Your Disk Suddenly Filled Up

First, confirm what's actually full

# Mac/Linux
df -h

On Windows, check drive properties from File Explorer. Confirm which drive is actually full before doing anything - if it's not the drive Ollama and Docker are using, the fix is somewhere else entirely.

Find out what's actually using the space

Model weights are almost always the biggest consumer on a local AI setup - the storage guide covers the real math, but a few models can easily add up to tens of gigabytes. Check the models directory directly rather than guessing:

# Mac
du -sh ~/.ollama/models

# Linux
sudo du -sh /usr/share/ollama/.ollama/models

See what's actually installed, and how much each model is worth in disk space, with:

ollama list

Safe cleanup, in order

• Remove models you're not actively using. This is completely safe and reversible - re-pulling a model later is a single command. ollama rm <model-name> for anything you pulled to try once and haven't touched since.
• Check Docker's own footprint separately. docker system df shows what images, containers, and volumes are taking up. Old, unused images from before an update can accumulate - docker image prune removes only dangling (unreferenced) images, not anything currently in use.
• Don't touch the Open WebUI data volume thinking it's the problem. Chat history and settings are typically a rounding error next to model weights - deleting it to free space is a bad trade for the disk space it actually recovers.

Prevent this from happening again

The storage guide covers sizing a drive with real headroom instead of the exact minimum - worth revisiting once the immediate problem is solved, so this doesn't repeat itself in a month.