Tree_Farmer wrote:
I figured it out, I bought Daisy Disk to figure out what file was so big. The answer was: Spotlight-V100, that file was 100GB, The answer was that file was corrupt and was waaaay tooo large, something was wrong with indexing. The answer was to: Rebuild the spotlight index by turning it off, which deletes the index file, then click the box to turn it back on, which deletes it. I now have 100GB of available space on my Mac internal drive. Solved!
Good job.
For HWTech, it’s a normal problem to run out of disk space. I believe that Apple programmers could forsee that problem and design the MacOS to handle out of disk space.
One would think Apple would put some safe guards in place to prevent the file system from completely running out of Free storage space to the point that it is impossible to move or delete anything to make room. The Linux kernel developers made the same mistake years ago with a similar file system (BTRFS), but did add in a small reserve buffer to prevent such an thing from wreaking havoc. At least if it did occur, there was a way to temporarily add a USB stick to add more storage to the file system so that files could be moved or deleted.
I believe that normally, if you run out of disk space, you just get an error and maybe something doesn’t work right. Maybe a 5% chance that something bad will happen. I don’t believe what you seem to be saying, that if you run out of disk space that there’s a 95% chance of something bad happening.
You can believe whatever you want, but I have personally seen it happen with when an APFS volume completely runs out of space.
Look into how a COW file system like APFS works. In order to move/delete files, you must be able to first write to the file system....if there is insufficient space, then the move/delete will fail. Moving a file requires being able to delete the file after it has been transferred....cannot be deleted if their is insufficient space.
The behavior of COW file system is intentional since it prevents file system issues & data corruption in case the process is interrupted by ensuring the data is first written to the file system before updating the file system links to the data. Apple just never thought to provide a safety buffer, however, even with a safety buffer, you could still lose data if you cannot save it successfully since macOS still needs storage to operate & will likely become frozen (separate issue from the APFS file system issue I'm referring to here when Free space is exhausted).
A co-worker saw file corruption occur years ago when the HFS+ file system completely ran out of space on a system they were working on. Everything was fine until it ran out of storage space.
Besides, when you have an SSD nearly full.....you are making the SSD work harder & causing it to wear out more quickly.
Even that 100GB can sometimes disappear very quickly doing very simple tasks. Again, first hand experience.
Apple has better programmers than that. This is common, Mac OS can handle it, normally.
Maybe, maybe not.
Even great programmers may have to create junk if their boss tells them to do so if they want to keep their jobs. Programmers cannot just do what they wish at Apple. A manager overseeing them will tell them what to work on and whether something should be fixed. And that manager has a manager who may override the lower manager.
From what I've personally experienced with trying to deal with Apple over the years (especially in the last decade)......a lot of those employees have their hands tied no matter how much they wish to help. It is so bad that I've given up trying to contact Apple on behalf of my organization unless it is something that absolutely cannot be avoided.
I have seen this elsewhere besides Apple....a contracted developer knew something needed to be fixed in a game, but could fix the problem because their contract with the owner of the software would not allow it since it was not in their contract. It is a weird & crazy world.
