Sequoia 15.3.1 showing incorrect free disk space

[gilby101]

I worry that what macOS thinks is purgeable might not be.

When it says purgeable, I am confident it can be purged. The worry is that purging may affect your system performance in the general sense. For example, lose TM snapshots (if using TM), lose caches and cloud data which effects response performance when needed again, probably (I have not checked) some logs. So I would avoid the situation where data needs to be purged. But your system has plenty of free space - great!

Over the years there are repeated complaints regarding free space and its inconsistency. I think Sequoia went a little way to improving that.

 

[OldGuyInTheClub]

Ok, I'll relax and let the OS handle it. Maybe one day it will snap back to what it used to be.

 

[OldGuyInTheClub]

DaisyDisk indicates 48GB purgeable - DaisyDisk is the best utility for understanding disk space usage (free trial)

Great suggestion. I tried the DaisyDisk free trial. When it scanned the disk, purgeable filesize went down from 125+GB to 32GB. Finder now shows 295GB free, which factoring in the new purgeable matches the ~260GB free I expect.

 

[Ben J.]

When it says purgeable, I am confident it can be purged. The worry is that purging may affect your system performance in the general sense. For example, lose TM snapshots (if using TM), lose caches and cloud data which effects response performance when needed again, probably (I have not checked) some logs. So I would avoid the situation where data needs to be purged. But your system has plenty of free space - great!

Makes me think; it's a bit like modern OSes uses memory, RAM. Free space is used for efficiency, and released if necessary. In the case of storage space: Snapshots, iCloud, and swap. All capacity is being taken advantage of.

 

[katbel]

Great suggestion. I tried the DaisyDisk free trial. When it scanned the disk, purgeable filesize went down from 125+GB to 32GB. Finder now shows 295GB free, which factoring in the new purgeable matches the ~260GB free I expect.

Thank you @gilby101 !
I bought DaisyDisk long time ago but never tried it to Reclaim the purgeable space 🙂
Numbers are still inconsistent but at least I got some GB space back

 

[OldGuyInTheClub]

The DaisyDisk experiment unfortunately didn't last. Overnight Finder reverted to showing the actual free space+purgeable value.

 

[katbel]

The DaisyDisk experiment unfortunately didn't last. Overnight Finder reverted to showing the actual free space+purgeable value.

Was afraid of something like that: I did a restart just to check it
The purgeable space went down but the space left is almost the same 🙄 of before clearing it