I have a Mac Air 2011. So yesterday I tried to backup my ipad with it and it cause the hard drive to be full. Today I can't login anymore. Tried rebooting it, it goes to the login screen successfully. Select a user, put in my password and then I was presented with a warning dialogue saying that I've ran out of disk spaces. And then it's stuck at a white screen forever.
Is it fixable? Or can I at least get the data back from the hard drive?
I don't know that a safe boot would resolve your issue; A safe boot would disallow third-party login items and kernel extensions from starting with your system but your issue is (presumably) caused by your system volume being full.
Try booting into your Recovery Partition via ⌘+R. This will boot into your recovery partition which isn't affected by your system volume being full.
If this doesn't work and it just continues on and tries to boot normally, you may not have a recovery partition; if this is the case, instead try ⌘+SHIFT+R which will force the ~650 MB recovery partition into RAM over your hardwired network connection.
Once you get into recovery mode you can access the terminal and navigate your file system and attempt to remove some unnecessary files, clearing up enough space to allow macOS to operate normally.
Do you got any other users on your MacBook? Can you log into them? If not you could try starting the mac in single user mode (restart + cmd-s) and delete some unnecessary big files over the command prompt and then try to log in.
Start Mac in safemode and clean your PC for garbage. Restart and voila
Follow these steps to start up into safe mode. -Start or restart your Mac. -Immediately after you hear the startup sound, press and hold the Shift key. -Release the Shift key when you see the Apple logo appear on the screen.
