Ventura not installing (space)

Whew! That’s good.

Having no snapshots makes this easier.

When you boot into Recovery, have you tried executing Disk Utility, then mounting the Data volume through Disk Utility?
At that point you should be able to quit Disk Utility and execute a Terminal session. The Data volume should be mounted on /Volumes/Data and since you are in a root shell, you should be able to go to the /Volumes/Data/Users/username/Desktop folder and delete the two mp4 files if they’re still there.
But be careful if you do this. You are running as the “great and all powerful ‘root’ user” and any slip up could force a complete reinstall.

At that point, try rebooting the Mac normally. If that doesn’t get you through the upgrade process, then you might have to look at other avenues such as using that clone (if it’s bootable) or reinstalling macOS from Recovery.

Speaking of reinstall, reinstalling macOS no longer wipes the disk of user data when you do a reinstall through Recovery. It’ll only impact the read-only Macintosh HD boot volume (it’s grayed out in Disk Utility). You have to jump through extra hoops noted in a macOS tech note in order to erase both Macintosh HD and the user data.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear.
Well, if you use Time Machine, you may very well be using snapshots. Time Machine can use APFS snapshots in two different ways:

  1. When a backup starts, Time Machine in Big Sur and later always takes a snapshot of the APFS source disks (e.g. your boot disk) you’ve configured to be protected by Time Machine. This snapshot provides a point in time copy that is used to copy changed files from. If you’re doing hourly automatic backups, each of these snapshots are kept for up to 24 hours for faster recovery and automatically purged after that time by macOS (or sooner if the space is needed).

  2. Time Machine in Monterey and later can also use an APFS formatted destination (or “backup”) disk to store its backups. After writing a backup session to the APFS formatted destination disk, Time Machine snapshots the destination disk. This preserves the backup and prepares the disk for the next backup session. The snapshots on the APFS destination disk represent complete backups of your source disks at the indicated points in time. The esteemed Howard Oakley of The Eclectic Light Company likes to refer to these as “synthetic snapshots”.

The benefit of an APFS formatted Time Machine destination/Backup disk is stability. An APFS formatted Time Machine destination disk does not have to rely on HFS+ “hacks” that have contributed to the brittleness of Time Machine in macOS releases prior to Monterey.

My point about saying that removing the snapshots of a APFS-formatted Time Machine backup disk “is bad” is that you would be deleting backups. I did not mean to imply that this would break Time Machine - It won’t. Rather that there would be the loss of a backup.

My Time Machine volumes are not APFS, and have no snapshots. I suspect this is also true for users who want to keep a long history of files to go back to. Sorry, thought that was what you were referring to

Agreed, You can still keep a HFS+ formatted volume as a destination for Time Machine backups in Monterey. I haven’t tried it in Ventura, but haven’t heard that Apple removed the capability in Ventura either.

Through the Data Volume, within disk utility, I can see the 2 MP4 files on my desktop, however I can’t click and delete. It’s greyed out.

I keep getting the No Such file or directory message.

Let’s stop using the tilde for a second. I made an assumption in a prior post that you had a working macOS running. In that case using the tilde is a useful shortcut. The use of the tilde character is not going to help us here and will end up confusing things.

If this is true, your files do NOT have a tilde in the file name. . We’ll double check what these files are really named as we go along.

Let’s stop and start again from the beginning. I’d like to take this step by step.

Boot your mini into macOS Recovery and start Disk Utility. Would you please post a picture of what is seen by Disk Utility after it starts?

I haven’t read this thread thoroughly but if the OP has a working, bootable backup, why not just boot from that then delete the files in question from the main drive?

Or is the main drive in a broken state and can’t be mounted?

Otherwise I’d be inclined to follow what technogeezer said - delete them from /Volumes/Data/Users/username/Desktop/Vo-Daigle-Candanosa-Richard.mp4 maybe using sudo rm if you can’t access them via the Finder.

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The path that I used was missing “Data”. I deleted the desktop MP4 file, and launched successfully the installation of Ventura.

Thanks everybody for your time and suggestions.

Ventura installed successfully!

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Excellent!