When looking at my "About This Mac" it says that I have 60gb of space left on my hard drive, but when I go into finder to find all of these files there is not 300gb worth in anything I search, even searching, "All files on the Mac". Help!?

First look at these extracts from the Pondini website:

http://pondini.org/OSX/LionStorage.html

http://pondini.org/OSX/DiskSpace.html

To assist in your situation, I suggest that you download from the Internet OmniDiskSweeper (free) and open it. It will show you all of your user files and the respective sizes.

Ciao.

“You may notice a difference in available space statistics between Disk Utility, Finder, and Get Info inspectors. This is expected and can be safely ignored. The Finder displays the available space on the disk without accounting for the local snapshots, because local snapshots will surrender their disk space if needed."

About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs

Where are these files? I want to delete them so I can have my hard drive clear.

Open Terminal and copy/paste followed by enter/return in a Admin account.

Turn local TimeMacine backups off: sudo tmutil disablelocal

Quit and reboot via the Apple menu.

Turn local backups back on: sudo tmutil enablelocal

You have been advised to run a shell command by someone who did not explain what that command does. To fill in the missing information, the command disables an important function of the operating system that may save you from losing data. There is no reason to disable that function, as it isn't causing you any problems and it never will. On the other hand, losing data later because you partially disabled the operating system for no reason may cause you serious problems.

I disagree with this. The local snapshots do you no good if the drive fails. The drive fails the local snapshots are gone. So what good are they? They are only enabled on notebook mac computers. None of the desktop model have that setting enabled.

Also they are not used during a regular time machine backup. They are just deleted when you run a normal tm backup.

So what good are they other then to fill up your hard drive with useless data.

Funny that apple doesn't feel these local snapshots are needed on desktop system.

Linc Davis wrote:

You have been advised to run a shell command by someone who did not explain what that command does. To fill in the missing information, the command disables an important function of the operating system that may save you from losing data. There is no reason to disable that function, as it isn't causing you any problems and it never will. On the other hand, losing data later because you partially disabled the operating system for no reason may cause you serious problems.

They are used by mobile devices as part of the rapid restore state on reboot and wake from sleep .

Just where did you get that from? Please post a reference to any article that states that.

What you are think of is the sleepimage file. The local time machine snapshots has nothing to do with what you have stated.

And even if they were, which they aren't, what makes a mobile device any different then a desktop system for this so called rapid restore feature. A reboot of the system loads all files from the hard drive from the original file locations.

Keith Doherty3 wrote:

They are used by mobile devices as part of the rapid restore state on reboot and wake from sleep .

Even more nonsense is being posted in this thread concerning local snapshots. Please see the support article I linked to earlier for genuine information. Local snapshots are not backups in the usual sense, but extra copies that may allow you to recover from unintended deletion or modification of files when you're away from your Time Machine backup device.

Quote from the article.

Time Machine in OS X Lion includes a new feature called "local snapshots" that keeps copies of files you create, modify or delete on your internal disk. Local snapshots compliment regular Time Machine backups (that are stored on your external disk or Time Capsule) giving you a "safety net" for times when you might be away from your external backup disk or Time Capsule and accidentally delete a file.

So what makes a notebook any different then a desktop, other then with a desktop you might have your tm backup drive connected all the time.

The object here is to not indiscriminately delete files you need or want to keep. I personally have never deleted a file I wanted to keep.

In essence a backup is for catastrophic failure of your system. So it can be restored once that failure has been fixed. Not because you go in willy nilly and start deleting files.

Lowluster greetings:

LowLuster wrote:

They are only enabled on notebook mac computers. None of the desktop model have that setting enabled.

I was not aware of that. What is your source?

Ciao.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4878

OS X Lion: About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs

LowLuster, greetings: Yes that is indeed the case. It begs the question why just portables and not desktops. My guess would be the hardware/performance differences. But that is just speculative. I thank you for the information.

ciao.

OGELTHORPE wrote:

. . .

It begs the question why just portables and not desktops.

Because folks with desktops usually aren't away from their external backups.

If you're travelling with a laptop, and no portable external backup drive, and a file gets delteted or changed in error, or corrupted, Local Snapshots may save your bacon.

Think of it as Versions for all files, not just the few apps that support Versions directly (and in fact, for those files, there aren't two copies, one in the Versions database and one in the Local Snapshots. They share them)

Pondini, greetings; Your clarification is most appreciated. Its utility would be a function of the volatility of the data for a given user on their portable Mac. Certainly not 100% fail safe but in the right conditions and circumstance it could "save your bacon".

My speculative thinking was along the lines that it may make backups more efficient and hence faster. That constitutes as a strikeout for me, but no one bats 100%. 😀

Ciao.

OGELTHORPE wrote:

. . .

My speculative thinking was along the lines that it may make backups more efficient and hence faster.

That's what I thought at first, too.

But Local Snapshots are entirely separate; they're made at the same time as a backup is scheduled. From what I gather, when you delete something, and empty the trash, the files aren't really deleted, but moved into some sort of pending area, then the next snapshot, by an entirely different process (mtmd). So it's mostly smoke and mirrors with indexes and such, and no data copying. Pretty slick!