Mountain Lion, and 'Backups'

Weaselboy said:

You can disable it with this >> "sudo tmutil disablelocal" Terminal command. But there really is no need to. OS X will manage this space and if the user requires the space for storage, OS X will automatically shrink the space used for local backups.

It can be a useful feature is you need a version of a file when away from your Time Machine disk. I would just leave it on and ignore it.

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I have a question for you Weasel.

Say I have local snapshots enabled and after a few weeks I decide to connect my MBP to the time machine and hit "back up". Now, the time machine starts to backup my MBP.

Now, what happens to those local snapshots? In the sense that, is Time machine aware of those local snapshots? And after the TM backup is done, will the local snapshots be deleted so it can start another session when I am not connected to the TM?

Weaselboy said:

No, from what I have seen tinkering with it a bit, they stay there as long as you have the extra disk space available.

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Okay but when you do the TM backup, are the local snapshots taken into account?

Weaselboy said:

Yes. The TM backup will pull those into the external backup set.

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So now once the local snapshots are pulled into the TM. Why is it still lingering around? So that we can go back in time locally if we wanted to?

Weaselboy said:

Yes, I believe that is the idea. It can actually be handy. I was on the road recently reconciling my bank statement in iBank and screwed it all up. I was able to use the local backups to restore a previous version of the iBank file and pick up where I left off.

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Okay cool.

You know i just returned my rMBP which had 256 GB SSD. I thought I would make do with it. But after the backups started eating space, I returned it and ordered a 512 GB one.