"Cannot save because disk is full" but disk is not full

[#1]

I am working on a large 2gb tiff panorama.  I have saved it plenty of times before.  After doing some work today, I went to save it and I get an error "Cannot save file because disk is full".  The disk is very much not full.  There was 15gb of free space on the disk when I tried to save (now down to 6gb because each time I try and save it eats up 2gb that it does not release back when the error pops up), and my scratch disk has 60gb of free space as well.  What is going on here?

I don't want to exit out of the program as I've made quite a few changes to the file that I don't want to lose since I can't save.

[#2]

I am working on a large 2gb tiff panorama.  I have saved it plenty of times before.  After doing some work today, I went to save it and I get an error "Cannot save file because disk is full".  The disk is very much not full.  There was 15gb of free space on the disk when I tried to save (now down to 6gb because each time I try and save it eats up 2gb that it does not release back when the error pops up), and my scratch disk has 60gb of free space as well.  What is going on here?

I don't want to exit out of the program as I've made quite a few changes to the file that I don't want to lose since I can't save.

[#3]

Photoshop is just passing along the error it got from the OS.

It sounds like the OS may be filling that small amount of space with the swapfile  (anything else would have been freed up pretty quickly after the error).

Have you tried saving as PSB?

Have you tried saving to a different disk?

[#4]

Sorry, I misspoke earlier.  The drive I am trying to save to is actually a 1tb drive with 471gb of free space.  The drive with 15gb of free space is the C: that photoshop is installed on.

Also of note that I meant to mention in the original post, the save progress gets to 99% before the error is thrown.

Saving as a .PSB works, so I wonder what it is about the tif that is a problem here.  I would prefer to save the .tiff as this is actually a file I brought over from Lightroom (using the "Edit in Photoshop" option) so I'd prefer to see my changes automatically saved back over there, though I suppose worst case I can import the .PSB in Lightroom and copy the LR adjustments from the other file.

[#5]

Actually it looks like Lightroom does not support .PSB files so I can't get it back in there unless I can get it to save as a .tiff.

[#6]

Not sure - disk full messages come from the OS and are passed along. It is possible that some OS file API is returning an incorrect error.

Hmm - did you copy the whole, exact error message?  If it said "scratch disk is full",  or "boot disk is full" that would indicate a very different issue.

[#7]

The file path in the error was chopped off, but the error itself just said "disk is full", not scratch disk, etc.

[#8]

Did you resolve this issue? I am having the same issue.  I brought my picture into Photoshop from Lightroom.  When I clicked command + S, I received the same message. I am unable to save the picture back into Lightroom.

[#9]

Hi,

I had few times this error. After two months my hard disk started to make some pretty strange noises and a lot of files started to be corrupted. Not sure if this is your case but check if your hard disk is still 100% alive. Consider also that 15 G of free space on a computer running Photoshop is not to much. Usually around 10 G the computer starts to slow down and may give u unexpected issues.

Please let us know how this ends.
Regards,

Martin Benes

[#10]

I was having the same problem trying to save to a 2TB NTFS volume. I repartitioned the drive to create two, 1TB NTFS volumes and I'm now able to save to either volume, so it's apparently a limitation of Photoshop itself and not a problem with the OS. Hope this helps. I should also note that the volume I was trying to save to (E:) was not specified as the Scratch Disk. That points to a solid state drive, in fact, the startup drive, C:

[#11]

I had that issue but clicked "save as a copy" and it went through ok.

Good luck.

[#12]

Hi, (For Mac users)

This problem happens when (Documents Folder) is having more than what system has assined for, Then though your disk is not full the system is not able to calculate Document Folder. That is the same for Adobe Audition. I had this issue with Adobe Audition CC 2020 and when I moved some big size files to other folders, it was OK.