[FRIAM] Advice on configuring computers

[Barry MacKichan]

On my Mac, I have three categories of space on my drive: used, free, and 
purgeable. I think Windows may be similar. The response to seeing an 
apparently empty continent is to occupy it. Same here.

A definition of purgeable space, pulled from a help file, is:

##What Is Purgeable Space##
When you check how much available disk space you have on your Mac, 
you’ll find that there’s a chunk of space that is **not literally 
**free****, but is nevertheless **available** to applications. In macOS, 
it’s called “purgeable space”.

The purgeable space mostly consists of local snapshots of Time Machine, 
and also caches, sleep images, swap files and other temporary system 
files.

When an application requests more disk space than is currently free, the 
system **automatically and instantly reclaims** the corresponding amount 
from the purgeable space.

Or else, when there is no deficit of free space, macOS allows the 
purgeable space to pile up to as much as 80% of disk’s capacity, by 
design.

--Barry
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20181014/d1635063/attachment.html>