GernotI have a neigbour’s iMac that does not boot up, because the hard drive is 100% full. It’s a Fusion drive. It boots up fine in recovery mode, the drives seem ok. There in terminal I deleted some large files, but this does not seem to free up space so it can boot again. Any ideas anyone besides re-installing? Is there a way to „vacuum“ a Fusion Drive so it exposes the free space?
Fabian Heusel@gernot Maybe there are snapshots which occupy the space? You should be able to list an delete them either with diskutil or tmutil
@fheusel Ah, diskutil can do that? When I tried yesterday, tmutil wasn’t available in recovery mode. (or I mistyped…)
@gernot At least in macOS Sonoma there is `diskutil apfs listSnapshots` and `diskutil apfs deleteSnapshot`. And according to this site it was already there in Monterey (“[and] have apparently been there for some years”): https://eclecticlight.co/2021/11/09/disk-utility-now-has-full-features-for-managing-snapshots/
@fheusel Cool, I will try this tonight. Hopefully it helps, I don’t want to tell him he has to reinstall :-) Thanks!
@gernot Another option may be booting from an external (USB or thunderbolt based SSD) macOS installation (I think you could create this using the recovery environment) and then cloning the internal installation using tools like CarbonCopyCloner to a second volume on the same USB SSD or a second SSD (which of course has to be bigger than the internal drive). Assumed there is USB 3 this might even be faster than the Fusion Drive and could be used regularly.