How to get back or remove purgeable space.

re: "Unfortunately there's no way to free purgeable space."

This is not true.

See the later answer. Here's what I just did to rid 72 GB purgable space:

Recognize that the purgable space is likely from Time Machine doing automatic hourly backups when you are disconnected from your external source. (In Sierra).

To see this, Open Time Machine. If, when disconnected from your external backup drive, you see a bundle of backups (I did!), then this is what's going on. MacOS is creating intermediary Time Machine backups while you're away from your external device. Potentially a very nice feature. Just not if you need the space to install large files or do a DRIVE sync or something.

To watch the purgable space go away, open up About This Mac, and click the Storage tab. This shows you your drive usage for any partitions, your purgable space, and particularly your remaining available space.

30 Second Solution:

- Go to System Preferences

- Open Time Machine

- Uncheck: Back Up Automatically.

That's it! Watch your purgable space disappear, reclaimed by available space!

I just gained back my 72GB.

(You can then decide if you want to return on Time Machine while you are away from your external drive -- or not).

I couldn't agree with you more. It is completely incomprehensible. If you haven' figured it out yet. In the link above you should let the file with the random data creation run until it hits the total size of your disk. Duplicating a 20GB file like the post suggested didn't work for me either as the system was so "smart" (***!!!!). So what I did was let it create a single really large file (which can take over an hour or so to do) but once that large file grew so large that hit the maximum disk size booooom all that 350GB of space I had cleared all of a sudden became available ... Hope this helps.

All the other answers I read above were bogus. Finally, I found this article, followed the instructions, and it cured the problem - 85GB of "purgeable" (but unusable apparently) space recovered.

https://www.jackenhack.com/mac-os-purgeable-remove-clear-space/

I believe I’ve resolved this issue; at least in my case.

Just to recap:

I was unable to download and install an Apple update (10.13.2 from 10.13.1) as I was repeatedly told I need to free up 2.1GB despite already having deleted and moved (to an external HDD) over 60GB! 'Get Info' of Macintosh HD showed I had almost 92GB ‘available’ with almost 85GB ‘purgeable’. Rebooting made no difference, and neither did the 'auto backup' in Time Machine or the manage space option under iCloud properties.

Thinking Time Machine Backup was involved somehow I tried to perform a backup (since the last was 7 months ago) but it said the task wasn't able to commence as the disk was being encrypted or decrypted. Since this was a new external HDD with software to create partitions, etc. (one for my BootCamp backups) I suspected I must have selected something on this drive in the past. This MacBook Pro retina is my main Windows 10 device, and my backup device for my 2017 iMac used for Logic Pro. I went back to my previous older HDD used for backups and tried that but received the same message? Strange, since that worked okay in the past. I then checked System Preferences, Security & Privacy, and discovered that the local Macintosh HD itself was being encrypted!! ***!

This must be the issue! The other systems/tasks are unable to do anything until this task is complete. Since I last logged into the Mac partition in December (5 weeks ago) it looks like this process had never completed in the background. I was totally unaware. Why couldn't any error messages make it clear that my Mac was encrypting the local HDD in the background? A fancy little icon at the top right of the screen would also have been nice and helped! Something like a black vault icon and white key inside it, beside the Bluetooth or magnifying glass, for Spotlight Search, for instance?

Anyway, I went to bed (it was 3am!) and waited for the drive to finish encrypting overnight then rebooted it in the morning. voilà! I then had over 90GB available, and only 20MB purgeable! Yes MB, not GB! I then successfully performed a Time Machine backup! Then I downloaded and installed the latest 10.13.2 without issue! Sorted! When Apple Support called me at 11:30 I then happily told him it was resolved!

Unbelievable!

Sometimes when i read this it actually pays to think how good spinning hard drives really are...

Maybe not in performance, which is where Apple headed too.. but at least with spinning drives in Mac's you know where the space was going, how much u have (unless u don't upgrade to Sierra)

*but* i can't help feeling SSD's gave Apple this "advantage" of confusing the user in the OS.

Sometimes i do a "secureerase freespace" on purpose via Terminal (once) most of this is free now

This is an absolute never ending nightmare. This is a huge bug that is still present months and months later.

