sleepingisgivingin

Q: I need to free up space on my HD and most of the space seems to be taken up by "backups" when I already have an external HD for those purposes?

I've been trying to clean up my mac so I can speed it up.  I've been using DiskDaisy and I repaired all my disk permissions but I still have about 500GB taken up on my HD ~300GB of which are supposedly "backups".  I do not see the need for these to be stored on my main HD when I have an external HD set up as a backup through Time Machine.  I was hoping someone could offer me some advice on what to do to remedy this problem?

 

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Posted on Sep 6, 2015 10:27 PM

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Q: I need to free up space on my HD and most of the space seems to be taken up by "backups" when I already have an external HD for th ... more

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  • by Kappy,Solvedanswer

    Kappy Kappy Sep 6, 2015 10:36 PM in response to sleepingisgivingin
    Level 10 (270,935 points)
    Desktops
    Sep 6, 2015 10:36 PM in response to sleepingisgivingin

    About Time Machine local snapshots


    Time Machine Snapshots

    Open the Terminal in the Utilities folder and enter or paste the appropriate command line. Press RETURN and enter your admin password when prompted. It will not be echoed. Press RETURN again.

     

    To turn them ON: sudo tmutil enablelocal

    To turn them OFF: sudo tmutil disablelocal

     

    Note that turning them OFF will also delete all existing snapshots.

     

    For more about snapshots see: OS X Mountain Lion- About local snapshots.


  • by sleepingisgivingin,

    sleepingisgivingin sleepingisgivingin Sep 6, 2015 10:52 PM in response to Kappy
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Sep 6, 2015 10:52 PM in response to Kappy

    Thanks!

  • by Linc Davis,

    Linc Davis Linc Davis Sep 7, 2015 7:35 AM in response to sleepingisgivingin
    Level 10 (207,963 points)
    Applications
    Sep 7, 2015 7:35 AM in response to sleepingisgivingin

    The comment you marked as a solution is wrong.


    When Time Machine backs up a portable Mac, some of the free space will be used to make local snapshots, which are backup copies of recently deleted files. The space occupied by local snapshots is reported as available by the Finder, and should be considered as such. In the Storage display of System Information, local snapshots are shown as Backups. The snapshots are automatically deleted when they expire or when free space falls below a certain level. You ordinarily don't need to, and should not, delete local snapshots yourself. If you followed bad advice to disable local snapshots by running a shell command, you may have ended up with a lot of data in the Other category. Ask for instructions in that case.