How to delete time machine local backup?

pretty long after the original post but thought i'd shared what i did.

had similar problem where the local snapshots of time machine is taking up a lot of space in a short time due to some very large virtual machine files which i added and deleted, this also caused finder to report free space incorrectly where my available free space is larger than my whole hard drive!

in my case disk utility was showing about 62GB free space whereas finder 560GB free space and my hard drive is only 500GB. and my actual usage was only about 160GB, meaning the free space by right should be 340GB.

after spending lotsa time researching and reading, did some of the steps taken by others like turning off time machine and rebooting Mac, this did adjust finder's reading to be the same as disk utility, however it still reports 62GB free space, meaning the local snapshots aren't being deleted as stated in Apple's article where turning off time machine would delete them immediately.

as i didn't wanna wait any longer to reclaim the free space, i installed several apps that detect folder sizes, and finally ran OmniDiskSweeper with root access through terminal, detected a .mobilebackups.trash folder that's up to 530GB in size which turned out to be the culprit, it contains several of the dated backup folders. after several attempts of trying to delete them and crashing the app, finally managed to do so and reclaim the free space.

maybe after a while time machine will delete those local snapshots, but maybe like what others have reported it wouldn't even after several days, but that's what i did to regain the free space immediately.

now i've turned time machine back on and hopefully things will be alright.

calbob84 - that is what I do. No need to use terminal commands. Not usre if it takes longer than doing it via terminal but it's pretty straight forward. You use Time Machine to find the back up you want to delete and use the options provided to do just that.

1. Open Terminal.app
2. Write sudo tmutil disablelocal
3. Press Return

I think i may have figured it out. Here are the steps i took:

-I logged into the "root" account on my computer by following the steps listed here Enabling and using the "root" user in OS X - Apple Support

-I ran the following commands in terminal "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles true" then "killall Finder" so that I was able to view the hidden files on my Macintosh HD

- I navigated to "Volumes" under Macintosh HD then the Time Machine Backups Drive

-You can then highlight the backups folder then proceed to delete it. NOTE: it may take a while.

IF IT DID NOT LET YOU DELETE IT FROM FINDER

-Still logged in as the root user navigate to launchpad and launch "Disk Utility"

-There you should find the Time Machine Backups Drive

-You can proceed to erase the drive from there

I had the same issue. My TM used over 250 GB. I used an external drive, partitioned it and formatted for Mac. Its a 2 TB drive, so I made a 250 GB partition for the TM only. I Selected this drive for a new TM back up, and it used roughly half of it. As soon as it finished, I checked again, and those 250 GB I had in my Macbook were gone. It's running a lot faster now.