samsung T7 encrypted 1TB SSD as a directly connecting backup solution. Maybe if I have to do this again it will be a bit quicker.

Downloaded Omnidisksweeper and could account for about 165GB of data , applications, system, libraries etc, but supposedly I only have ~30GB free space, although you suggest that is not a reliable readout (?). I wonder where the rest of the space went. Hmmm. if I look under Storage in About this Mac, I see the system taking over 100GB.

I got aggressive with archiving some older material and got to about 50GB of free space.

Then for a lark I looked at:

tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates

and there were already 3 there for today about an hour apart (as expected I believe).

I deleted the first one and that freed up another ~15GB, the second maybe another 1.5GB. Perhaps this is due to the MBP being restored from a backup but that seems like an excessive amount of "snapshoting" space to take up.

My backup is a Time Capsule circa 2011 with a 1TB HDD but that is now full. My understanding was that Time Machine deletes the oldest backup when the drive is full to make space for the latest, but could that be part of the problem here?

I now have ~50GB of space free so I hope that keeps me going for a bit. However, if the issue is Time Machine creating very large snapshots what could be causing this? Is there a command line instruction that shows the size of these snapshots?

Thanks

BM

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MacBook Pro fills HDD and crashes on restart

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