Before
500 gb Hard Drive with 360 gb Used
Full Back to Time Machine
New 1 tb SSD installed
Full Restore
290 gb used
Everything seems to be there and working.
Have I accumulated 70 gb of temp files in 15 months?
What does full Time Machine Backup copy / not copy?
Is this an "opportunity" to identify temp files and delete each month?
Where to start
Thanks
Steve
MacBook Pro, iOS 9.2.1, 2 tb Time Machine
I believe that you may be referring to the local snap shots:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204015
Essentially they can be ignored. They will be automatically deleted if space is needed for other data.
Ciao.
AH
So I may have had 70 gb of snapshots on my MacBook Pro's Hard Drive created when I used the laptop away from the desk and 2 tb Time Machine.
Can I periodically do a full backup and delete / cause the deletion of these snapshots?
70 gb still seems a lot for 15 months even though I do use the MBP a lot (who doesn't?)
OR
Do I do a full backup and restore each year to remove them / reclaim disk space?
Thanks
Steve
Local snapshots will automatically be deleted starting with the oldest ones when you actually need the drive space for your own use. And once you get down to about 20GB of free space snapshots are no longer kept. You need to do nothing, the operating system will do it all.
The free space you gained from the clone was almost certainly a mixture of local snapshots, temporary and cache files, and logs. A cloned drive is always somewhat smaller than the source drive.
Let Time Machine do the work it is designed to do. Full backups are not necessary and will take a long time. You will reduce the amount of 'snapshots' by connecting the MBP to your Time Machine HDD more often.
Or you may turn off Time Machine and restart the MBP. That should eliminate them. Or use Terminal as shown in the first (Pondini) link I posted.
Ciao.
I connect to the External Time Machine often and worst case every other week, so the extra 70 gb must be " temporary and cache files, and logs". Any ideas how to identify / delete them?
TimeMachine works every hour that the computer isn’t connected to TimeMachine so there’s certainly some snapshots there. Oglethorpe has shown you how to get rid of them but I recommend that you don’t try. The OS will kill them if/when needed and they might just save your bacon some day.
As for deleting caches etc, those are also automatically taken care of except for rare instances when a file gets damaged so the OS can’t delete it. To deal with that rare instance, restart in Safe Mode (restart and hold the shift key until the Apple icon appears). Once you get to the desktop, if the trashcan appears to have anything in it, empty it. Then restart normally. But you can’t just delete cache files before programs need them. Delete them and at best they’ll just get remade. At worst the program that owns the cache will crash.
Had time to do a little investigation and Time Machine does not backup the folder
$HOME/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History
which I clean of files older than 3 months with
find $HOME/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History -atime +88 -delete -print
which accounts for some of the missing 70 gb, but still got a way to go with finding the rest.
Any ideas?
Time Machine does not backup the Java Runtime for OpenOffice Macros, but it is not problem to re-install.
Still wondering and investigating where the rest of the missing 70 gb is.
MBP is 15 months old and I have only been using Time Machine for the last month before I changed the Hard Disk to the SSD. So, not sure that the missing 70 gb is old snapshots, etc. related to Time Machine - hence the continued investigation.
Time Machine Backup & Restore
