About This MAC

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About This MAC

Doing some clean up on my machine. Getting unnecisary photos and videos onto external hardrives. When I go into About This Mac, More Info, Storage Tab it shows me all of my disks. There are the different categories that it groups into the used space. Audio, Movies, Photos... What is included within the Backups and Other categories. My hard drive is 320 GB, and they take up 63 GB for the Backups and 97 GB for the Other section.

If I use a time machine does need it to take up so much space for the Backups section, or is that part of what it needs to work?

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)

Posted on Sep 24, 2013 5:23 PM

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Answer 1

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LowLuster

Level 6

12,105 points

Sep 24, 2013 6:12 PM in response to J_Wood

The backups are from the TM Snapshot system. Turning TM off will clear them. There is also a terminal command to stop the hourly Snapshots from happening.

sudo tmutil disablelocal

In my opinion these local snapshots are just a waste of hard drive space. They are never used when doing a real TM backup and the only Mac computers that have this feature enabled is the notebook line of Macs. Supposedly they are taken just in case you accidentally delete a file.

The Other catagory is exactly that. Other files OS X doesn't have a defined catagory for. They could be any type of files, even Operating System files.

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Answer 2

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Sep 24, 2013 8:20 PM in response to J_Wood

Do not run any shell commands or otherwise try to interfere with the way Time Machine works.

The backups are local snapshots. They are managed automatically and you will probably never need to override that automatic management. Just leave them alone.

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