Any MacOS experts out there please?

ayjaycee

Hopefully there might be some Mac experts here on BR as I have searched on line for potential answers and, although this seems to be a common issue, I have not yet found any solutions which work for me. I have a 2015 model Macbook Pro Retina (running MacOS 10.14.12 Mojave with a 13” screen, 128GB SSD, 8GB RAM). The SSD is starting to fill up (about 20GB free space left). I therefore deleted a bunch of files and folders amounting to about 40GB, emptied the trash and rebooted. On that basis, I expected the ‘Disk Utility’ to show about 60GB free space available but it’s not changed (ie. still showing 20GB excluding 'Purgeable' disk space - see below).

I have switched off Time Machine and have never had Cloud storage switched on. I have also searched the Mac and cannot find enough files to add up to what the disk tells me is used disk space (ie. around 100GB!) or, indeed, the ‘Purgeable’ disk space. I suspect that this is something to do with the latest MacOS release as I have never had the issue before. In the past, I have done exactly the same and freed up all the disk space that I needed.

Any suggestions to sort this out would be much appreciated please don’t turn this into a Mac -v- Windows (or Linux!) argument. FWIW here are a couple of screen shots which only confuse things more:

From ‘Disk Utility’:


From ‘About this Mac / Storage’:

craigus89

What is the actual issue here? Disk utility is showing a different thing from 'About this Mac' which is showing the 40gb that you've cleared out is now available. Unless you need to do any partitioning then I wouldn't worry about it, the space is clearly there, no?

ayjaycee

Craig, Thanks for the comment. One of the problems is that, on the face of it, the two are giving different indications of available space but, the numbers add up to the same. 'Disk Utility' shows a total of 21.81GB free space + 44.61GB Purgeable = 66.42GB and 'About this Mac' says the same but doesn't differentiate between actual free space and Purgeable data (actually a total of 66.43GB but it's close enough). My issue is that I cannot find those so called Purgeable files (ie. the 44GB).

In the past, when I have deleted large blocks of files or folders to free up space, it has always done just that and showed the expected results in Disk Utility straight away. There is also the problem that I just cannot find Purgeable files amounting to 44GB!

itboffin

This might help https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=049ZgEWM21w

ayjaycee

itboffin wrote:

This might help https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=049ZgEWM21w

Thanks for that (I really do mean it). Maybe I'm being thicker than usual but it's not exactly the easiest thing to follow and also seem that it might be a bit dangerous if you get things wrong. I can't believe that there isn't an easier way around it!

craigus89

Do you actually need to do anything though? I've always had my suspicions about the 'disk utility' on macs, if you've done as you say and cleared the space it is likely available but the interface in that particular app just isn't showing it to you.

ayjaycee

Hi guys. Just thought I'd close this off and say thanks again for the suggestions. Given Craigs suspicions about the accuracy of the Disk Utility, I thought I would take a stab in the dark and just pile a couple of large folders (20 GB each) into the disk and then delete them followed by emptying the trash bin. Lo and behold, I rebooted to find that I had the full 60 odd GB sitting there as free space. I still had a further 20 odd GB of purgeable files that I couldn't find but that didn't worry so much given the other result. About an hour later, I looked again at the Disk Utility to see that purgable files had gone down to 6 GB which is around what I would expected to see. I've got no real explanations but am nevertheless happy as it was beginning to really bug me. Again thanks for the advice.

964cup

https://www.macobserver.com/tips/how-to ... ard-drive/

ayjaycee

964. Been there already, done it etc. but it was no help. Thanks anyway.

craigus89

Glad you’re sorted mate.