I'd run into this situation earlier this year, on MacOS, though in my case the restore from Time Machine backup did work. But I found myself in the exceedingly

I'd run into this situation earlier this year, on MacOS, though in my case the restore from Time Machine backup did work. But I found myself in the exceedingly frustrating and confusing situation of not being able to free space by deleting files: - 'rm <filename>' from bash - Emptying Trash. - Deleting ".Trashes" directories. - Booting single-user and attempting to delete files. - Booting to the Recovery system, invoking terminal, and attempting to delete files. - Attempting to remove snapshots using the 'tmutil' utility, either booted normal, safe-mode, single-user, or rescue. Best I can tell, tmutil simply would not run under single-user or rescue modes. Final solution was to repartition the hard drive, re-create filesystem, reinstall the OS, and recover user files from Time Machine. This ... took a while. My take-away is that MacOS behaves exceedingly poorly under any number of high-resource-utilisation modes (memory, CPU, or disk usage). Some discussion from the time on the Fediverse: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/111849495055957910 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/111849495055957910>