I recently faced a puzzling issue: my 1TB MacBook Pro showed only 150GB free, but disk analyzers could only account for about 500GB of used space. After hours of troubleshooting, I discovered that Spotlight’s search index had balooned to 233GB, hundreds of times larger than normal.
The Problem
Standard disk analyzers showed that my mac had 330GB of “Inaccessible Disk Space” and 66GB of “Purgeable Disk Space” but no clear explanation for where my storage went. Removing the purgeable space was easy enough with sudo purge but none of the recommended fixes from ChatGPT like clearing Time Machine snapshots, clearing unused conda packages with pip cache purge and conda clean --all, and restarting the computer had any effect on the inaccessible disk space.