The on-board flash storage drive on my MacBook Pro retina 15" is filled with a 100GB of time machine "Backups." How do I find and delete these backup files? See attached pic.
(Note: I use an external disk for my time machine backups, so I have no idea why my MBP on-board flash storage shows backups as consuming storage.)
MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mavericks (10.9)
OS X Lion and newer Mac OS X versions create local snapshots in portable Macs if Time Machine is enabled. See > http://pondini.org/TM/30.html
You don't have to worry about. They are stored in a kind of volume named "MobileBackups", but they appear as stored in your hard drive. To delete them, open System Preferences > Time Machine, and turn off Time Machine. Then, turn it on. However, you don't need to delete them, as they will be deleted when your hard drive gets full
OS X Lion and newer Mac OS X versions create local snapshots in portable Macs if Time Machine is enabled. See > http://pondini.org/TM/30.html
You don't have to worry about. They are stored in a kind of volume named "MobileBackups", but they appear as stored in your hard drive. To delete them, open System Preferences > Time Machine, and turn off Time Machine. Then, turn it on. However, you don't need to delete them, as they will be deleted when your hard drive gets full
Great solution (trick)! Once I turned-off Time Machine and then turned-on Time Machine again my disk space was freed from the bogus "Backup" data. See pic below now showing plenty of available space and only a miniscule amount of backup data used.
Thanks! I am very grateful.
You are welcome
Perry Lehman wrote:
Great solution (trick)! Once I turned-off Time Machine and then turned-on Time Machine again my disk space was freed from the bogus "Backup" data.
Soon as you use TimeMachine again it's going to return, because that's the local TM file.
If you don't want this taking up extra space on your boot drive and not prone to accidentally deleting files, or for more security reasons you want you delete stays deleted.
Then enter this into Terminal program: sudo tmutil disablelocal press return and entering your Admin password. Turn off TimeMachine in System Preferences and back on again after a few minutes to see if your drive space is reclaimed.
To re-enable it: sudo tmutil enablelocal
In addition to what mende1 and ds have said, I keep Backups "off" (using the Terminal command) becasue it can really beat up a SSD/flash storage.
But make certain that you connect your MacBook Pro to your Time Machine disk at least once a day, so you don't lose too much information should your storage fail.
Clinton
This is a good tip - using the terminal command to keep the TM backups "off" to conserve space on the SSD/flash drive. I'll do it. Thanks!
Perry
This is a good tip
No, it's completely wrong. Disabling local snapshots serves no purpose whatsoever and merely increases the chance that you'll lose data.
Thanks a lot mende1. It made a huge difference.
so if I start getting low on space in my internal hard drive when im backingu up my mac, what exactly will happen to the backup?
ds store,
Your solution worked well. I just cleared the "backups" from my MacBook and now the "Free" HD space matches the "Available" HD space. I did do a TM backup before disabling, then enabled again after confirming that "Free" matched "Available". Thanks!
Thank you of this easy and great solution. It gave me back 39G.
MacBook Pro flash storage filled with "Backups" - how to delete?
