The Hypnotyst
Level 1 (4 points)
Notebooks

Q: My MacBook Pro won't let me remove local snapshots to free up hard drive space.

I am having a very frustrating time attempting to remove backup "local snapshots" from my laptop's harddrive. Time Machine is NOT doing it's job and removing these snapshots as the space is needed, (even though every post on this forum indicated this is what would happen if Time Machine is running normally) and will not let me remove them manually. I have now run out of hard drive space. I have 750 GB hard drive in my laptop, and over 300 GB is being used for these "local snapshots."

 

I am using 10.7.5 OSX, on a 2012 MacBook Pro.

 

I have looked at every possible forum question relating to this issue, and have followed ALL procedures I could possible find to reclaim my hard drive space. This includes:

 

1. Turning Time Machine Off, ejecting the Hard Drive being used as a back up. Restarting my computer.

2. Disabling the local snapshots in Terminal with this command: sudo tmutil disablelocal

3. Deleting the Preference file found here: Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist

4. Deleting All Backups found on my Hard Drive, through the Time Machine Preferences window.

 

I also attempted to back up the entire computers hard drive as it is, only to discover that Time Machine was about to backup these local snapshots (backing up a backup?!). This is absurd!! Why does this even occur? This means it would take 819 GB to back up 750 GB. I am SO confused as to why any of this is happening!!

 

Please help!!!

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Jul 4, 2016 12:52 PM

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Q: My MacBook Pro won't let me remove local snapshots to free up hard drive space.

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  • by leroydouglas,

    leroydouglas leroydouglas Jul 4, 2016 9:04 PM in response to The Hypnotyst
    Level 7 (23,564 points)
    Notebooks
    Jul 4, 2016 9:04 PM in response to The Hypnotyst

    I would try rebuilding your Spotlight index and see if things look better then:

    Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support

  • by Esquared,

    Esquared Esquared Jul 5, 2016 12:54 AM in response to The Hypnotyst
    Level 6 (8,415 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jul 5, 2016 12:54 AM in response to The Hypnotyst

    This will get you up to speed as to the relation between local snapshots and Time Machine: http://pondini.org/TM/30.html

     

    The relevant part is: "Local snapshots require space on your internal HD (and any other disk/partition that Time Machine is backing-up), but only if there's at least 20% free space:  Time Machine will delete some or all as necessary, and make no new ones, if the drive gets over 80% full."

  • by The Hypnotyst,

    The Hypnotyst The Hypnotyst Jul 5, 2016 3:19 AM in response to Esquared
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Notebooks
    Jul 5, 2016 3:19 AM in response to Esquared

    Unfortunately the section you have underlined in your response is NOT occuring on my laptop, as I stated in my original post. Time Machine is NOT removing these local snapshots at all, and I have less than 1% space now available on my hard drive. If Time Machine was working correctly this would not be a problem. This is very frustrating as I love Apple products, but this seems like a very unintellgent design flaw! And I want my 300 GB back, not being taken up by useless backup files!

     

    Thank you for your advice about Spotlight Indexing, I will try this out!

  • by The Hypnotyst,

    The Hypnotyst The Hypnotyst Jul 5, 2016 4:32 AM in response to leroydouglas
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Notebooks
    Jul 5, 2016 4:32 AM in response to leroydouglas

    Hi

     

    I attempted your procedure for Spotlighting Index. When I dragged my HD into Spotlight, it said it would not exclude the Time Machine portion of the drive from the search! Why is this happening? In addition I cannot remove my HD from Time Machine, as it simply does not show up when I open Time Machine preferences!

     

    The only thing that occured is that my storage changed from Backups to Other!

     

    I am not sure what to do!