My MacBook Pro is equipped with a 1TB Solid State Disk (SSD), which I figured would offer plenty of space for months to come. When I decided to migrate from Aperture to the new Photos app, I took a close look at my storage requirements, knowing that my photos alone could take up ~400GB of disk space.
I clicked on the Apple logo on the upper right corner, About this Mac and then on Storage. To my surprise, half of the disk space was taken by “Backups“, which are so-called local snapshots created by Time Machine.
Time Machine’s Local Snapshots
According to Apple’s Knowledge Base:
Local snapshots complement regular Time Machine backups that are stored on your external disk or Time Capsule by creating a local backup on your startup disk when your normal backup drive is not available. This provides you with a “safety net” for times when you might be away from your external backup disk or Time Capsule but accidentally delete a file. When your normal backup is available again, Time Machine copies the local snapshot contents from your startup disk to your normal backup drive.
I updated my Mac Mini running OS X Server lately, which serves as the backup destination for Time Machine. After the upgrade, the Mini renamed itself to Mini (2) and thus Time Machine on my MacBook couldn’t find the backup destination anymore. As a result, Time Machine hasn’t been able to backup for about 10 days. I figured because of that, the local snapshots were piling up but should clear once Time Machine completes a successful backup cycle. So my troubleshooting strategy was taking the following steps:
- Let Time Machine complete a full backup cycle
- Disable and then re-enable local snapshots using the following command line: sudo tmutil disablelocal && sudo tmutil enablelocal
Neither worked but I knew that:
- I just upgraded OS X on my MacBook Pro to the latest Beta
- Messing around with my huge Photos Library somehow caused the file system of my disk to get corrupted and I had to repair it twice
How to Remove Local Snapshots Folder Manually
Either of those two events could have caused the local snapshots folder to become corrupted, so I decided to clean it up (meaning trash it) manually. Disabling local snapshots leaves a folder called .MobileBackups.Trash at the root of your boot volume and in my case it contained 455G worth of backups.
I moved the folder to my Desktop via Terminal (sudo mv .MobileBackups.trash /Useres/mk/Desktop/bla), dragged it into the Trash and then emptied the Trash to get rid of the snapshots. Emptying the Trash may complain about a number of files being in use, you can just skip them, reboot and try again.
Under normal circumstances, local snapshots shouldn’t take up 50% of disk space, but something led to abnormal circumstances in this particular case, I suppose.
After emptying the Trash, don’t forget to make sure you re-enabled both Time Machine and local snapshots. Not having good backups is worse than temporarily running out of disk space. For more on my backup strategy, see My Backup Strategy – Part 3.
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That’s nuts. On my 1TB drive I had 780 Gb local snapshots. No wonder it was telling me it can’t create local snapshots. But why on earth it needs 780 Gb local snapshots when data including OSX occupies about 200 Gb on my drive. And I have 2 external firewire time machine drives. Makes no sense. Must be a bug. This affected machine runs 10.13.6 (can’t upgrade anymore).
Yeah, that’s probably a bug…
Just chatted with Apple support and this is directly from them.
to delete local snapshots use this command:
tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 999999999999999 4
Once you uncheck automatic time machine backups in the settings no local snapshots should be created. I hope it helps
Thanks Dave, this worked for me, I am in the process of cleaning up my iMac and freeing up space. Nothing seemed to use/clear the snapshots, used your instruction and restarted TM and it appears to be working normally so hopefully the backups will be restarted (all previous ones seem to be intact). An operating system update seemed to lose my Music library so I needed my TM recently (it was my Shared folder configuration I think), so I will definitely continue using the TM!! David.
.. and thanks to Michael of course for the original post!
You got it!
I used the tmutil listlocalsnapshots / |sed -e’s/com.apple.TimeMachine.//’|xargs -L 1 tmutil deletelocalsnapshots fixing the ASCII error and I got the message “local is not a valid disk” HUH???
Make sure the ‘ aren’t curled but straight. I had to delete and re-type them after copy/pasting from the article.
Just formatted an 8TB Seagate external drive to use as a Time Machine Backup Drive, so I used HFS+, as recommended.
