TIL about Purgeable Disk Space in OSX, and after hours of struggling, how to reclaim it.
What is Purgeable Space?
May 26, 2020 The Storage pane of About This Mac is the best way to determine the amount of storage space available on your Mac. Disk Utility and other apps might show storage categories such as Not Mounted, VM, Recovery, Other Volumes, Free, or Purgeable. Jun 19, 2018 To free up disk space, it’s helpful to know exactly what is using disk space on your Mac. A hard disk analysis tool like Disk Inventory X will scan your Mac’s hard disk and display which folders and files are using up the most space. You can then delete these space hogs to free up space.
How to download chrome on macbook air 2018. Purgeable Disk Space is a “feature” of more recent versions of OSX. It is storage on your hard drive that the operating system sets aside for files that it thinks you might access again in the future.
An example of files that are moved to
purgeable space is files that you send to your remote iCloud storage. Presumably, you are sending files to the cloud to free up space on your local machine… if there is space available locally on disk, though, OSX will keep these files around in purgeable space which speeds up accessing the files again from your local machine.
In my opinion, it’s a bit of a silly assumption on behalf of the OS to keep files around that the user is asking to send to remote storage.
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I ran in to issues with purgeable space when trying to partition my hard drive for a Windows installation. I had over 40GB of my hard drive confined to purgeable space, and even though that storage counts as “free” from an OSX perspective, it is still technically allocated. This prevented me from being able to pull in as many GB in to my Windows partition as I needed.
Even though I haven’t experienced it, I have also heard of folks running in to issues installing games or downloading large files onto their machines, and hitting the purgeable space wall. How to download google chrome on my macbook pro.
Free Up Disk Space Vista
There has to be a way to reclaim purgeable space from the OS, right?
How to Free Purgeable Space
It isn’t as easy as it sounds.
There are apps like cleanmymac3 which offer to clean purgeable space on your machine (for a fee) but I wanted to find a way to reclaim this space without the need for a paid service.
Purgeable space is freed when you ask the operating system to store a new file that exceeds the amount of true free space left on disk.
For example, if I have 15GB of space left on my disk, 5GB is truly “free” and 10GB is purgeable, If I create a file that is 6GB large, I will use up the rest of the “free” space and 1GB of purgeable.
Once the file that reclaimed the purgeable space is deleted, the space goes back to being truly free, instead of purgeable again!
Free Up Disk Space On Mac
So the trick is to create enough large files locally that all of the purgeable space is reallocated to support the new large files. After deleting those files, your space will return to a truly free state, instead of returning to purgeable.
Free Up Disk Space On Macbook Air
One important caveat that I learned while attempting this solution: if you create a big file locally, and duplicate it over and over again with
cmd+c/cmd+v or cmd+d , your disk space will not be properly filled up. This is an OSX trick to try and conserve hard disk space for duplicate files, by just creating new references to the original file instead of brand new copies of the file itself.
This is a good feature in most scenarios, just not in our immediate case where we actually want to fill up our disk as fast as possible.
See my step-by-step instructions for creating large files and duplicating them in the next section:
Step by Step Instructions:Clear Space On Macbook
The procedure above was inspired from this stack overflow post.
I hope the above was helpful! Feel free to reach out to me if you’re still having trouble freeing the purgeable space on your mac.
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