How To Access Icloud Drive On Mac

so i'm seeing a lot of questions on the internetabout something new in sierra called purgeable space. to show you what i mean just go to the applemenu about this mac and then click on storage here. then you'll see a breakdown of what is onyour mac.

How To Access Icloud Drive On Mac, you'll see little things like apps, system,ios files. things like that. you'll sometimes see this little sliver here,it's only 8 gb on this test account but a lot of people are seeing 30, 40, 50 gb markedas purgeable space.

so what exactly does that mean? so apple tells you a little bit about thesein a support document here at this webpage. here it basically explains that purgeablecontent is when you've turned on optimize mac storage it's stuff that can be taken offyour mac because it can be downloaded again. let's take a look in here and click on manageand it opens up another window, here it is, and you can see optimize mac storage. this talks about removing itunes, movies,and tv shows that you've already watched and also email attachments if the storage spaceis needed. these are things that can be redownloadedagain.

they don't exist only on your computer, theyactually exist primarily online and your looking at a copy of them on your computer. but actually it comes from more than justthis media stuff. it also comes from icloud drive. so if you go to system preferences and thenyou look under icloud and then you have icloud drive and you look at options, one of theoptions here is optimize mac storage. this basically allows your mac to offloadsome of the files that you have so that they exist on your icloud account but not on yourmac. they look like they exist on your mac butthere will be a little cloud symbol next to

them. if you try to access them it'll download themagain so you can view them. it does this for files that primarily arelarge and you haven't accessed in a long time. so it's going to be a minimal amount of chancethat you're going to actually need those files. this is what it means by purgeable space. so then the question people have is okay sohow do i get back that space so i have more free space on my drive. well you already do. the whole idea behind purgeable space is thatyour mac will free it up if you need it.

so say you have 40 gb available on your driveand 10 of them are purgeable. well, you can consider that you've got 50gb available on your drive. but that extra 10 gb isn't going to do youany good if you don't need it. it'll be just sitting there blank. the idea is that it's keeping icloud drivefiles and it's keeping media files there since you have the space it might as well leavethose files there and not offload them to icloud. i know this is a tough concept to get yourhead around sometimes but if you just consider this as space that's being used by your mac.

it has things on it, files that you can actuallysee like movies or files on icloud drive. so it's not really free space but your macdoes recognize that if it runs into trouble and you need that space that it can get ridof it because it can easily add it back if need be.