App To Delete Purgeable Files On Mac

Posted on  by
  1. There are apps like cleanmymac3 which offer to clean purgeable space on your machine (for a fee) but I wanted to find a way to reclaim this space without the need for a paid service. Purgeable space is freed when you ask the operating system to store a new file that exceeds the amount of true free space left on disk.
  2. My problem was that Mac OS Sierra refused to remove the Purgeable part of the partition, so when I tried to install Bootcamp, It only showed the “real” free disk space. The problem is, I manually deleted stuff like iMovie and Garageband with the associated files by hand using OmniDiskSweeper, which is a free and excellent application for finding and removing large unused files on your disk.
  3. It’s pretty easy and all you need is a Mac maintenance app like CleanMyMac X that does exactly what macOS does — detects useless files — but unlike macOS, lets you remove them quickly. Now, to remove purgeable space in just a few clicks: Download CleanMyMac X for free. Go to the Maintenance tab. Choose Free Up Purgeable Space. Once you’ve reclaimed purgeable space, use CleanMyMac’s Smart Scan tool to remove junk files, speed up the system and scan your Mac for malware.

Instead of working hard, Apple chooses to work smart (for the most part, looking at you, G4 Cube). Instead of making your hard drive bigger, they’ve tackled the problem of limited space on your Mac with cloud storage. Which, in its turn, created a slice on your storage bar named “Purgeable”. Now let’s take a look at how did that come about.

What is Purgeable disk space on Mac?

Purgeable storage consists of files that macOS deems suitable for removal. Something that can be literally purged away from your drive and cause no trouble. The appearance of Purgeable storage is connected to the feature of Optimized storage in macOS. When Optimized storage is turned on, loads of files get moved into the cloud and for some of them, actual presence on your drive is optional. But for which exactly?

Which files are considered Purgeable?

The second way lets you move to iCloud Drive or simply delete older files to reclaim some space on your Mac's cluttered drive or, as Apple calls it, optimize Mac storage. If you want to remove purgeable files on your Mac, you need to use a third-party app. So, if you are in search of the best Mac cleanup software; we would recommend Umate Mac Cleaner. It is all-in-one tool for cleaning and optimizing your Mac to boost its performance. If you're using macOS Catalina, open the Apple TV app, choose TV Preferences from the menu bar and then click Files. Optimise Storage selects “Automatically delete watched films and TV programmes”. In macOS Mojave or earlier, open iTunes, choose iTunes Preferences from the menu bar and then click Advanced.

Nobody can be a hundred percent sure, but the main guess is that these are both your files and system-generated files that comply with two criteria:

  1. They’re like really old and you haven’t opened/used them in a while.
  2. They are synced with iCloud so their original file can be removed from your Mac.

Purgeable files can be of any type. From watched movies in your iTunes to applications languages you’ve never used.

But what renders them purgeable and what does it mean? The system finds these files and knows that when you start running out of space and you have your Optimized Storage turned on, it can remove these files to give you more space.

How do I view my Purgeable Storage?

You can see how much space your macOS can purge in a number of places:

  • The first option, and the most visual one is your native storage tab. To access it choose About This Mac in the Apple menu then switch to the Storage tab.
  • In the Status Bar of your Finder when it’s turned on (to turn it on click on View and then Show Status Bar).
  • Another way would be to click on Go in the top menu, choose Computer right-click on your hard drive > Get Info
  • Also, View > Options panel will turn on the display of hard disks on the Desktop.
  • Finally, you can simply ask Siri how much free space you have left.

How to clear Purgeable space on Mac?

Delete

You don’t usually need to delete purgeable space on your own, but if it really bugs you, jump to the next headline. Purgeable space is labeled so that you know: whenever there’s a free-space issue, you’re safe because your macOS will automatically clear up that purgeable space and it will become free space instead.

The only thing you need to do to have your macOS removing these files when it’s needed is to have your Optimized Storage turned on. To do it, go to the Storage tab in About This Mac menu and click Manage. Now you can turn any option you’d like to be synced with iCloud. You can read more on Optimized Storage and how to use it.

Is there a way to force remove Purgeable space on Mac?

Yup. It’s pretty easy and all you need is a Mac maintenance app like CleanMyMac X that does exactly what macOS does — detects useless files — but unlike macOS, lets you remove them quickly.

Now, to remove purgeable space in just a few clicks:

  1. Download CleanMyMac X for free.
  2. Go to the Maintenance tab.
  3. Choose Free Up Purgeable Space.
  4. Hit Run.

Once you’ve reclaimed purgeable space, use CleanMyMac’s Smart Scan tool to remove junk files, speed up the system and scan your Mac for malware — all in one go.


Also, it’s a good idea to clear your browser extensions, old Wi-Fi connections, and apps you don’t use once in a while. Simply in a form of general Mac system hygiene.