Went through all procedures to run a backup, but have twice got:
“Time machine could not create a local snapshot to backup from”.
Do I need to ensure my 1TB iMac drive (which is nearly full), and uses Catalina, has a minimum space available to allow a snapshot to be taken?
If so, what should that minimum be?
Or if you have any other suggestions for a novice computer user, please advise.
Many thanks.
Hi Scott,
yes, TM always creates local snapshots first before backing up to an external drive. I’ve read you should have ~20% space on your local drive available for snapshots to work.
Cheers,
Michael
I was able to delete my local snapshots from the terminal with this command, which lists all snapshots, extracts the dates, then deletes them by date. It allows new ones to continue being created, but temporarily clears them”
tmutil listlocalsnapshots / |sed -e’s/com.apple.TimeMachine.//’|xargs -L 1 tmutil deletelocalsnapshots
Thanks Noel, that’s incredibly useful!
Noel could you break this down for a none coder….I was hoping to find a solution that automated this process as now I have to delete these snapshots 1 by 1 using the date…
This only became a problem for me (amongst other things) after updating my 2013 Macbook Pro to Catalina.
When I tried your command line as typed….I got the following:
sed: 1: “’s/com.apple.TimeMach …”: invalid command code ?
You need to replace the two ’ characters by ‘
This did not work for me. I got the following error:
sed: 1: “’s/com.apple.TimeMach …”: invalid command code ?
If you copy and paste the above line from this page, the single quote character (ASCII 39) is replaced by what seems to be an Acute Accent character (ASCII 239), the command line will not be able to parse that correctly. You will need to manually replace the two accents by single quotes
Your article is very informative. Unfortunately, I am getting source drive errors in com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots volume. I tried using “sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots $date”, but there are a couple of dates that simply will not delete. They always reappear when I “sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots $volume”. Is there any way to “force” these to be deleted? I also tried thinlocalsnapshots, but that did not seem to help either. Meanwhile, trying another backup…
Hi Juhan: I don’t think you can force the deletion.
PS:
nearly half of my drive space (37GB) is taken up by “Other Users” — though I am currently the only user — and my wife’s user folder is only 9GB.
Any idea what could be occupying other 28GB? Might that be Time Machine?
Hi Eric,
Time Machine keeps multiple copies of changed data, so you can, for instance, restore a copy of the file from exactly two months ago. In other words, the backup of your wife’s data contains likely multiple versions of files that have changed over the past months. As a result, the backup is often larger than the current data.
Running High Sierra on MacBook Pro, I pasted your initial command into terminal:
“sudo tmutil disablelocal && sudo tmutil enablelocal”
— and got the reply,
“disablelocal: Unrecognized verb.”
Any suggestions?
Hi Eric,
It seems like newer versions of tmutil cannot disable local snapshots anymore, you can just delete them – see
listlocalsnapshotdates [mount_point]
List the creation dates of all local Time Machine snapshots.
Specify mount_point to list snapshot creation dates from a specific volume.
Listed dates are formatted YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS.
deletelocalsnapshots date
Delete all local Time Machine snapshots for the specified date (formatted YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS).
Running Yosemite macbook pro
When I typed in the terminal command (correctly) I got this reply…
sudo: unable to stat /etc/sudoers: Permission denied
sudo: no valid sudoers sources found, quitting
Musics-MacBook-Pro:~ lap2pro$
Any suggestions?
Thanks!
Bill
Hi Bill,
You need to execute SUDO as a user who has admin privileges.
I disabled and then re-enabled local snapshots since then I now get a “Your system has run out of application memory” when I’m working on my computer. I never received message before and now I am unable to use my Adobe applications without getting this error. The only thing that has changed was messing around in the terminal. Have you ever heard of this happening?
hi, i tried every possible way you described, but the strange thing is, that i am not able to type in my password in the terminal when i try the sudo tmutil command…. please help me :D
What do you mean by “not able to type in my password”. If you mean that you don’t see any characters when you type your password, then don’t worry, that’s by design. Even though you don’t see anything you type, just enter your password and press enter. It doesn’t print your password for security reasons :)