Purgeable Space Recovery
My Lightroom Main Library became corrupted by some unknown bug in Lightroom. I have backups in multiple forms so I can recover with minimal data loss. I first deleted the Lightroom Main Library files (~450 GB on a 1 TB SSD internal boot drive). Before deleting the files, I had approximately 200 GB of free space. This deletion should have left me with ~600 GB of free space. I tried to copy the backed up version of the Lightroom Main Library to the boot disk. I got an error message telling that I needed an additional 250 GB of free space to enable the copy.
This was insane. I spent 3 hours trying to understand this. I finally noticed that in DiskUtility, it told me that I had ~200 GB of free space and 450 GB of "purgeable" disk space. I have spent another long period looking for how to free this purgeable space. I do not want all the old corrupted files to be copied to iCloud. I do not want any files automatically copied to iCloud other than the ones I have already assigned there.
What is going on? I played around with turning off optimization of file storage. I finally tried to use the storage tab in about this mac to manage the file space. Some set of operations I performed finally allowed the file copy to start. What is going on? I do not want or need purgeable files without an explicit way to purge them. I am a full-time software engineer with 45 years of experience. What is going on here?
Make this work in a reasonable way under my control. What is the simple solution to purging "purgeable" space. A simple command is required. Even if it is in terminal. Just tell me.
MacBook Pro, macOS High Sierra (10.13.6), (15, Mid 2012) + 1TB SSD boot disk