Time Machine Snapshots not erasable.

Hello everyone,

It's a few weeks I am struggling with my internal HDD that is apparently full. Eventually I found out that I have 330GB of hidden stuff to delete, which is basically old TM snapshots. Firstly with CleanMyMac, then with DaisyDisk, and even I tried to delete them one by one through the terminal, but everything looks impossible.

In the meantime I keep receiving alerts that the space on my hdd is finished and that I should delete something. In the worst cases it affects also the RAM, and speed of course, and the system pushes me to close some applications. Everywhere it seems that this space it is not occupied while instead it is and it is slowing me down and annoying a lot. Is it the new Big Sur the problem?

How can I rid of this stuff??? Any idea?

I shared with you some screenshots.

Thanks,

P.S. Of course I tried to switch off the TM automatic backup, but it didn't work.

Posted on Apr 11, 2021 11:46 PM

Top-ranking reply

Luis Sequeira1

Level 9

76,850 points

Posted on Apr 12, 2021 2:59 AM

The worst thing you can do to your mac is letting creepy software like "cleanmymac" on it.

Snapshots should be cleared automatically, but for some reason sometimes they aren't.

It is however relatively easy to clear them using tmutil.

Try this: in Terminal, type the following:

sudo tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 100000000000 4

type your password when requested (nothing will appear, not even bullets or asterisks as you type the password), and press enter. It will take a while, wait until the prompt appears on the next line.

Let us know how that goes.

That large number is about 100GB, and the number 4 is the highest "urgency".

So the above command will try to reclaim about 100GB of free space by "thinning" the space used for snapshots.

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Time Machine Snapshots not erasable.

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