60-100GB wasted by Mobile Backups/ Hidden Space

[MBX]

Since I installed High Sierra I get more space used by 'hidden system files' and 'mobile backups'. I looked into it, disabled TimeMachine automatic backup. Even tried the other terminal commands to delete local snapshots but didn't work.

After checking with DaisyDisk I still have about 60GB used by 'mobile backups' folder that is hidden. Mostly 50GB is trash that I don't want backed up at all.

I googled and found no way to delete that 'mobile backups' content.

Even tried this other terminal command:

sudo tmutil disablelocal


But it doesn't seem to work in High Sierra.

Does anyone know how to clean or delete the 'mobile backups' or will it eventually clean itself and get rid of the old stuff?

 

[leventozler]

It's the new normal for APFS.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204015

"Time Machine in macOS High Sierra stores snapshots on every APFS-formatted, all-flash storage device in your Mac or directly connected to your Mac. Time Machine in earlier macOS versions stores snapshots only on the internal startup disk of Mac notebook computers.

To make sure that you have storage space when you need it, snapshots are stored only on disks that have plenty of free space. When storage space gets low, snapshots are automatically deleted, starting with the oldest. That's why Finder and Get Info windows don't include local snapshots in their calculations of the storage space available on a disk."

 

[Honza1]

This provoked me to check my HS MBP 15inch TB using:

tmutil listlocalsnapshots .

few times in the last 24 hours or so - and it seems to always list 24 hours of local snapshots. Even when TM to external drive just finished, I have 24 hours of local snapshots created about every 2 hours if computer is on. No more than that. Considering that those snapshots should be relatively small most of the time, this seems to be reasonable. And assuming the snapshots are automatically deleted when space becomes issue, it seems a good default behavior.

 

[MBX]

When storage space gets low, snapshots are automatically deleted, starting with the oldest. That's why Finder and Get Info windows don't include local snapshots in their calculations of the storage space available on a disk."

Ok well at least it will get deleted if running low on space.

 

[Jamovik]

I think a way to stop this is to disable automatic back ups. I use Time Machine and have turned automatic back ups off, and my last local snap shot is from the last time I backed up to time machine.

 

[MBX]

There's something strange though and I wonder if this is a bug.

I scanned my drive with daisydisk and in MobileBackups a TM Snapshot appears (wasting 50GB space) that does not appear when I do the tmutil command. I deleted that snapshot via terminal but still appears in daisydisk MobileBackups hidden folder.

And it sucks especially because it's about 50GB of trash contents. Now I wonder if there's a bug and it wasting so much space that I can never recover again. Because it just wont go away.

Does anyone know how to properly delete any contents of the MobileBackups folder that you can't access via finder?

EDIT: OK Found solution. You can delete with DaisyDisk: https://daisydiskapp.com/manual/4/en/Topics/DeletingFiles.html