High Sierra purgeable disk space problem

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Level 1

4 points

High Sierra purgeable disk space problem

I have a High Sierra installation on a Macbook 2015 and filevault is currently (encrypting my disk almost a week now). I tried deleting large files and local timemachine snapshots but my disk remains unchanged and is constantly being eaten up, I suspect that filevault is the culprit as this started happening after I turned on filevault. My time machine is currently paused/not backing up.

I know purgeable disk can be solved by using "dd" to create large chunks of file/s to make the disk full then deleting them when the disk is full, but on my case my disk doesn't show the "purgeable" section on the storage graph so I'm not sure if this solution would work on my machine.

Any ideas on how to solve this?

Posted on May 8, 2019 10:35 PM

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Answer 1

ron9162 Author

Level 1

4 points

May 23, 2019 11:23 PM in response to ron9162

Hi Guys,

I finally got the answer, all that missing disk space (purgeable) went free after the (3 weeks) filevault encryption has finished. I got the same problem as this thread https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/336784/strange-available-and-purgeable-space-on-high-sierra

Thank you all for your input.

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Answer 2

BDAqua

Level 10

250,259 points

May 9, 2019 9:57 AM in response to ron9162

Hi Ron,

How much free space is on the HD, where has all the space gone?

OmniDiskSweeper is likely the easiest/best, and is now free...

https://www.omnigroup.com/more/

Try running OmniDiskSweeper as root.

See: https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/how_to_recover_missing_hard_drive_space

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Answer 3

BDAqua

Level 10

250,259 points

May 9, 2019 10:20 PM in response to ron9162

If you open Console in Utilities, do you see lots of errors streaming by?

Open Activity Monitor, sort on CPU% the Memory... any clues there?

EtreCheck is a simple little app to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Use the Note tool on the bottom of this editor's toolbar, as shown in the image, to copy and paste the output from EtreCheck.

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