"Purgeable" space is killing my Mac

[QuarterSwede]

Personally I don't use TimeMachine and I disable Spotlight. They are resource hogs and I get along fine without them.

I can't live without Spotlight. That's what converted me from Windows to OS X back when Tiger came out. Blew my mind how quick and thorough search was (and it's STILL a lot better 21 years later).

 

[BSDnostalgia]

Is there a storage cleanup tool for iOS that is similar to Daisy Disk for MacOS? I need a way to clear the junk buildup on my iPad.

 

[gilby101]

Is there a storage cleanup tool for iOS that is similar to Daisy Disk for MacOS? I need a way to clear the junk buildup on my iPad.

No. iPadOS and iOS don't allow full disk access which is required to scan the disk. Put another way, all apps are sandboxed.

 

[jdw13]

I was bothered more by it in older MacOS versions, when sometimes the "purgeable" portion of "Available" space was no really available to some applications. When it became an issue for me, I would just write to a large dummy to overwrite all the 'Available.' The writing would abort as the system disk was full and then after deleting my dummy file, only a small amount of 'purgeable' would remain. Example of the shell command I would use (from Terminal or XQuartz xterm):
$
$ head -c 36000000000 < /dev/random > ~/Downloads/myfile
$ rm ~/Downloads/myfile
The writing of such a large file this way can take some time. That large number "36000000000" should be at least as big as your 'Available' space in bytes.
Right now on a 256 GB 2020 M1 MacBook over half of my 45 BG Available space is purgeable and nothing has aborted due to lack of disk space.

Note: my way of dealing with it is free but not be as good as some of the tools because it writes unnecessarily to the SSD.

 

[BSDnostalgia]

When it became an issue for me, I would just write to a large dummy to overwrite all the 'Available.' The writing would abort as the system disk was full

Yes, back when disks were disks, I would do the same thing. Only, sometimes I would create a smaller file of random bytes and then cat together as many as I needed for the big file without a fail because, sometimes, a little messy. Random bytes because stuff was getting smarter about compressing out redundant zeroes. The thing is, that old strategy isn't necessarily a good idea in the world of SSDs. Writing flash uses up write cycles, and, deleting and cleaning random blocks takes time. Sometimes a lot of time. That is why I wish MacOS would do a much better job of cleaning the kitchen when it is done cooking. But, the real problem is with iOS because there just isn't an easy way to do this.

 

[Padre_Pio]

Another "Fishrrman dumb question":
Did you try a full shutdown, followed by a restart?

More dumb thoughts:
If Spotlight seems to be messing with things, have you considered TURNING OFF Spotlight, totally? It can be done...

(I banned Spotlight from my Macs from the time it was first introduced, a good number of years ago...)

I came to ask the same thing!!!

 

[madrich]

I like Spotlight.

 

[kirbyrun]

Just wanted to close the loop on this in case anyone else is ever in the same boat...

After many, MANY weeks of discord and trying things (betas!), I finally surrendered and nuked my drive from orbit, then reinstalled macOS from the Recovery Disk, then -- finally -- restore from a Time Machine backup that predated the problem.

And...everything's been fine for a couple of weeks now. What a nightmare this was!

And now I'm afraid to update to 26.6! 😂

 

[BigMcGuire]

Wow ... this ... works... I had a massive 450+GB purgeable space growing since the day I got my 16' MBP in 2022. Started out small and kept growing every time I upgraded. And I'm watching it right now purge almost 500GB - something I've spent hours to try to figure out how to do (did not want to reinstall from scratch).

I have a 4TB SSD and was only using a small portion of that so it wasn't bad but still bothered me.

Thank you for this post. You made my month!

I did have to follow the link and use my App Store version to get a free non-App store version for this to work.

Edit: Don't be surprised if Mac OS claws some of that back right after you purge it (back up to 20GB - but sure beats 450GB).

Just reporting back... since using Mac OS normally since May (it is now August) and not doing anything weird, no big file transfers, my purgeable space is back to 162.9GB. Better than the 450+ GB it was before but ... I have a feeling this is just how Mac OS operates now.

<shrug>