I've gone in and manually deleted the purple ""Backups" files from my hard drive - yet they remain.
I turned off the time machine.
Currently, the "backups" are taking over 50% of my storage. I deleted all of them but somehow they remain.
Please help!
MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.2), FCP X
Time Machine uses available space, and will prune as your disk usage increases.
You can disable just the local backups, without needing to disable all of TM, too:
http://osxdaily.com/2011/09/28/disable-time-machine-local-backups-in-mac-os-x-li on/
Probably the easiest official and supported way to remove the backups is to have TM enabled and then purposefully fill your disk past the threshold, then toggle the local backups setting off.
Thank you MrHoffman for responding to my query.
Unfortunately, the problem is not resolved. The "backups" file is so large that it takes up 50% of my storage space for this external hard drive. I've turned off time machine & deleted all the time machine files except the last, latest one, but that cannot account for the massive (1.3 TB file) that remains.
I have a lot of video footage on this drive, and that is accounted for under "movies" I guess. The rest, the bulk of it, seems to be in the purple band called "back ups." While scrolling thru the drive, I just can't see where that footage lives so that I can delete it. And clean up this drive.
Here are explanations of Time Machine Snapshots or backups on your MBP storage:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204015
They can be ignored because they will automatically be deleted by the OSX if additional space is needed for other data. It really is not a probl;em.
Ciao.
It seems that you do not need nor want continuous backups and there will never any need to roll back to the previous hour, then do what everybody else does around here — before their world blows up, their laptop is damaged, a command or tool goes awry, there's a disk error underneath your movies, or some new Adobe patch decides to delete something — and run with the occasional and manual backup.
Otherwise, Time Machine will do this and will "borrow" that used storage to keep extra backups — releasing it when your own usage increases — if it can't connect to the TM targets.
Put another way, OS X is using what you aren't — and will transparently release that storage usage back to you if and when you need it — in order to provide you with a benefit.
This is a variation of the system physical memory usage discussion, where somebody sees OS X caching user and disk data in memory and then acquires one of those add-on tools that goes and argues with OS X about this caching, in an effort to have visible free memory — free memory is inherently wasted memory — and which generally means the user is now hitting your disk rather than using some otherwise unoccupied memory to try to reduce the disk I/O and improve your performance.
But to answer your question, you can choose to effectively waste that storage that you're not using. Turn off TM either in general or on the specified device, or for the specified movies, wipe the disk and reload its contents from your (other) backup of your files, and you won't have any background use.
How do I delete "backups" from my hard drive?
