Free space on 1 TB drive went from 90 GB to 455 GB overnight.

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Free space on 1 TB drive went from 90 GB to 455 GB overnight.

I'm puzzled - My MacBook Pro with a 1TB drive has been hovering around 90GB free space for months. Suddenly today I have 455.2GB free. I can find nothing missing (and I've tried!) and the machine is still working like a charm. M1 Pro chip with 32GB running Tahoe 26.1 (something to do with the upgrade to .1????). I run the Hauptwerk virtual pipe organ software (amazing piece of software!) and have a lot of space taken up with pipe organ sample sets which I feared would be missing, but they all seem to still be present.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this? I've never seen anything like this and it is driving me crazy.

Thank you for any info,

Ray

MacBook Pro (M1 Pro, 2021)

Posted on Nov 5, 2025 1:16 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

leroydouglas

Community+ 2025

Level 10

198,078 points

Nov 5, 2025 2:14 PM in response to FoxFanRay

FoxFanRay wrote:

I'm puzzled - My MacBook Pro with a 1TB drive has been hovering around 90GB free space for months. Suddenly today I have 455.2GB free. I can find nothing missing (and I've tried!) and the machine is still working like a charm. M1 Pro chip with 32GB running Tahoe 26.1 (something to do with the upgrade to .1????). I run the Hauptwerk virtual pipe organ software (amazing piece of software!) and have a lot of space taken up with pipe organ sample sets which I feared would be missing, but they all seem to still be present.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this? I've never seen anything like this and it is driving me crazy.

Thank you for any info,

Ray

the macOS manages purgable, available, and free storage.

it can take several days of behind the scenes for it to release to free storage— this is normal in todays macOS.

Local snapshots are considered purgeable and may be removed at any time...

iCloud storage, optimize setting, temp 30 day deleted files, Time Machine, etc.

ref: Free up storage space on Mac - Apple Support

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Answer 2

Nov 6, 2025 7:23 AM in response to FoxFanRay

have you enabled "optimize storage" ??

that keeps the master copy of some files in iCloud, and when you reference them, they will be downloaded to you.

it main drawback is that, like an addiction, it continues to get worse and there is no easy way out.

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Answer 3

FoxFanRay Author

Level 1

37 points

Nov 5, 2025 7:12 PM in response to leroydouglas

These are good thoughts but they don't explain the issue. Since I've been getting close on space, I've been monitoring the snapshots, purgeable space etc for quite a few months. In fact I have previously deleted Carbon Copy Cloner snapshots myself while monitoring the space and have watched the Time Machine snapshots for size. I have never had (in the prior 2 to 3 months) more than 120 GB purgeable. I run iStat Menus (I'm a mainframe programmer and consider iStat my Omegamon!) so I can drop down a display of the space in a second. When I saw this space change this morning, my first thought was an iStat issue, so I opened the Disk Utility app to check, and it shows the same thing. I wish I had screen prints over the past 3 months I've been watching, but never thought I'd need them. I've not had this much free space in well over a year. Thanks for the thoughts though.

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