My Mac book has run out of space. It has done a partial update and won't continue, I need to retrieve documents from the machine. I haven't back anything up

bobbie-jo48 Said:

"My Daughters Mac book has run out of space. It has done a partial update and won't continue, I need to retrieve documents from the machine. She hasn't back anything up and need to retrieve assignments and photos from the machine. Can you roll back the update to access the Mac book"

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Use a Time Machine Backup:

Did you backup your Mac, recently? If so, then restore your Mac from that. You'd backup you Mac prior to doing so, and then restore your data from the backup you just created, through use of Migration Assistant.

You can try booting into Recovery Mode and selecting the "Restore from Time Machine Backup" option even if you don't use Time Machine. See if there is an option to restore from a local snapshot. If you can restore from a local snapshot, then do so which in theory should boot back into the OS that existed before the update/upgrade.

Try booting into Safe Mode to see if the update will finish.

You can try putting this laptop into Target Disk Mode and connecting it to another Mac to access the data.

Users should always keep at least 20GB of free storage space available at all times for the normal operation of macOS. For OS upgrades, macOS will need a lot more free storage space.

Users should always have frequent and regular backups of their computer and all external media which contains important & unique data.