I have a 512GB HD in my 6 year old MacBook Pro, but will be upgrading to a new Macbook Pro with a 256GB SSD. I moved a lot of memory over to a external hard drive so that I would be well under 256GB. In looking how much memory I have on my computer I would be well under now, but it still says I have 70+GB "Back Up Memory". Does that "Back Up Memory" count against my total memory and/or will it go away when I switch over to the new MacBook Pro?
First of all, you are confusing memory (RAM) with disk space. What you are concerned with is physical space on your disk.
70+ GB of "Back up Memory" or "Backups"?
Where are you viewing this?
Thanks for your response. Yes - I am concerned about the physical space on my hard drive. I am not talking about RAM, I am talking about Hard Drive Space. I am viewing this in "About This Mac" under storage (not memory). Let me know what you think.
Then "Backups" would be your Time Machine Backups. Do you keep TM backups on your internal disk?
If not try OmniDisksweeper to help you find what's hogging your disk space.
I do TM backups so you are right this is it. How do I not keep the back ups on my internal disk just on my external?
They shouldn't be on your internal drive in the first place. If you keep an external for TM as it seems you do, be sure your TM backups are writing to that disk by choosing it in TM Preferences. If you see backups on your internal see Pondini's Time Machinde Tips
I run TM and my Storage looks like this...
(Note that I am only using 1 partition of the external, so the numbers don't add up to 1TB)
Just as a point of information: If Time Machine is enabled a notebook computer running Lion will keep "local snapshots", which are temporary backups of stuff - stored on the hard drive - until a TM disk is connected.
You can use these local snapshots via Time Machine even if your backup volume is not mounted - try it!
charlie
Thanks Charlie, good point. But 70GB?
And what happens on an SSD, it must also save the snapshots?
Aha. I could not find that article, which you found. Now you know what I know about it (if not more!).
charlie
As far as I know, you can turn snapshots off:
With limited space on an SSD, I certainly would.
Good information. I will read thru all of this and hopefully resolve this issue. Thanks!
back up memory question
