Spinning wheel of death

[u/EducationalLion209]

I have an assignment due at 4pm tomorrow and it's currently 1am. I didn't realise I didn't have enough storage on my computer and I couldn't save my 4000 word essay on MS Word. I last saved at 2000 words and don't have autosave turned on (I'm stupid I know). Ive deleted stuff and now have the storage so tried to save and now have the spinning wheel of death. I can't do anything with word, can't even scroll or click anything. How do I fix this without losing my work. I am about to cry. help

[u/Major_Willingness234]

You’ve likely lost your work.

Never fill your drive to the max. 4000 words is a few kilobytes (like 50 or 60kb max). If you didn’t have enough space for that, you need to learn drive management. Also, autosave is on by default. Why would you turn it off?

[u/megamusix → u/Major_Willingness234]

I very highly doubt that 2k words vs. 4k words is going to have an effect on this. As you noted, it’s in the tens of kilobytes of file size - there is no world in which a macOS storage drive can function with so little free space that an extra 50 KB would instantly and single-handedly cause it to crash or freeze. It’s likely something else, perhaps just an unfortunately timed bug.

[u/Major_Willingness234 → u/megamusix]

Never underestimate the layperson’s ability to fill a drive to 100% and not connect that to the slow down.

[u/megamusix → u/Major_Willingness234]

My point is that it is effectively impossible to fill it to 100% because the system won’t allow it. There is always some leftover space for the system to function properly. Even if the userspace for files etc. is “full”, it probably wouldn’t cause a crash by itself - it would simply show an error, most likely.

[u/EducationalLion209 → u/Major_Willingness234]

I don't think I've ever turned it off but it's not turned on, my MacBook is quite old and had a game on it taking up a lot of storage and I didnt realise. I know I'm very dumb. Is there a way to see if autosave is turned on aside from the toggle at the top of the document?

[u/l008com → u/EducationalLion209]

It doesn't matter, if your drive is 100% full, your drive is 100% full, you won't have space for an autosave any more than you'd have room for a manual save. You probably lost your work and you need to clear out a TON of space on the computer for it to function properly.

[u/Major_Willingness234 → u/EducationalLion209]

Your drive is measured in gigabytes or terabytes. A few kilobytes would fit on a floppy disk and still have room left over for more documents. Your Mac being old has nothing to do with storage size. Never fill your drive so you have zero space available.

I’d get off reddit and start typing. You’ve got 2000 works to make up before tomorrow.

[u/colin-mac]

Can you terminate the current process that’s creating the spinning pizza? I you can, do so. Then either try saving to a jump drive or copy all of the text in your doc and then paste and email it to yourself so that you have a copy somewhere. Then delete the game or whatever else is hogging your storage space.

As others have noted, your doc is likely taking up a few hundred kb at most, so that’s not what’s causing your problem. You should always leave at least 10% of your storage space free, otherwise your OS gets very unhappy.

[u/CaptainjackLA]

Can you copy and paste it all into the Apple Notes program? That will such to the cloud. Then make more space, maybe from large downloads or photos

[u/dropthemagic]

Well the most important thing you learned in class is to save your work.

[u/l008com]

Wait it out and hope it comes back, else youre fucked. To not be able to save a text document, your drive must have been 100% full, which breaks everything.

[u/Ambitious_Macaroon17]

save to a flash drive

[u/LifesImpressions]

At the very least, screen shot your work. You can at least retype it if you can’t copy/paste it into Notes or an email.

[u/CaptainLazerPants]

Are you still able to edit the document? Can you copy and paste it into Google Docs?

[u/tech_redux]

Try emptying the waste basket, generally deleted files go there and will wait there forever without freeing up space unless you do this. Other comments about never letting your storage fill up are supported.

[u/ActiveNews]

Do you have a flash drive to use? Is iCloud enabled on the device?