It continues. Every time I run Daisy Disk, I have 5GB less storage. I'm down to 28.6GB. I started somewhere north of 40GB.

I haven't been taking notes. (Good use of Captain's Log!) But I believe the somewhat ambiguous "~free+purgeable" may be growing larger, as it's at 529GB right now.

I suspect that the vast majority of that space is my Photos library, where Photos or iCloud or some combination thereof can make some decisions on the size of thumbnails or what have you.

I just looked at the Time Machine snapshots in Disk Utility (from the View menu). I can't pretend to understand any of this, because it makes no sense, but in the last 8 hours Time Machine has created 11GB ("private size") of snapshots. The largest (3.59GB) a couple of hours ago when I deleted a bunch of email.

So as I've been deleting stuff, Time Machine has been adding stuff. 11GB would get me close to the figure I seem to recall when I started this adventure. But I don't understand why the available space would be going down. You'd think it'd remain the same. But maybe there's a lot of overhead that goes with the snapshots.

I'm not going to delete any of them right now. If I understand things correctly, those locally stored snapshots will be deleted (or written to the Time Machine HD) as new snapshots, presumably much smaller as I've stopped making huge changes, replace them.

I'll know more Friday afternoon. For now, my efforts to recover more storage will cease.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 14:43 Wednesday, 20 March 2024