I followed bad advice to disable local backups in Time Machine because my backups were coming in at 450GB. Now all of that data has moved to "Other" storage and I need to know how to take care of this. What steps can I take to reclaim my storage space?
MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)
Disabling local snapshots does not move them, but deletes them. Local snapshots appear in that image as "Backups" with a separate color.
About Time Machine local snapshots
Time Machine Snapshots
Open the Terminal in the Utilities folder and enter or paste the appropriate command line. Press RETURN and enter your admin password when prompted. It will not be echoed. Press RETURN again.
To turn them ON: sudo tmutil enablelocal
To turn them OFF: sudo tmutil disablelocal
Note that turning them OFF will also delete all existing snapshots.
So why did my Other section expand by 450GB and my Backup section disappear after I ran sudo tmutil disablelocal
Couldn't tell you. Read the link I sent. Snapshots do not take up space permanently. The system will delete them as the space is needed. In any event you need to find where the 450 GBs of data are to check it they can be removed permanently. Other is simple stuff that doesn't fit into one of the several categories.
Have you checked your disk's status using Get Into or Disk Utility?
OK so, I had 450GB of backups, I disabled local backups, go and check the storage again and the Other has increased by 450GB while that backups have disappeared. That's where we stand. I need to know how to reclaim that 450GB of space. I tried using Daisy Disk and I can't see that data, it's hidden.
Don't worry about the space. OS X will delete those files and reclaim the space as needed. I'm afraid I don't know where Time Machine puts the local snapshots. You would need to hunt through library folders to find them.
Where do I hunt? There is no where evident for me to look. DaisyDisk & OmniDiskSweeper are only seeing 532GB used while at the same time showing 36GB free.
As I said, I can't help you here because I don't use Time Machine.
Were you able to figure out the space issue? I used the same sudo command and the same exact thing happened (twice!). I had a total of ~25GB move to "other" from Backups after I ran the command. I have since tried to copy some large files to lower my available disk space to below 1GB to see if that will cause the older backups to purge, but no luck there either. Rebooting does no good either.
Local Backups moved to Other
