Why does it tell me that Macintosh HD is full when my computer is new?, Why does it tell me that Macintosh HD is full when my computer is new?

Same issue with MacBook Pro (2.8 GHz i7) and MS Office for Business Mac:2011. I have plenty of space left (500+ GB). The popup "The disk is full trying to write to Macintosh HD. Free some space on this drive, or save the document on another disk" shows irregularly. However, saving the document manually does work properly. The document resides in a DropBox folder. The autorecover folder is just in my Documents folder - full rights granted. In the autorecover folder a file exists with the name of my document having "AutoRecovery save of " prepended. The size of this document is 0 KB.

Maybe this is caused by me closing the lid, travelling and reopening the lid again frequently: other networks, sleeping computer etc. I know Outlook doesn't like this and does crash occasionally. Maybe Word suffers from this as well. Restarted Word, reloaded the document and didn't get the error anymore, at least, not for now.

The second says that Word is unable to save the AutoRecover file to the location I have specified.

What location is that?

Yo can find this in Preferences / File Locations.

I just noticed that I'm replying to a message from a month ago. Rather than taking over an inactive topic started by someone else, may suggest that you start your own, and in a more appropriate area? The best place to ask your question would be in a Microsoft user forum. If you want to ask it here, please use the "Snow Leopard" area, assuming that's your OS version. Thanks.

I just recently ran into this issue while tracking changes in Word for Mac 2011 on my iMac running 10.6.8. I set autosave for every 4 min. I was tracking changes while editing for about an hour until I got the dreaded "hard disk full" message. I had this saved to my dropbox. I went to my other mac to see if the changes from the last hour were updated and they were not. What happened to autosave every 4 min?!

This is extremely frustrating as an editor but I've found a quick way to save your current changes:

1. Keep your exisiting document (A) open. View in print preview mode. Under the Review pane make sure "Final Showing Markup" is selected. To be on the safe side I selected all markups. Now turn OFF track changes.
2. Open a new document (B) and view in print preview mode. Go to track changes and make sure it is OFF but make sure "Final Showing Markup" is selected along with all the markup options.
3. Go back to A, select all (command+A) and copy (command+C).
4. Go to B and paste (command+V).
5. The documents should be identical and you can now save the new document (B) with another name.

From what I've read this is a MS issue (as always) and you should update your software regularly. Other than that I will also be saving a backup copy (under preferences > save).

Have the exact same issue on a new Macbook Air Core i7, 4GB Ram, plenty of room on my 256 GB SSD.

latest update of Word 2011 running

Tried copying and pasting the lot into a new document as described, only to find that the new doc displayed the exact same behavior - any suggestions?

This is really really annoying - +10 years of development and Word for Mac is still this buggy? C'mon!

I should have mentioned I had to close all other programs first, then proceeded with the copy.

Try opening a new blank document then save. I had the same problem at first then created a new doc, saved, copied, saved again.

I worked on the same document I copied the other day and it continued giving me the error message BUT it still saved.

I agree, 10+ years and they're still having major issues. What's the point in using Word if it can't even save. I've wanted to move to iWork but all my colleagues use Word.

MB91110 wrote:

I should have mentioned I had to close all other programs first, then proceeded with the copy.

Try opening a new blank document then save. I had the same problem at first then created a new doc, saved, copied, saved again.

I worked on the same document I copied the other day and it continued giving me the error message BUT it still saved.

I agree, 10+ years and they're still having major issues. What's the point in using Word if it can't even save. I've wanted to move to iWork but all my colleagues use Word.

Why not move to Windows and you won't have these problems. It's not Word it's OS X.

Since this is an Apple support forum I would think that users would be making an effort to solve problems rather than sweep it under the rug and go back to Windows. I encourage everyone to move away from PCs and get a Mac. All happy Mac users now but they still have the Windows program issues. I am forced to use a PC at work and it actually had a similar issue when we upgraded to Office 2007.

I've been having the same problem running Word 2008, earlier under Leopard and Snow Leopard, and now, still, under Mountain Lion. It affects only certain documents, and the only common feature that I can identify is that (a) they have a lot of graphics in them, and (b) they're stored in the old .doc format ("compatibility mode"). The solution, for me, has been to open the "save as" menu and save in the .docx format. If you do this, don't ditch the .doc version until you've closely reviewed the .docx one, as the conversion (epecially of graphic elements) is often imperfect. You may need to copy-paste some of the original graphics into the new version.

You can specify the default format for saving documents under Word -> Preferences -> Save. This applies only to new documents; existing documents will be saved in whatever format they are already in.

The reason there's no single, magic fix is that "Unable to Save: Disk Full or Too Many Files Are Open" is a stupid choice of language for what is in fact a generic "unable to save" message. It's triggered by Word not obtaining an acknowledgement that the write to disk was completed successfully. A full disk is just one of many possible causes, so the message is quite misleading.

Thanks! Changing the document from .doc to .docx ended up fixing my problem.

It's not a Mac issue. It's a compatibility issue. jpdemers has it right.

Copy your work and past it in a new xxxx.doc . Save the new file and it will work fine. neglact the other file. GOOD LUCK!

@jpdemers solution ('The solution, for me, has been to open the "save as" menu and save in the .docx format.') helped me out! 🙂 I had to make a small variation though: because my document contains macro's I had to change it to .docm in stead of .docx.

Thanx a lot jpdemers!!! You solved a very annoying software issue for me! 😎