250GB of "backups?

[rwd hero]

My Mid 2009 MBP with a 500 GB hard drive has been running pretty sluggish lately. I decided to clean house, move a lot of larger files (movies, pictures etc.) to an external HD to see if things would smooth out. I have 213 GB of movies I moved to a 500 GB external along with all of my pictures. When I check the storage space in "about this mac" it says 250 GB is of the 500 GB is taken up with "Backups". I use time machine to back my computer up on a 1 TB external, and never have backed anything up on this hard drive (except my iPhone). Can anyone help me find these "backups" and delete them? Here is a screen capture of the about this mac...

 

[theman]

Download the app GrandPerspective and you'll be able to see what's taking up the space.

 

[maflynn]

Its probably Time Machine's local snapshots that are taken. you can remove them by turn off Time Machine and turning it back on or issuing the following command in terminal.

sudo tmutil disablelocal

To turn it back on, you issue the following command

sudo tmutil enablelocal