Time Machine is one of the most important OS X features. With an external hard drive, you can easily set up an automatic backup and always keep on hand backups of all your data. However, Time Machine not only creates backups to external drives and local and snapshots, which can cause a lack of available disk space.
How do I know how much space is occupied by local backups
Find out how much space on your internal hard drive backups busy at the moment is very simple. To do this, press the menu bar, select "This is the Mac" and click "Details". In the menu, switch to the tab "Storage" and look. The screenshot 90 megabytes, but the reality of the figures, more often, more impressive - tens of gigabytes, or even more.
Backups can not be viewed or deleted through the file system, but the way to do it, of course, there is.
Why does the system create local backups
Local snapshots are created only on the MacBook enabled Time Machine. That is, if you have a MacBook or iMac with a non-tuned Time Machine - local backups will never appear on your hard drive.
They are created in order to be able to recover deleted files or previous versions, even when the external drive is connected to your Mac. The system automatically creates them in the background, does not itself at the same time exhibiting (Time Machine icon in the menu bar will be "silent"). These backups are stored on the boot disk, along with the rest of your files.
Due to local backups, you can recover deleted files or previous versions even without a connection to an external drive that you use for Time Machine. All this is done for the convenience of laptop owners.
OS X is trying to automatically delete local backups, but ...
It is logical to assume that if you connect an external hard drive and creating a backup, local backup copies are deleted. Not really. You can see this for yourself by opening the menu "This is the Mac", there is still a section "backups" and he still takes up disk space.
Here works the principle of "as long as there is room." More specifically, the backups will be stored until the disk is full at 80%, or there will be 5 gigabytes of free space. After that, the system will begin to delete the oldest backups version. But if you like extravagance is not satisfied, the creation of local backups can still be turned off.
How do I disable local snapshots
Local backups do not interfere with the time, but often there are situations when you need to release disk space to install the game, any volume copy software or any other data. Here is a good time to remember gigabytes they occupy.
If you completely disable the Time Machine, the system will remove and local backups, but to go to such extreme measures are not necessary. Easier and faster to use a special terminal command.
Open Terminal (in the folder "Programs" ‣ "Tools" or via Spotlight), trying to drive this one code, enter your password and press enter:
sudo tmutil disablelocal
After a few seconds, the system will remove all local backups and frees up precious space they occupy. After that, your Mac will no longer create any backups on the boot drive, all of your data Time Machine will only be stored on an external.
If you need to enable local backups again, use this command here:
sudo tmutil enablelocal
It's all. Hopefully, the information from this article will be useful to you. Let your Macs running smoothly, so backups will never be used. Neither local nor foreign. ;)
via Apple.com