Purgeable Space Problems

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.