There is a large section on HDD that states purgeable in Apple, About and in disk utilities. It's available space but how do you purge or see what's there?
MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.3)
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.
Super helpful. Worked perfectly. I have a feeling this answer is going to help others.
thank you. got rid of 130 gb!
Thank You!🙂
Thanks , released 10 gb from my drive !
Thanks Chastings, really useful tips.
So does this mean that I, as the user and owner of the hard drive with the purgeable files, can not purge those files as is usually possible when that term is used?
Thanks!
Thanks, perfect fix!!! Reclaimed 90 GB of purgeable space!
Purgeable in Disk Utility
