I'm spring cleaning all my HDDs and SSDs to help FCP X run more efficiently.
My Mac mini has a 500GB HDD and as you can see it has 302GB Used and 350GB Available which doesn't add up.
I know that this is a peculiarity of the Mac system but I like things to look correct.
Is there any way to make the figures add up correctly?
If you have Carbon Copy Cloner you can use it to dump snapshots.
The difference is the "purgeable" number. 499 minus 302 used = (about) 197. 197 + purgeable (158) = about 350 or so. Purgeable = space that could be made available but hasn't been cleaned up just yet.
I don't believe so. It really is foolishness that Apple can keep track of hard links, but can't keep track of something as basic as how much free space there is on a drive.
Start a time machine backup, that may free some of the space. Same with restarting your device. Ultimately, there is no way that I know of to coax a quicker purge. But both of those options may free up some space.
I have gotten the purgeable space to go away by copying a file from an external drive to the internal one. Once I realized that purgeable is meaningless I just ignore it. It is just surprising the first time you see it.
I think the available space is the correct figure and the used is inflated.
I believe that’s correct.
Is there any way to speed up the purging process?
Purgeable file can be a significant problem for pro users who often need to generate large files. If you’re short of drive space and try to do a large export, the export can fail because it looks at available space and doesn’t take purgeable space into account. You can’t reclaim it on demand. I’m not sure what can aside from the Finder itself.
I think that solves it . . . just ignore it!
The cures (eg. Time Machine) are worse than the problem.
Restarting the computer has no effect,
500GB HDD.......302GB Used.......350GB Available?
