Kicad stops responding while writing to disk until full

Software
1

Hi All,

What happened today was weird!! What I thought at first was a recovery action for a file but the operating system showed Kicad was ‘not responding’. The activity monitor, however, showed that Kicad was writing to disk until it stopped with the message that the disk was full. Couldn’t mak a screenshot of it because of this error. I didn’t so far reinstall Kicad to resolve the problem because I don’t know what and where the disk is written. Could anyone point me to what went wrong here?

17:42:15: can’t open file ‘/Users/hans/Library/Preferences/kicad/9.0/kicad_common.json’ (error 28: No space left on device)
17:42:15: can’t open file ‘/Users/hans/Library/Preferences/kicad/9.0/kicad.json’ (error 28: No space left on device)
17:42:15: can’t open file ‘/Users/hans/Library/Preferences/kicad/9.0/kicad.json’ (error 28: No space left on device)

Application: KiCad arm64 on arm64

Version: 9.0.0, release build

Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.2.6
FreeType 2.13.3
HarfBuzz 10.2.0
FontConfig 2.15.0
libcurl/8.7.1 (SecureTransport) LibreSSL/3.3.6 zlib/1.2.12 nghttp2/1.63.0

Platform: macOS Sequoia Version 15.3.2 (Build 24D81), 64 bit, Little endian, wxMac

Build Info:
Date: Feb 19 2025 13:05:44
wxWidgets: 3.2.6 (wchar_t,wx containers)
Boost: 1.87.0
OCC: 7.8.1
Curl: 8.7.1
ngspice: 44.2
Compiler: Clang 16.0.0 with C++ ABI 1002
KICAD_IPC_API=ON

2

There’s not much you can do to restore normal operation other than to free up space on your disc.

3

Aren’t there somewhere log files so I can find out what it wrote and where on disk kicad has written?

4

KiCad doesn’t write a log. You should find a way to inspect your file system to find by size, modification time etc. but that’s general OS system management, not about KiCad.

5

I think I found it: the back-up system of Kicad went berserk! I don’t know what it tried to back up but it wrote more than 180 Gb to disk…
Maybe worth to look into the back-up code to look for anomalies…

6

Usually looking into the source code alone isn’t fruitful for finding the bug. What exactly did it write to the disk?

7

Can you share a screenshot of the contents of the project directory (the place where the kicad_pro file is)?