What are backups in lion?

[WillMak]

When I go to about this mac to look at my storage space is says that 31 gigs is being used up for "backups" on my 128 GB air that's also 1/4th of the storage space! What is this backup use referring to?

 

[UnseenLlama]

When I go to about this mac to look at my storage space is says that 31 gigs is being used up for "backups" on my 128 GB air that's also 1/4th of the storage space! What is this backup use referring to?

I would guess backups refer to any iOS device that you are backing up to that computer. So if you are not backing up to iCloud, you would be backing up to your local computer.

 

[stark4]

How do you install Office 2011 on MBA?

wow that's a lot of backup eating up the MBA space

 

[robots3humans0]

backups refers to local backups done by time machine on your drive in between times that you've backed up using the actual time machine. its a new lion feature that does incremental backups for you. You can disable it using a terminal command that ends in disablelocal but i dont remember exactly what it is. a quick google search should find it

 

[WillMak]

OP here, I found out about it finally. OS X lion now does local backups of your files on the hard drive in case you delete something and need it back; in other words it's time machine on your original drive! I turned it off by turning time machine off and now I'm back to 90/128 gigs! With this feature off I just do manual backups by telling time machine to backup when I have an external plugged in.

If you leave time machine on all the time it will do a local backup of all your data if it can't find an external for the next "scheduled" backup. I think Apple should not have this as a default setting for SSD laptops since it will kill the HD space without anyone knowing.

 

[deeddawg]

Might be worthwhile to read up on it a bit. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4878

Local snapshots are periodically condensed into daily or weekly snapshots to minimize the space used on your disk. If your disk is low on space, Time Machine stops creating new snapshots, and some or all existing snapshots may be removed to make space available for applications to use. If sufficient disk space becomes available again, Time Machine resumes creating local snapshots. This means your disk will have the same amount of available space as it would if Time Machine were not enabled.​

 

[WillMak]

You do realize it just does the previous two weeks, right?

Thus the max usage ought to be what you've changed in the past 14 days. It'll spike a bunch on a new system due to all the "new" stuff you're copying over, but seems like it ought to level out and reduce aftter you get past the first few weeks with the new system, no?

Wouldn't know yet, only had my system for 1 week ;-).

 

[deeddawg]

Wouldn't know yet, only had my system for 1 week ;-).

I may be wrong on the two week thng, I read it somewhere but can't see a reference at hand right now. I do know on my system it only shows two weeks worn of local backups, but I also have TimeMachine backing up to a NAS on my home network.

Also here's a link on how to disable it: http://www.ihasapple.com/2011/09/disable-time-machine-local-backups-in-mac-os-x-lion/

I would suggest though seeing if it really turns out to be a problem or not. I've not seen any issues, but again as I have regular backups to a NAS over wifi, I may see something different than those using an external HDD for time machine backups.