Mysterious "Backups" taking up 50Gb according to System Profiler?

[FilipG]

Earlier today I was formatting my external hdd I use for Time Machine and once I had cleared it I decided to offload some movies/series etc from my mid 2009 MBP onto my newly formatted external hdd.

After having done so and deleting the relevant files form my mac (and of course emptying the trash) I checked "about this Mac" and system rofiler to see how much free space I'd cleared...

To my surprise I found I had lost about 2GB and not only that but system profiler shows (After "audio", "movies", "photos" and "apps") a label saying "backups" with a file size of 50 gb!

What on earth is this and how do I get rid of it??

I've attached a screenshot os you cal all see what I'm on about.

MAny thanks in advance.

PS my first post.

 

[FilipG]

I think this may be the answer

http://toti.posterous.com/hidden-local-backups-with-mac-os-x-lion-filli

Apparently Lion has a new feature that backs up your mac locally in the case that your time machine hard drive is not connected...very, very strange. What to do with it?

 

[FilipG]

Update...BAD

After turning off time machine like other forums recommended and restarting my mac (supposedly this would remove the "backups" portion) All it did was merge "backups" with "Other" so that now I have under "about this mac"/"More info"/"Storage" 138 GB of "other" files, I really need this space, what can i do???? PLEASE HELP

 

[old-wiz]

try emptying the trash.

also there was a command sudo tmutil disablelocal
which might help

 

[pm79]

try emptying the trash.

also there was a command sudo tmutil disablelocal
which might help

sorry a stupid question....how to do you give that command?

 

[e-r-a-n]

In terminal.
And try deleting .Mobilebackups, its the location of your backups

 

[Weaselboy]

http://toti.posterous.com/hidden-local-backups-with-mac-os-x-lion-filli

Apparently Lion has a new feature that backs up your mac locally in the case that your time machine hard drive is not connected...very, very strange. What to do with it?

That is what it is. Just leave it alone. OS X manages this space and will shrink it if the user needs more storage space. If you turn Time Machine off then back on it will zero the space and start fresh.