Q: How to delete time machine local backup?

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:

I delete  backups monthly. Go: TM, go to earliest back up using the time graph at the right of the screen, clk. on gear icon (next to the eye icon) and select "delete backup". Keep doing this for each backup yuo want to delete.