Macs don’t do well when they start to approach full storage. The operating system doesn’t provide enough safeguards and backoff options to help you cope with what can become a disaster, requiring a full drive restore! I wrote about this happening with my younger child’s MacBook two years ago. That article was about the abject failure of attempts to get a Mac working after it had reached maximum Mr. Creosote levels. What about avoiding this altogether?
Six Colors reader John wrote in with this particular problem, which has been plaguing him across multiple Mac laptops but doesn’t occur on his Mac mini. John pays Apple for 6 TB of storage and is using nearly 4 TB. Logging in and out of iCloud seems to resolve his full-storage issue, but it comes with a lot of wasted time and some syncing problems.
I suspect one or more things in his case:
iCloud eviction delays: iCloud isn’t properly evicting data (deleting the local copy, as there’s a cloud copy), or doing so rapidly enough, as the drive starts to fill. The nature of iCloud Drive and iCloud storage for apps and the system is that only as much is cached locally as needed, and the oldest, least-used data is evicted with no user involvement. See below for help on that.
