Purgeable in Disk Utility

Hi Curt:

Thanks for this hint. I had 116G of "purgeable" space and reclaimed that by toggling the local snapshots in Time Machine. This is a much more useful reply than the boilerplate article answer I got from Apple Support.

Regards,

-Clint

In macOS Sierra, “Purgeable” content appears when you've turned on Optimize Mac Storage. It's storage space that your Mac can automatically make available when storage space is needed. Files marked as purgeable can always be downloaded again on demand.

If you have TimeMachine enabled it might be that local snap shots are the issue. Generally when the backups are successfully completed, the OS will delete the local snapshots. I have seen a delay in this which causes the local snapshots to remain.

An option is to disable local snapshots but know that this will delete any TimeMachine local backups created between TM backups. It not delete any files other than the backups that have not been written to TimeMachine.

The command to disable snapshots is:

sudo tmutil disablelocal and must be run from a terminal session. It will also prompt for an admin password.

To renable use:

sudo tmutil enablelocal

Hope this helps.

Curt

I have purgeable space accumulating but "Optimize Mac Storage" is disabled. Should this occur?

Curt

I get "disablelocal: Unrecognized verb" when I try this. tmutil -h does not list disablelocal as an option. I am on MacOS High Sierra.

Same for me. I did not select the optimize function, but found that 40gb of my files had been arbitrarily and randomly tagged as purgeable by the system. Including new files that I did not want removed from my HD. This was a week ago.

Then yesterday, those files were purged. For no apparent reason or trigger. Are they gone forever? How to prevent more files from being purged? Who knows, cos Apple aren't giving any info or options on how to manage or prevent this.

Thanks Chastings -- that was exactly my issue here as well. I'd disabled iCloud Drive and the purgeable space was not being reclaimed (subtracted from the "free space") and reported erroneously. I hope future point releases make this easier to DISABLE completely, and revert to the previous OSX ("pre-MacOS"? lol) behavior.

BB623 - I had this exact issue, I had ~60GB of "purgeable" data on my HDD and therefore couldn't download some large 3rd party software I had purchased.

The solution I found was to turn OFF all of the optimize settings (iTunes, Mail, Photos, etc.) you can find articles about this online. And then my Apple support agent had me reindex my spotlight. Through all of these steps my "purgeable" data went from 60GB to less than 10GB. Hope this helps someone!

None of the provided options seem valid or work for me.

I do not have Optimize Storage checked and never have.

tmutil disablelocal tells me that disablelocal isn't a command "Unrecognized verb"

I called support. They said that connecting to my Time Machine backup and letting it run overnight should clear it up. It does not.

WTH.

I had a similar problem. The purgable disk space on my Mac left me with only 5Gbyte of free space.

After much ado it turned out that the Photos library was the root cause of my problem. I had got into problems with this file as I was running out of storage space on iCloud. Photos therefore assumed that it could not reduce the local file despite me having moved out a huge number of photos to offline storage.

After making all the necessary backups I simply deleted the Photos library file from my Mac. After a restart I had almost an empty disk. I then simply created a new Photos library and marked this as the primary sync library. The iCloud process worked perfectly restoring all my picture and better still only keeping a small number of the photos as full size in the library. It still allocates some purgable space BUT I now have some 50Gbytes free space instead of 5.

That all said it still appears to me that purgable space is NOT truly purgable. Surely there should be something to allow us to at least see what is taking up the space, and something to allow users to remove files from this space.

I was using bootcamp I have 20 gb of purgeable space how to convert that to free space

Thanks Chastings.. I did what you stated in your post and my purgeable space was reduced to almost negligible.