mjwebb wrote:
This happened after a series of efforts to shift large numbers of files to iCloud and OneDrive remote storage.
Look at the bright side. You know exactly what caused your "system data" problem. Most users are totally clueless.
I can't run anything (e.g., Outlook) on the machine because it cannot find space to do anything.
I don't doubt it.
I tried removing big archive files by throwing the in trash and emptying the trash. First it created 24 Gb and then about 6 Gb, but each time, as I watched "Get Info" on Macintosh HD, the available space shrank to basically nothing, being filled with "system data".
I've described this exact sequent to people many times.
When I look at what apps are running on system, there is nothing suspicious.
No. There is absolutely nothing suspicious or malicious associated with this problem.
At this point, I cannot even drag files or folders to a local terabyte SSD, because it says it has to download them first, and of course there is no room to do so.
Cleverness will only get you so far, eh?
My Applecare support tech kicked me to a "senior tech", who was trying to help me download some sort of app to see my system as we tried things, but it wouldn't download.
While it's good that you know what caused the problem, it's pretty bad if you don't even have enough storage to download a fix. I'm not allowed to give you a link to the new Storage management tool I just released to fix these problems, but even if I could, you wouldn't be able to download it.
It seems doubtful that making a "Genius Bar" appointment would help. I have no idea what to try next. Any thoughts would be appreciated, as I have a big deliverable due in a couple of days!
It seems obvious that you'll need to delay that deliverable.
The problem goes back to your first statement. Exactly what did you do to "shift" those files? How much data are we talking about? Were those files already downloaded to computer and you were trying to make more local storage available or something? Unfortunately, all these cloud storage services try to make everything as "user friendly" as possible. In most case, they do this through fiction. In most cases, users never find out the truth. It's even harder for us on the other side of the world trying to find out what really happened. I have many hypotheses about what happened to your data and what state it could have been in to cause this cascade of failures, but they're just hypotheses. I don't really know. That's why I ask for more information. It's absolutely crucial.
I can explain the deleted files a bit better. When you delete a file, you can't actually erase it. Only Apple can do that. There is a task that runs in the background (called "deleted") that will take the files that (you thought) you had deleted, and actually delete them. But it runs this task on its own schedule, in its own good time. It most definitely doesn't know or care about your big deliverable. And to make matters worse, when your system runs very low on free storage, everything runs much, much more slowly. And all of these storage matters become much more difficult. The values that it reports to you become even further disassociated from reality.
But eventually, within one or two days, that data that you deleted will be recovered as actual free storage. Unfortunately, there's an excellent chance that whatever process you started with your "shift" will consume that storage within a few milliseconds.
One useful recommendation I can make is to recommend that external SSD and start copying your most important files to it. I have a strong suspicion that you're going to need that. I know this isn't good news, but it's always better to know ahead of time, isn't it? Try to locate as many actual, large files as you can and copy them to the external drive. Then delete them from the internal. It's not going to help in the short term, but it will safeguard those files and it might allow that initial "shift" process to complete in a more reasonable time.
I also recommend keeping your computer plugged in and not allowing it to go to sleep. You want to keep it running and churning through that data. I hope you have very good internet. Even with very good internet speeds, this could take a long time, perhaps a week or so, depending on your internet speed and how much data it is.
In the future, if you know you have some big event due, never start any kind of significant change on your computer. In fact, I recommend never doing any kind of significant change unless you have another computer to use if things go south, as they so often do these days.
