Only 1 GB remained on my wife’s Mac after she filled the entire drive. To clear up space, I’ve been attempting to delete files, but every time I try to do so, I get the error message “The operation can’t be completed because the disk is full.” Is it possible to get beyond Trash or get around this? I would be very grateful for any help. Many thanks.
The OS requires around 5-8 GB of free disk space on your Macintosh HD to function well. As you described, there is only 1GB available on the Mac, it is insufficient for the OS to perform some operations, therefore, it triggers the error “The operation can’t be completed because the disk is full” when you attempt to move files to the Mac Trash.
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If you can’t move the unwanted files to Mac Trash and receive the “The operation can’t be completed because the disk is full”, you have to release some disk space in other ways to fix this error. You can try to:
- Empty the Mac Trash
- Restart your Mac
- Boot into Safe Mode and delete files
- Clean Mac with third-party tools such as iBoysoft MagicMenu
- Move big files to external hard drives
- Uninstall unused apps on the Mac
- Repair disk error with First Aid
- Update macOS
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I checked the Mac Trash and there were some deleted files, I emptied it and followed the other steps to free up disk space on my Mac, now the annoying error message haven’t prompted again.