How do I delete Purgeable Space on a Mac?

You (and the others concerned about the size of the purgeable space being report) should understand that manually purging does absolutely nothing except maybe give you a dopamine hit when you see the free space size bump up. Whether Finder or About this Mac is reporting 400 GB or 900 GB free made no difference to the OS and ow it works(how you feel about it might be different of course!).

APFS is a far more advanced file system than HFS+ was, and things like space recovery are so transparent to the user that there is almost no point in even looking at it. Or at least understand that you are looking at it for your own sake and not because it is necessary.

Ran into the purgeable space issue while trying to update the SD nav card for my car. The Kia updater app does not recognize purgeable space as being available and would not download the update. I tried multiple times to delete files and manually purge with terminal, but could not gain any available space. I came across another posting that suggested turning off "optimize mac storage" under the iCloud settings. Did that, rebooted and watched the purgeable space number rapidly decrease. Downloaded the update and turned optimize mac storage space back on afterwards. Just need to remember to do this the next time around.

i think you need to understand it's not about dopamine but getting a job done: i can't download footage i need to work with, because the frame.io app doesn't recognize that i have 700gb purgeable space and just says i have only 20gb of free space. now you can go on all day long how frame.io didn't code their app correctly but some of us just need a solution to a considerable problem, not an ill informed lesson on how apple will magically do everything and one should just lay back.

Interesting cure, thanks.:)👍