How to delete time machine local backup?

Okay so I finally found the solution! First, make a Time Machine backup of your Mac. Then restore your Mac from that latest backup - and once it's done restoring it will have cleared out your local backups. As soon as it finishes loading, turn off Time Machine (but make a reminder to weekly manually backup your Mac on Reminders :-))

You are good to go. I have done this 2 or three times and it has worked every time! Enjoy.

Hi. No, you don't need to wipe the hard drive first.

-Restart the computer and hold down "option" before the noise plays. Keep holding it down until the hard drive icons appear in the middle of the screen.

-One will say Recovery 10.7 (if you have Lion) or 10.8 (if you have Mountain Lion) and the other will probably say Macintosh HD. Double click on the one that says Recovery.

-After that, a window will pop up and you will choose "Restore From Backup" (the first selection in the box.)

-From there just follow the directions and choose to restore from the latest backup.

-Once it is fully restored it will have cleared automatic backups.

Quick question...which operating system are you running? What laptop do you have? I had Mountain Lion on a MacBook Pro Mid-2010 and just upgraded to Mavericks. Just doing this cleared out my backups so that's an option too.

When did you install Mavericks? If you haven't checked auto backups since then, do so now. It should have wiped those out during the installation on Mavericks. It did for me 2 days ago when I installed it. Check the storage place again.

that command should have instantly set the purple backups category to Zero. What is taking up the most space? The yellow "other" category?

Local backups are deleted automatically when available space is low. They should rarely, if ever, cause a problem.

That terminal command is to Disable Local backups.

To delete the local backups turn TM off in the sys preferences.

bizlaw wrote:

My MacBook Pro is running out of hard drive space, and the culprit is Time Machine. Apparently Time Machine stores local backups on the hard drive when it is not connected to the backup drive,

No. It makes them at all times, whether the regular backup drive is connected or not.

and then is supposed to delete them when it does backup.

No, they're "thinned" automatically after 24 hours to one per day, then deleted after a week (or, deleted as necessary if your OSX drive gets over 80% full).

So your problem is almost certainly elsewhere. See Where did my Disk Space go? for the common culprits, and ways to find less-common ones.

Also see Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #30 for the gory details on Local Snapshots.

I'm running SL and my time machine only deletes backups when the allocated space is full. You can delete old backups via time machine itself. Go TM/enter time machine/go to oldest backup/clk on the button window with the gear/choose delete backup

I am having a similar problem. my system information shows that I have over 100gb of backups. I ran that command listed above and there was no effect except when I went back to check under storage, my entire hard drive was listed as backups, all 500gb. I restarted and now it's back to normal but I still have 107.9gb of backups. I did a search of the back up files and can't locate them. Time Machine is turned off. Any way to manually delete these space consuming backups?

jackavs19 wrote:

. . .

I still have 107.9gb of backups. I did a search of the back up files and can't locate them. Time Machine is turned off. Any way to manually delete these space consuming backups?

Normally if you either run sudo tmutil disablelocal or turn Time Machine OFF, they will be deleted. If your disk is over 90% full, it's done at a high priority, otherwise at a lower one, so it can take a while.

However, on rare occasions, there's something corrupted preventing them from being deleted. You may have to Restart, look in the trash for recovered items and force-delete them.

bizlaw wrote:

I took my MacBook Pro to my local Apple Store. The Genuis told me that I had to let Time Machine run automatically to delete the local backups

Not so. Once you turn them off, local snapshots are deleted whether you're connected to the TM drive or not. If you have a lot of them, it can take a while to delete them all, especially on a busy system.

That's extremely unusual. From the man page for tmutil: