Purgeable Space Problems

I think I somewhat managed to solve this by creating a smaller partition and then deleting it. I am now able to use the entire purgable space for partitioning.

I don't think currently there is a way to purge this space manually as of yet. (I asked something similar in https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/50073 )

As a work around for this I did the following to force the space to be cleared.

In the terminal I used the mkfile command to create a file large enought to completely consume the remaining free space on my drive.

"mkfile -n 60g ~/Desktop/BIGFILE"

Replace 60g with whatever file size you would like.

Once that command was finished I rebooted. I am not sure if this next step is necessary, but I didn't want deleting theses files to just create more purgable space so I used RM in the terminal.

"sudo RM ~/Desktop/BIGFile"

By doing this I was able to clear enough space for what I was wanting to do. I have also not noticed any unwanted side affects of this process and I have now done this multiple times for various reasons.

It doesnt work for me, any other solutions found?

I finally solved this issue on my macbook air after doing much research online. The descrepancy in my case between the available space reported in finder and the available space in about my mac was due to local snapshots created through the time machine utlity. Although these were seen by about my mac as purgeable, finder was not able to see them in the same way, it seems

open terminal and run the command 'df - h'

if you see a volume called mobilesync, with a load of used space, thats the culprit.

run command 'sudo tmutil disablesync' and enter your password when asked

run 'df -h' again and the mobilesync volume should have dissapeared, and your space on your startup disk should be reporting the recovered space

run 'sudo tmutil enablesync' to get backup back online and you should be good to go

about my mac->storage will have a bit of a funny turn while it sorts itself but will report correclty again in a few minutes - dont panic.

Please note, this worked for me, it may not solve your issue

Running any terminal commands with elevated permissions (sudo) carries some risk - only follow these instructions if you are comfortable with this.

Nick.

PS let me know if this solves your issues, it would be good to spread the word if this is not just a fix for me.

Are you talking about Mobilesync in Application Support? That is the Backup for your iOS device, mine is around 17gb big. I would not delete that though, even if it gives me space.

I simply opened Time Machine Preferences, clicked the Lock Icon to unlock and make changes. Then I unchecked the box next to Back Up Automatically under the TM Icon. Finally I restarted my Mac. When I turned my Mac back on to check the storage all the purgeable data was gone which freed up over 70 GB on my SSD. Afterwards I went back into the TM preferences and rechecked the Back Up Automatically box. After restarting my computer a second time I saw that the purgeable data was still gone.

It works for me, thanks.🙂

Thanks! This helped me. Much simpler solution than others offered here.

Simple, yet genius! Thanks!

Oh wow this worked for me. Thanks so much. Have spent hours on the telephone with Apple over this. The tech support guys don't know this.

A simple way to reclaim the "Purgeable" disk space is to secure erase the disk with the commandline diskutil:

diskutil secureErase freespace 0 /dev/disk1

Will do so for the startup disk

This worked first time for me! Thank you!

Perfect solution. Thank You

Thank you! Such a simple solution!

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately this does not appear to work on SSD drives. :-/

10

Worked for me, thanks.🙂

Thank you jjason. I wish I had found this earlier. I was on the phone with apple support for 2 hours because I could not back up an iphone to a macbook air computer due to disk space - even though I deleted a ton of stuff and kept deleting more and more. It eventually became obvious that this was a purgeable space issue since the true free space was not increasing - all deletions were just increasing "purgeable space". Apple support had no idea how to fix the purgeable space issue. They had me try a ton of different things - multiple reboots in safe mode, recovery mode, reindexing the disk, etc. Finally I said "this is ridiculous, clearly it is a purgeable space issue. Let me Google 'purgeable space issue' ". I quickly found this answer about time machine and turned off time machine. Problem fixed in 5 seconds. The purgeable disk reallocated itself and the free space increased greatly. (It remained even after I switched time machine back on).

Why is it that every time I try to back up or restore an iphone via itunes it turns into a multi-hour exercise? Does apple ever try this stuff with real users? Why am I finding the solution and telling it to them instead of the other way around? Do they even review the long phone calls or long genius bar sessions to see what took so long and how to improve those issues? That is 2+ hours I'll never get back for a badly tested feature - not to mention the loss of a bunch of old iphone backups that I unnnecessarily deleted that I can now never get back if I need them.

its:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

Thank you for the TM solution. After my first reboot, I noticed the purgeable space moved to used space, but after a few minutes it cleared out and left me with 2GB of purgeable and all that wonderful free disk space.

It works perfectly for SSD drives. Helped me to free 5go of purgeable space

Jjason, they need to put your answer as correct!

I know this is old subject but since I was looking myself how to release free space since some apps that check available space doesn't take into consideration dynamic purgeable space. Most efficient solution I found was following:

1. Open Terminal from Launchpad or Spotlight.
2. Paste the command into Terminal: mkdir ~/largefiles. (This will create a new folder named largefiles in your home directory.)
3. Execute the command: dd if=/dev/random of=~/largefiles/largefile bs=15m. (This will create a file called largefile in the largefiles folder, which contains the random output from /dev/random.) Note: Your Terminal may look frozen as the command is running.
4. A few minutes later, press Ctrl + C in the Terminal to stop the command from Step 3. You can monitor increasing size of your new file by running "ls -lah ~/largefiles" in another terminal window
5. Run the command: cp ~/largefiles/largefile ~/largefiles/largefile2. Repeate command by diplicating largefile until you will up whole your free space and reduce purgeable space to almost zero.
6. Once you see a message telling you that the disk is critically low, run the command: rm -rf ~/largefiles/ to delete all of the largefiles from your Mac.
7. Empty your Trash.

this way it works flawlessly to reduce your purgeable space to minimum.

As far as I can tell, the approach used by https://developer.apple.com/forums/profile/dotster no longer works with MacOS Sequoia 15.4.1. I've attempted this multiple times, but I end up with exactly the same free space and purgeable space as before. WTF Apple!