Is there a way to limit local Time Machine snapshots

[tosbsas]

Hi there

Time machine local snapshots fill up my internal ssd. Is there a way to limit the number of them, yesterday I had about 8 snapshots. I can delete them with Onyx, but there might be a command to limit them to 2 or 3 only

 

[Weaselboy]

There is no way I know of to limit them, but it only saves them for 24 hours, then purges them off. They also should not cause you drive space issues. The OS will also purge them off if the space is needed.

 

[trusso]

A couple of options, as I see it:

• Cocktail has an option to thin or delete local snapshots (I had thought there was an option to disable them, but perhaps it was removed). I'm willing to bet TinkerTool and similar utilities may have the same functionality.
• TimeMachineEditor appears to be able to disable local snapshots (though I have never used it myself). Worth a look, perhaps.
• Disable Time Machine completely (personal recommendation). I personally prefer Carbon Copy Cloner because it makes bootable backups and affords a much greater level of control of what, when, where and how my files are backed up.

 

[tosbsas]

That Time Machine Editor looks interesting - will test it. Reduces snapshots according to your own interval. Still does local snapshots though

 

[Weaselboy]

TimeMachineEditor says it cannot disable them. I have never seen any setting or app that can disable the new style snapshots used by Catalina.

I disabled the hourly snapshots but snapshots are still being created, why is that?

You can't totally disable snapshots. New snapshots are created every time a regular backup is made (snapshots are used as the data sources for the backups). That's how Time Machine works. Note that the lifetime of snapshots is not well defined but they usually live no longer than 24 hours. Apple is agressively restricting programming access to snapshots making them not particularly useful on macOS.

 

[tosbsas]

yep but I reduced backup from hourly to every 4 hours - seems sufficient

 

[Nütztjanix]

sudo tmutil disablelocal in Terminal sadly doesn't work any longer. Up until High Sierra (?) you could disable the creation of local snapshots.

 

[tosbsas]

Found a Workflow in Alfred and Running it delete them easily.

Thats ok for now