How to disable Local Snapshots

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How to disable Local Snapshots

Is there anyway to disable local snapshots in Time Machine. It is very irritating that it keeps eating up so much of my hard drive space but I would prefer not turning off automatic backups as when I get home I like that it backs up over my network.

I have thought of setting this in cron:

tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates / |grep 20|while read f; do tmutil deletelocalsnapshots $f; done

But, I would prefer to do it correctly as that is kind of a hack.

MacBook Pro TouchBar and Touch ID, macOS High Sierra (10.13.6), 500GB SSD

Posted on Nov 2, 2018 8:48 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

leroydouglas

Community+ 2024

Level 10

183,594 points

Nov 2, 2018 1:42 PM in response to Otaku-GenX

Otaku-GenX wrote:

It does not work. :-( They removed that verb.

Whitestar:~ user$ sudo tmutil disablelocal

disablelocal: Unrecognized verb.

Whitestar:~ user$

edit:

I see no disablelocal in the the man page—

man tmutil | more

You can turn off Time Machine's automatic backups.

You certainly can read more: Disable local snapshots in High Sierra with APFS

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Answer 2

BDAqua

Level 10

238,997 points

Nov 2, 2018 1:41 PM in response to Otaku-GenX

Uhhhg, it was there in 10.12, maybe after the fact...

I eventually use this command to find all the local timemachine snapshot

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

And then delete them one by one using

tmutil deletelocalsnapshots <snapshot_date>

High Sierra wouldn't remove 320GB+ purgeable space. Please HELP!

How to thin your local Time Machine Snapshots on macOS High Sierra - Ask Different

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Answer 3

BDAqua

Level 10

238,997 points

Nov 2, 2018 10:30 AM in response to Otaku-GenX

Hi there,

Open Terminal on your Mac laptop.
Enter the following command into Terminal:
sudo tmutil disablelocal
Press Enter.

https://www.imore.com/how-us-time-machine-local-snapshots-recover-data-your-mac- laptop

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Answer 4

Otaku-GenX Author

Level 1

18 points

Nov 2, 2018 2:41 PM in response to BDAqua

Yah I was hoping not to have to script that into cron though. :-( If you do this "tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates / |grep 20|while read f; do tmutil deletelocalsnapshots $f; done" it deletes them all but I was hoping for a better solution.

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Answer 5

Otaku-GenX Author

Level 1

18 points

Nov 2, 2018 1:02 PM in response to BDAqua

It does not work. :-( They removed that verb.

Whitestar:~ user$ sudo tmutil disablelocal

disablelocal: Unrecognized verb.

Whitestar:~ user$

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Answer 6

Otaku-GenX Author

Level 1

18 points

Nov 2, 2018 2:13 PM in response to leroydouglas

If I do a search for disablelocal in my man of tmutil it finds nothing. :-( I am running 10.13.6. There is a disable verb but that disables all automatic backups.

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Answer 7

BDAqua

Level 10

238,997 points

Nov 2, 2018 2:46 PM in response to Otaku-GenX

Shhhhhhh... as soon as Apple finds "customers" doing what they want to do on Apple's devices or SW... they remove the capability.👿

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How to disable Local Snapshots

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