Purgeable space mainly consists of local snapshots which your Mac makes periodically. It is simply factored into System files which isn’t very helpful and makes it appear that macOS system files are taking-up a huge chunk of hard drive space as you can see below. In previous versions of macOS, going to About This Mac > Storage clearly showed the amount of purgeable space on your Mac: Since High Sierra however, Purgeable space is no longer displayed in macOS. DaisyDisk has long been the best utility to find large files or recover disk space on Mac but has now been updated to find and delete snapshots and “purgeable space” that is no longer visible in macOS. The developers behind DaisyDisk are one of the few to have studied in-depth the new APFS system. Here then is an easy way to fully recover storage space on your Mac including High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina and Big Sur.

The Top External Hard Drives For Mac Users.

MacOS will eventually delete them but only in its own sweet time which isn’t convenient if you need that storage space immediately. If you’ve deleted some large files on your Mac and yet still find that it hasn’t freed up any disk space, it’s probably due to these snapshots. Using a disk storage utility like Daisy Disk is now almost essential on macOS because since the release of of macOS 10.13 High Sierra was that, Apple switched to the new APFS file system for Macs with SSD drives.ĪPFS basically balances file space more “intelligently” on your Mac particularly when it comes to Time Machine snapshots and backups.Īlthough APFS can help manage disk space more efficiently, it can also be something of a curse because it actually makes it harder to accurately check storage on your Mac and recover disk space being hogged by local snapshots. It’s very hard to find these on your Mac but thanks to DaisyDisk, it’s really easy to find and delete the ones you don’t need.

One of the main reasons for this is that macOS takes “snapshots” of macOS to backup your system but these snapshots take a lot of valuable storage space. If you’re constantly seeing a warning pop-up that “Your startup disk is almost full” and “To make more space available on your startup disk, delete some files” then you’ll know how frustrating this can be. This often happens after installing new software or upgrading to a new version of macOS. One of the biggest problems Mac users have is macOS suddenly warning them they are low on disk space. If you’re struggling to work out where all your Mac’s hard drive storage space has gone, here we show you how to recover disk space on a Mac easily with DaisyDisk.

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