MacOS – Stuck in update boot (not enough disk space)

Usually this is resolved by a second restore after you reboot your computer. Of course, you might wait things out if you don't have a backup and there is any chance whatsoever the phone will complete this update without risk of losing the data on the phone (contacts, app information, documents, etc...)

To be sure you (and I) haven't skipped a step, you will want to do everything on this page.

• iTunes: Restoring iOS software

Pay attention to the link at the bottom should you get there about putting the device into recovery mode. That will wipe everything, so don't do that unless you have a good backup from this morning (or whenever you started the update process).

Boot to Recovery Mode (hold cmdR while booting). In the menubar open Utilities -> Terminal.

Now change your working directory and go to /Volumes:

cd /Volumes

List all volumes:

ls -l

Move to your main volume

cd name_of_main_volume

Now you can move forward to a directory to remove files and folders with cd folder_name.

Appropriate paths to remove files or folders without touching your own data are:

/Volumes/name_of_main_volume/cores
/Volumes/name_of_main_volume/var/vm

Then remove files with rm file_name or rm *.* after making sure you are in the proper directory with pwd and checking all files with ls -l.

The folder cores may be empty, vm usually contains a sleep image and/or swap files which are all disposable.

If this doesn't suffice go to your applications or your user folder and remove files/folders.

To remove a folder use rm -R folder_name. In this case application files (e.g. Maps.app) are also folders!