That is correct - even in case when many things point that system behaviour is not correct. Manual intervention - without knowing the root cause - can cause more problems...
Which files are purgeable? Look with new versions of Sparsity and Precize
Where are all those purgeable files? Two updated utilities to help you find them: Precize and Sparsity, which will crawl folders checking which files are purgeable, sparse or clones.eclecticlight.co
Where does macOS get its volume free space figures from?
After studying thousand of log entries in less than 2 seconds, this is how macOS updates its values for purgeable and available space. But who uses them?
TLDR: Just let the OS handle its own resources.
My M1 mini was going strong with less ~5% free space, typically ~150 GB purgeable (on a 512 GB SSD). And no drive problems — I’m able to monitor via DriveDX.
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Storage amount way off, endless system data calculating
- Thread starter brinkeguthrie
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Which files are purgeable? Look with new versions of Sparsity and Precize
Where are all those purgeable files? Two updated utilities to help you find them: Precize and Sparsity, which will crawl folders checking which files are purgeable, sparse or clones.Where does macOS get its volume free space figures from?
After studying thousand of log entries in less than 2 seconds, this is how macOS updates its values for purgeable and available space. But who uses them?
TLDR: Just let the OS handle its own resources.
My M1 mini was going strong with less ~5% free space, typically ~150 GB purgeable (on a 512 GB SSD). And no drive problems — I’m able to monitor via DriveDX.
Thanks for the articles. I will read them later. Maybe this all will make more sense then.
In my opinion the OS handles it wrong when offline data from a 3rd party cloud drive (more than 600GB) does count as free storage, when I look into System Settings/General/Storage and as purgeable when I look in Finder and Disk Utility.
I now uninstalled the Proton Drive app and moved all data in my user folder. Now the same data is there as Documents and purgeable data went up to 968GB from about 630GB.
At least the available storage numbers are identical now everywhere. It was 870 GB and red color was for Music before, that is missing now completely in the graph. On the other Mac it's only there and missing in the list.
But I don't have problems with never ending calculations. Also never had before.
I had the same problem. I contacted Apple, and after an hour long phone call, it turns out there was a problem with snapshots.
Here's a post I shared on Reddit that explains what I did to fix it:
but basically I deleted the local snapshots via my terminal:
I rebooted a few times, booted in safe mode and ran First Aid on all my disks as well.
EDIT: well my post just got deleted...
Here's a post I shared on Reddit that explains what I did to fix it:
but basically I deleted the local snapshots via my terminal:
tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 999999999999999 4I rebooted a few times, booted in safe mode and ran First Aid on all my disks as well.
EDIT: well my post just got deleted...
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I wanted to split my 4TB drive into two 2TB partitions and wasn't able to get more than 680GB even if I deleted hundreds of GB of data. It always was the the same 680GB for a new partition although I had more than 3TB free storage.
Then I remembered the Snapshots and looked into this app:
After deleting the 957GB Snapshot I am now able to use 3.17TB (with 3.22TB free storage) for a new partition instead of 680GB. This is really strange.
Yeah there seems to be a bug that makes snapshots look bigger than their actual size. Or maybe it's more like blending real data with snapshots.
That impacts the calculations of System Settings>Storage>System Data. This loading forever breaks the whole Storage section. At least that's what we concluded with the Apple support.