Disabling Local Backups

[fryday444]

Okay, so I do NOT want to have TimeMachine snapshots stored on my HD, but I DO want to use the new file version feature of Lion. I've seen "sudo tmutil disablelocal" thrown around a lot on here. What does that actually disable?

 

[maflynn]

in the terminal issue the following command
sudo tmutil disablelocal

That will disable local TimeMachine snapshots.

 

[fryday444]

in the terminal issue the following command
sudo tmutil disablelocal

That will disable local TimeMachine snapshots.

But will it also disable the new autosave feature of Lion? What is the difference between the command and turning off TimeMachine via the GUI?

 

[maflynn]

I don't know if it disables the autosave feature as I generally don't use any apps that use that feature. Given that this local TM snapshot is only enabled for MBPs and not desktops, I'd say no.

This is not turning Time Machine off either, just local snapshots, TM will continue to back up as it normally would but it will write the back ups to the back up volume

 

[fryday444]

I don't know if it disables the autosave feature as I generally don't use any apps that use that feature. Given that this local TM snapshot is only enabled for MBPs and not desktops, I'd say no.

This is not turning Time Machine off either, just local snapshots, TM will continue to back up as it normally would but it will write the back ups to the back up volume

My next question would be, what is the difference between local snapshots and TimeMachine backups? (This is my first Mac since OS 7)

 

[paulsalter]

My next question would be, what is the difference between local snapshots and TimeMachine backups? (This is my first Mac since OS 7)

not sure of the full differences

local snapshots work in the same way as TM machine backups, if they are enabled they constantly store backups on your machine until something needs the disk space, then it will automatically take the space and delete the local snapshots, Finder shows you disk space which is available to you (it ignores local snapshots), if you go to about this mac and look at storage this shows you have much space is used by snapshots

unsure whether the system writes the local snapshots and the same info to ™ simultaneously as the local snapshots appear to only get deleted when disk space is getting low and something else needs the space

For me, I haven't tried the terminal command to disable them, prior to Lion I only did a time machine backup once a week, so now I just turn time machine off in preferences and do a manual backup every weekend

I can confirm that with TM disabled, autosave and versions work without any issues (though for me I wish it turned them off 🙂 )

 

[fryday444]

I can confirm that with TM disabled, autosave and versions work without any issues (though for me I wish it turned them off 🙂 )

For me, that is good news. Now I just need to ascertain if the terminal command to disable local screenshots also disables autosave...

 

[Riemann Zeta]

I would love a terminal command that disables autosave and versions (bringing back the Save As command)--then I could Preview again without fear that it will crap all over my files without my consent. I also wish that disabling App Resume would eliminate the "Saved Application States" folder from ~/Library. Even with App Resume and Resume from Reboot both disabled, Lion still generates images of every window opened for every application.