I'm running Monterey and my Disk Utility shows 236GB of purgeable space on the HD which does not appear in the Storage tab in About This Mac. I've tried clearing this space manually, emptied the trash, restarted the computer, emptied the PRAM but nothing seems to clear it.
Any help would be much appreciated!
MacBook Pro 15″, OS X 10.11
Why do you want to delete your files?
Purgeable space is files that can be recovered from some other place like iCloud Drive. It is not unnecessary or unwanted space. It can be local Time Machine snapshots if you have Time Machine enabled, but haven’t connected the backup drive in a while.
If you moved the data off an SSD, you may have to wait for the garbage collection routine resets the storage space that was previously allocated. If it has been idle for a few hours, I would think that would have completed by now.
Hi Barney,
Thanks for your reply.
I'm trying download some instruments from the Native Instruments library on to an external hard drive but this requires sufficient space on the internal HD. I've moved all of my all of my data from icloud to an external drive and disabled the cloud but I still can't seem to shift those 236GB.
Also, the fact that Disk Utilities Shows 236GB of purgeable memory but 'About this mac' doesn't makes me think that there's a bug somewhere but perhaps I'm wrong. In any case, I'd like to know where the potentially recoverable material can be found.
Thanks again
Purgeable space
