Terminal reports low disk space

Question

sinepgnol Author

Level 1

26 points

Terminal reports low disk space

This message popped up onto me suddenly:

"Your disk space is critically low.

Older terminal scrollback contents may be automatically discarded to conserve VM backing store."

I have 6 GB of free space on my system disk. Any ideas of what it could be? Thanks in advance

MacBook Pro, macOS High Sierra (10.13.3), null

Posted on Mar 11, 2018 10:56 AM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Mar 11, 2018 12:02 PM in response to sinepgnol

Yes. Your disk space is critically low. Fix this ASAP. Once you get to this point further reduction is free space can lead to a catastrophic loss of all data when you find you no longer can open files, trash files, backup, etc. If you reach that point then your only option is to erase the drive and reinstall macOS.

How to Free Up Space on The Hard Drive

You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.
Also, see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.
Free up storage space on your Mac.
See Where did my Disk Space go?.
Be sure to Empty the Trash to recover the space.
Replace the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.
Use OmniDiskSweeper or GrandPerspective to search your drive for large files and where they are located.

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Answer 2

sinepgnol Author

Level 1

26 points

Mar 11, 2018 12:12 PM in response to Kappy

Listen buddy, nobody ain't gonna tell me that I'm broke on disk space when I'm most certainly not, check this output:

df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on

/dev/disk1s1 233Gi 218Gi 5.2Gi 98% 1593120 9223372036853182687 0% /

devfs 193Ki 193Ki 0Bi 100% 668 0 100% /dev

/dev/disk1s4 233Gi 9.0Gi 5.2Gi 64% 2 9223372036854775805 0% /private/var/vm

map -hosts 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% 0 0 100% /net

map auto_home 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% 0 0 100% /home

/dev/disk3 698Gi 551Gi 146Gi 80% 100034 4294867245 0% /Volumes/Macintosh HD

See? I have free disk space to spare

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Answer 3

etresoft

Level 8

46,330 points

Mar 11, 2018 1:54 PM in response to sinepgnol

sinepgnol wrote:

I accept your objections KP but 5.2GBs is still free space to burn. So, would you come up with another piece of advice, please?

No, it is not. With modern machines having lots of RAM and SSD drives, you can run out of 6 GB in less than one second. When your machine actually does run out of space. The results are very, very bad.

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