Disk Space Issues AGAIN!

TidBITS Talk
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I thought I’d learned enough on dealing with disk space thanks to much help I got here, but apparently not. So here’s my latest story:

Have a 1T internal drive on my M4 Mini. When I got that size, I did not realize I could play so many games, so before you know it, I was running low on free space. Now I’m not totally positive but I think I had at least 50G free when I started this process. And yeah I see how macOS 2026 takes up a lot more disk space (I gotta get rid of my 64G iPhone as I see almost 30G is taken up by the OS and system cache).

I get setup with an external drive. At first, I got about 120G moved for one specific game. Odd, DU & Omni tell me I had 109G free. WTF? So I move another 157G onto that external. Double WTF as DU is telling me I have… 113G free on my boot drive. Huh? This is crazy and makes zero sense. I have 279G of stuff on that external drive that I “moved” from my boot drive and it’s telling me I only have 113G free? I even did a reboot, but results are the same.

Now I know one can NOT trust what the finder is saying, but for the hell of it I did a GetInfo on my boot drive. Hmmmmm.It says I have 441G available with 327G purgeable. BUT it also says I have 869G in use. AND guess what? 114G free forgetting the purgeable nonsense.

Last head scratcher. I looked at one of my ccc snapshots… from before I did any of this. User folder was 533G. NOW it’s 388. That seems to be moving 279 out of it resulted in a lessening by 145??

YIKES!

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I found lots of storage space in iTunes podcasts

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That purgeable space will be Time Machine snapshots and temporary backups, plus various caches uses by macOS. The space is reclaimed over time as Time Machine does its stuff, but there’s always a lag between your freeing up space by moving or deleting stuff and that space actually being released.

Yes, it’s indeed a WTF. If you want to reclaim that purgeable space right now, I’d recommend something like DaisyDisk, but I’d suggest manually running Time Machine beforehand just to make sure that has backed up all recent changes.

Although I only have a 512GB internal drive in my M3 MacBook Air, touch wood I’ve yet to run into any issues with low space. But I know now to use DaisyDisk if I want to see what’s being used by which apps / processes and where.

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I never expected this to be so wack… all of a sudden, TODAY I am getting far, far more accurate results. That “869G in use” is now… 586G. THAT pretty much mirrors what I THOUGHT it should be.

Oh, no Time Machine, I do CCC.

I mean, the fallacy lasted over several days no matter how much I tried to stand on my head. And I use Omni Sweeper and it too had the wrong information… until today.