Just from my perspective, I have no photos or music stored on my macbook, but more than half of my "free space" is purgeable. I use my mac mainly for audio production, and I have yet to determine what my mac is considering purgeable. Another issue I run into is that when I'm downloading additional content for a particular program (in my case, audio samples for Studio One 3), it's seeing the purgeable space as used and will not allow me to download the content if it exceeds the free space I have, even tho apparently I have way more space than the program thinks I do.
I wonder if the audio apps you're using are caching large files. For example I use Camtasia for creating these types of videos and I'll capture a bunch of screen video. Even though I save my files as self contained (they contain the video clips) it saves whatever I captured (even if not saved and even if deleted from a project) in some cache directory in I think my user Library somewhere. For some reason, Camtasia is also not paying attention to its own preference which says to purge cache files. Needless to say, I cleared up a few gigs of old cached footage. My Mac thinks that was purgeable space. If your Mac says that you had 100GB that's purgeable and you're trying to generate a file that is around that size (more or less than 100GB), I can see that it wouldn't let you do that until you go through the purging. Keep in mind though that there's lots of things that it thinks is purgeable and maybe for you it's not. Maybe it thinks that email attachments are purgeable because they are on the mail server somewhere and can be redownloaded. I started using CleanMyMac which is a great little app that helps manage this stuff and point out what to clear out, what it means... A friend raves about it so I gave it a try. Well worth the $39 or whatever it was.
Very informative video on optimized storage. If iCloud Drive and 'desktop and documents' are enable, but optimized storage is disabled, does it mean that all the files in the desktop and document folders will stay in the local drive, but a copy of these two folders will be stored in iCloud. These iCloud copies are used to sync the same folders of other macs that I owned? These other macs have the same iCloud setting as the main Mac.
I believe that if you don't have optimized enabled, full copies remain on your mac as well as iCloud. When optimized is enabled, they may or may not be on your local computer. This is because the OS determines what files should be local and which ones should be kept in the cloud but with easy access (download when opened) based on the amount of disk space you have and the frequency of usage of those files (eg. a file not opened since last year may not be local). Of course before testing out anything with these iCloud services, it's best to run a time machine backup or create a copy of all of those files ideally on another drive. Hope that helps.
It automatically unchecked the photo box? Weird. I set this up on my 2TB drive that is about half full but I am a little afraid to try this on my 500GB Mac. I worry that it will throw things off that I want to stay on there.
Thanks for the post, Tom. At first the word 'purgeable' threw me off, putting in my mind "to CLEAN or WIPE AWAY" unneeded or hardly used files. A word like "relocatable" makes more sense to me. I probably would even have better understood "cloudable" ... although it's the name of a company :) David Cox explains "purgeable" starting about 16:15 in one of his recent videos ua-cam.com/video/9hAAMaQ2AwQ/v-deo.html and yeah ... it's basically moving seldom used files to Cloud Drive.
Just from my perspective, I have no photos or music stored on my macbook, but more than half of my "free space" is purgeable. I use my mac mainly for audio production, and I have yet to determine what my mac is considering purgeable. Another issue I run into is that when I'm downloading additional content for a particular program (in my case, audio samples for Studio One 3), it's seeing the purgeable space as used and will not allow me to download the content if it exceeds the free space I have, even tho apparently I have way more space than the program thinks I do.
I wonder if the audio apps you're using are caching large files. For example I use Camtasia for creating these types of videos and I'll capture a bunch of screen video. Even though I save my files as self contained (they contain the video clips) it saves whatever I captured (even if not saved and even if deleted from a project) in some cache directory in I think my user Library somewhere. For some reason, Camtasia is also not paying attention to its own preference which says to purge cache files. Needless to say, I cleared up a few gigs of old cached footage.
My Mac thinks that was purgeable space. If your Mac says that you had 100GB that's purgeable and you're trying to generate a file that is around that size (more or less than 100GB), I can see that it wouldn't let you do that until you go through the purging. Keep in mind though that there's lots of things that it thinks is purgeable and maybe for you it's not. Maybe it thinks that email attachments are purgeable because they are on the mail server somewhere and can be redownloaded.
I started using CleanMyMac which is a great little app that helps manage this stuff and point out what to clear out, what it means... A friend raves about it so I gave it a try. Well worth the $39 or whatever it was.
Very informative video on optimized storage.
If iCloud Drive and 'desktop and documents' are enable, but optimized storage is disabled, does it mean that all the files in the desktop and document folders will stay in the local drive, but a copy of these two folders will be stored in iCloud. These iCloud copies are used to sync the same folders of other macs that I owned? These other macs have the same iCloud setting as the main Mac.
I believe that if you don't have optimized enabled, full copies remain on your mac as well as iCloud. When optimized is enabled, they may or may not be on your local computer. This is because the OS determines what files should be local and which ones should be kept in the cloud but with easy access (download when opened) based on the amount of disk space you have and the frequency of usage of those files (eg. a file not opened since last year may not be local). Of course before testing out anything with these iCloud services, it's best to run a time machine backup or create a copy of all of those files ideally on another drive. Hope that helps.
It automatically unchecked the photo box? Weird. I set this up on my 2TB drive that is about half full but I am a little afraid to try this on my 500GB Mac. I worry that it will throw things off that I want to stay on there.
I am just asking to myself if the purgeable new thing was a necessary?
Thanks for the post, Tom. At first the word 'purgeable' threw me off, putting in my mind "to CLEAN or WIPE AWAY" unneeded or hardly used files. A word like "relocatable" makes more sense to me. I probably would even have better understood "cloudable" ... although it's the name of a company :) David Cox explains "purgeable" starting about 16:15 in one of his recent videos ua-cam.com/video/9hAAMaQ2AwQ/v-deo.html and yeah ... it's basically moving seldom used files to Cloud Drive.
So much lip smacking and swallowing. Take a breath dude.
Sorry.