That’s about all you need to know about what is purgeable space on Mac, so we hope this article has been of help. macOS is a great addition to Mac, we’re glad it has space-saving features and other cool stuff (Siri!) but it could’ve been a bit clearer to users, that’s for sure. Anyway, have a good day and keep your Mac clean.

These might also interest you:

TIL about Purgeable Disk Space in OSX, and after hours of struggling, how to reclaim it.

What is Purgeable Space?

Purgeable Disk Space is a “feature” of more recent versions of OSX. It is storage on your hard drive that the operating system sets aside for files that it thinks you might access again in the future.

Remove Purgeable Mac Os

App To Delete Purgeable Files On Mac

An example of files that are moved to purgeable space is files that you send to your remote iCloud storage. Presumably, you are sending files to the cloud to free up space on your local machine… if there is space available locally on disk, though, OSX will keep these files around in purgeable space which speeds up accessing the files again from your local machine.

In my opinion, it’s a bit of a silly assumption on behalf of the OS to keep files around that the user is asking to send to remote storage.

I ran in to issues with purgeable space when trying to partition my hard drive for a Windows installation. I had over 40GB of my hard drive confined to purgeable space, and even though that storage counts as “free” from an OSX perspective, it is still technically allocated. This prevented me from being able to pull in as many GB in to my Windows partition as I needed.

Even though I haven’t experienced it, I have also heard of folks running in to issues installing games or downloading large files onto their machines, and hitting the purgeable space wall.

There has to be a way to reclaim purgeable space from the OS, right?

How to Free Purgeable Space

App To Delete Purgeable Files On Mac Computer

It isn’t as easy as it sounds.

There are apps like cleanmymac3 which offer to clean purgeable space on your machine (for a fee) but I wanted to find a way to reclaim this space without the need for a paid service.

App To Delete Purgeable Files On Mac Catalina

Purgeable space is freed when you ask the operating system to store a new fileHow to change an app's icon on mac. that exceeds the amount of true free space left on disk.

For example, if I have 15GB of space left on my disk, 5GB is truly “free” and 10GB is purgeable, If I create a file that is 6GB large, I will use up the rest of the “free” space and 1GB of purgeable.

Once the file that reclaimed the purgeable space is deleted, the space goes back to being truly free, instead of purgeable again!

So the trick is to create enough large files locally that all of the purgeable space is reallocated to support the new large files. After deleting those files, your space will return to a truly free state, instead of returning to purgeable.

One important caveat that I learned while attempting this solution: if you create a big file locally, and duplicate it over and over again with cmd+c/cmd+v or cmd+d, your disk space will not be properly filled up. This is an OSX trick to try and conserve hard disk space for duplicate files, by just creating new references to the original file instead of brand new copies of the file itself.

This is a good feature in most scenarios, just not in our immediate case where we actually want to fill up our disk as fast as possible.

See my step-by-step instructions for creating large files and duplicating them in the next section:

Step by Step Instructions:

  1. Open your terminal by searching for terminal in spotlight (open spotlight with cmd+spacebar)

  2. In the terminal, execute mkdir ~/largefiles
    • This creates a new folder called “largefiles” in your home directory.
  3. In the terminal, execute dd if=/dev/random of=~/largefiles/largefile bs=15m
    • This will create a new file called “largefile” in your largefiles folder, which contains the random output from /dev/random.
    • NOTE: this command will cause your terminal to appear like it is frozen… that is expected, as the command is running!

  4. After a few minutes (around 5), hit ctrl+c in the terminal window to kill the command from step 3.

  5. In the terminal, run the command cp ~/largefiles/largefile ~/largefiles/largefile2
    • This will copy the largefile that was created in step 3 to a new file called “largefile2”.
    • Remember, this is different than just running cmd+d or cmd+c/cmd+v on the file… it’s forcing the file to be copied over in its entirety, filling up more space on disk.
  6. Continue to run the copy command from step 5, changing the name of the copy destination from largefile2 to something different each time.
    • Change the copy destination name to something like largefile3, largefile4, etc…
    • You should continue to run this command until you see a OSX message appear that says “disk is critically low”.
  7. After you see the disk critically low message from OSX, execute rm -rf ~/largefiles/
    • This will delete all of the largefiles from your system.
    • Make sure you empty the trash bin as well, or the files will just sit in there taking up space!
  8. Open disk utility by searching for disk utility in spotlight
    • You should see either no amount of purgeable space, or a very small amount of purgeable space remaining in your hard drive snapshot!

What Does Purgeable Mean Mac

The procedure above was inspired from this stack overflow post.

App To Delete Purgeable Files On Mac Computer

I hope the above was helpful! Feel free to reach out to me if you’re still having trouble freeing the purgeable space on your mac. Mac app question mark.