As of 10.13.2 "sudo tmutil disablelocal" doesn't work and generates the following error: "disablelocal: Unrecognized verb.", however "sudo tmutil disable local" returns to the command prompt without any error or other message. Does it work?
It doesn't solve the purgeable problem. The worst thing is that I cannot create a time machine backup that doesn't include all the garbage purgeable space. I have about 40GB of real data but my TM backups want to be 250GB. This is one of the most awful "features" [read: bugs] apple has come up with yet. Hours and hours wasted trying to deal with this with no end in sight.

Sometimes when i read this it actually pays to think how good spinning hard drives really are...

Maybe not in performance, which is where Apple headed too.. but at least with spinning drives in Mac's you know where the space was going, how much u have (unless u don't upgrade to Sierra)

*but* i can't help feeling SSD's gave Apple this "advantage" of confusing the user in the OS.

I'm with you on this! We shouldn't have to resort to the internet or Apple forums to essentially perform a simple task of deleting files from an internal hard drive. Apparently, the system is clever enough to manage the 'space' itself; however, in my case I'm trying to install the pending macOS 10.13.2 update but it says I need another 2.1GB of disk space - Despite deleting and moving over 60GB of files this afternoon?! I have rebooted my MBPr several times, toggled the Backup Time Machine settings, and System Preference iCloud on/off - all to no avail. I've even tried the other 'solution' requiring creating large 'dummy' files to replicate and fool the system?! Give me strength! We never even had these problems in the 1980s FFS!

This is both annoying and frustrating. Give users the choice of how they want files to be managed and ensure both process actually work. Never in all my life of using computers have I been told there's still not enough disk space after properly deleting/moving more than the required space? Utterly ridiculous!

Was this feature dreamt up and employed by some youth in his twenties, straight out of college?

Thanks for the reply! I tried that process twice. The first time it created a file just short of 6GB then then stopped! I still copied it multiple times but nothing was happening. Suspecting it was an incomplete file I set the limit to 5GB in the commons line and re-ran it & again made multiple copies to the point where I got the error msg before my MacBook effectively froze so I had to power off and back on!

It got to the point where I've just literally came off the Apple support chat msg system. They've asked me to perform the NVRAM reset so I'll try that and see how I get on.

Glad you got yours sorted though!

For me, (my longer answer is made in a reply to someone else below) I noticed the following:

I then checked System Preferences, Security & Privacy, FileVault tab, and discovered that the local Macintosh HD itself was being encrypted!!

If so, wait, reboot, check Time Machine Backup, etc. Try a download!

The articles commonly cited and recommended by Apple make a claim that doesn't seem to be substantiated by reality. For example yes you can store photos and documents in the cloud but it fails to purge them from the local hard drive. So when you see 'purgeable' space on your disk yes maybe that is true but it in practice does not actually get purged (and there is no way to invoke this manually). So they may as well label the space as 'photos' and/or 'documents' since it is not really usable space. In the end one is just as limited by a 256gb SDD as they were before this feature arrived (e.g. Unable to download or create new files due to a full disk despite having 100gb 'purgeable' space). Somebody please prove me wrong.

No fun, I am out of space...Google Drive isn't operable as I have run out of space.

From what I read, purgeable space is only usable when I commensurate amount of space is available using iCloud, something I do not accept.

If Apple is forcing my hand and I have to read forums to address technical issues then Apple is no longer the Apple I loved.

Regrettably, a suggestion to disable Time Machine local snapshots has recently been posted to this Discussion.

I strongly recommend that you reject that suggestion as inappropriate. Not only is it completely unrelated to the problem you describe, local snapshots are not included in any available space calculations, and are automatically terminated and removed when additional space is required, as are certain other files normally generated by macOS.

About Time Machine local snapshots - Apple Support

stellamaris5 wrote:

However, there have been several reports in the developer forums of people asking to get rid of the 'Purgeable Space' - how do you do it?

Barney-15E provided the applicable Apple Support documents explaining how it works. Local Snapshots are included in its calculations.

It's supposed to be automatic and not something you need to worry about, though there are occasions in which you might want to disable or exclude certain items from "Optimize Storage": How to use pro apps with Optimized Storage - Apple Support.

Apple could probably explain things a little better. The following link may help explain some of the uncertainty regarding Purgeable Space:

http://blog.macsales.com/39247-rocket-yard-guide-what-is-purgeable-space-in-maco s

It directly answers your questions (edited for the sake of brevity):

Can I Delete Purgeable Files Myself?

Not easily.

Can I Prevent a File From Being Marked Purgeable?

Not directly.

I got the same problem: 50GB purgeable and that annoying running out of disk space message - has someone solved this problem? How?!