Time Machine restore gave me huge hard drive

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Level 2

245 points

Time Machine restore gave me huge hard drive

I was having problems with something i was trying to do and decided to start fresh and redownload everything i needed to. I started the project a day ago, so i went into time machine and restored macintosh HD to yesterday morning. everything went fine, and was back to how i remembered it, but now my hard drive is 429gb/500gb full. (Saying it is double seems about right). So clearly when i restored it kept the one i had on there when i restored. How do i delete that macintosh HD? I want to keep the one that i restored from (from yesterday), and delete the the current one i had before restoring. When i go to macintosh hd in finder it is the one from yesterday btw. Thanks in advance i need to transfer 80gb of movies to it and dont have enough room thats why i noticed it.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.2), 21.5 inch. October 2009 version

Posted on Dec 26, 2011 8:35 PM

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Answer 1

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Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Dec 26, 2011 10:39 PM in response to Alex403

Alex403 wrote:

. . .

i went into time machine and restored macintosh HD to yesterday morning. everything went fine, and was back to how i remembered it, but now my hard drive is 429gb/500gb full. (Saying it is double seems about right).

That's not how you do a full system restore (but Apple doesn't make that clear). What you restored got put in a folder in your hidden /Volumes folder.

To do a full system restore, see #14 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions. That will erase everything on your HD, then restore everything from the backup you select.

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Answer 2

Alex403 Author

Level 2

245 points

Dec 26, 2011 10:56 PM in response to Pondini

yes unfortunately i figured that out after i already did it! but thank you i enabled hidden folders and erased the volumes folder, and the number started going down. Thanks.

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