Strange available and purgeable space on High Sierra My Mac has been complaining about low disk space in recent days. I tried deleting lots of huge files and folders (more than 20 or 30 GB of them) but I still got the complaint and the free space does not increase. It seems like what I deleted has become purgeable content instead of free space. 

Here is my storage overview:


Cool, more than 60GB of available space. Not quite, here is what is shown in my disk utility:



Okay, more than 60GB are purgeable. No matter how many files I deleted from the system, the purgeable content is increased, not the free space.

Do you know what is going on? I suspect it is related to the encryption process because it is running at the moment (the progress is 80% at the moment), but I am not sure.



Thanks in advance
Oddly enough I had just under 60GB of purgable space.

I read around and found a few posts where people mentioned creating large files as once you ran out of space osx would start using purgable space. It works but you don't need to!

You can run bootcamp assistant- it will remove local time machine backups AND icloud cached content. Not only did i get my 60GB purgable space back, but i got an additional 60GB.

Considering I'm on a 250GB SSD and want to dual boot, extremely pleased. Hope this helps!