Backup Help!

[hayleywow]

Hi Guys

I have a MBP that backs ups to a Time Capsule, and all seems fine there.

I have noticed today that on my MacintoshHD Drive over 70GB is being used as backup - see screenshot. Why?? when I have Time Machine setup

Please help as I have an SSD so space is critical

Hay

 

[GGJstudios]

For Time Machine users on notebooks running Lion or later, space may being consumed by Time Machine local snapshots, which can be disabled by entering the following command in Terminal: sudo tmutil disablelocal.

About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs​

 

[maflynn]

To disable local snapshots issue the following command in the terminal (found in Applications>Utilities)
sudo tmutil disablelocal

 

[hayleywow]

For Time Machine users on notebooks running Lion or later, space may being consumed by Time Machine local snapshots, which can be disabled by entering the following command in Terminal: sudo tmutil disablelocal.

OS X Lion: About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs

OK I ran that and it can up in top right corner "MobileBackups has been unmounted" and the Backup portion has now gone from MacintoshHD I assume this won't effect Time Machine?

Can you guys recommend a good Mac HDD cleanup tool?

 

[johnnnw]

Don't use those clean up tools. They often delete stuff you probably wouldn't want deleted, and therefore can slow down your Mac because it needs to recreate them.

Manually go through old files and delete them.

 

[Weaselboy]

OK I ran that and it can up in top right corner "MobileBackups has been unmounted" and the Backup portion has now gone from MacintoshHD I assume this won't effect Time Machine?

Image

Can you guys recommend a good Mac HDD cleanup tool?

IMO you got some bad advice to disable the local backups. They do not hurt anything and do not affect disk space available to the user. OS X manages this space and will shrink the local backups once your disk reaches 80% full and the user needs the space for storage. You can just ignore the local backups spaced used. You will notice this space is not even included in the Finder's space available calculations for this reason.

It can be a useful feature that backs up versions of files when you are away from your TM backup disk. If, for example, you accidentally delete a document it an be restored even without access to your TM disk.

You can run the below command in Terminal to reenable local backups.

sudo tmutil enablelocal

 

[Yahooligan]

IMO you got some bad advice to disable the local backups. They do not hurt anything and do not affect disk space available to the user. OS X manages this space and will shrink the local backups once your disk reaches 80% full and the user needs the space for storage. You can just ignore the local backups spaced used. You will notice this space is not even included in the Finder's space available calculations for this reason.

It can be a useful feature that backs up versions of files when you are away from your TM backup disk. If, for example, you accidentally delete a document it an be restored even without access to your TM disk.

You can run the below command in Terminal to reenable local backups.

sudo tmutil enablelocal

I would be curious to know how this affects writes to local disk and if the writes are increased, if they are then by what amount? I ask because those of us with SSDs may want to watch out for this and how it may affect drive lifespan/durability.

 

[Weaselboy]

I would be curious to know how this affects writes to local disk and if the writes are increased, if they are then by what amount? I ask because those of us with SSDs may want to watch out for this and how it may affect drive lifespan/durability.

I really think it is a non-issue and everybody is a bit overly concerned about SSD lifetime. Read this article and this one for some stats on SSD NAND lifetime. The small amount of write cycles added by the local backups is not going to make a quantifiable difference.

 

[Yahooligan]

I really think it is a non-issue and everybody is a bit overly concerned about SSD lifetime. Read this article and this one for some stats on SSD NAND lifetime. The small amount of write cycles added by the local backups is not going to make a quantifiable difference.

Good points, and they don't even list the 512GB in the chart. Based on the use case provided it would be double the 256GB version. It would take a lot to use up the write cycles on a 512GB MLC drive, I could do 50GB/day and it would still take decades.