Apple offers an inbuilt backup program to the Mac users, Time Machine, that makes it really easy for them to backup everything they have on their machine. These backups prove to be helpful when something goes with their Mac and they have to restore their important data after setting up their Mac afresh. In fact, any deleted files can also be recovered through these backups if they had been deleted accidentally.
Jump To Section:
- Why Are There Hundreds Of GBs Of Heavy Backups On Hard Drive Of My Mac?
- How To Delete All The Time Machine Backups From Mac?
As for the laptops from Apple – such as Macbook, Macbook Pro, and Macbook Air–Time Machine comes with an added feature that it uses to take local snapshots through which you have the backups stored right on the internal drive even if you disconnected the external drive from Macbook. It keeps all your important data handy and you can recover it anytime if the need be.
There are certain situations in which these local snapshots prove to be invaluable. For instance, you may be on a trip and can’t access your backup drive.But ifsomething goes wrong with your Macbook and the local snapshots are available to you,they can be used for restoring all your data that is not backed up on the local drive.
But one thing that might be of concern to you is that these backups consume a lot of space on your drive. To be fortunate, it is possible to delete the unwanted backups and create space on your Mac.
Why Are There Hundreds Of GBs Of Heavy Backups On Hard Drive Of My Mac?
External hard disk drives are needed for setting up and using Time Machine and that’s where you need to store your backups. But if that’s how it is done, why are there large backups eating space on the internal drive of your Macbook? Well, the reason for that is local snapshots.
As soon as the Time Machine is set up on Macbook, it starts creating local snapshots automatically. Time Machine creates one snapshot everyday after 24 hours time period and it also keeps weekly snapshots besides that as well. The weekly snapshots are kept on the internal drive until your Macbook starts running low on the storage space. Hence, if it’s been years since you have been taking backups of your macbook using Time Machine, you’d probably have heavy backups that may be consuming hundreds of GBs on your internal drive.
How To Delete All The Time Machine Backups From Mac?
Before we continue with the deletion process, let’s first make it clear that you should not be worrying at all about the Time Machine backups and the space they may be consuming on your drive. If things are working fine, Time Machine automatically starts deleting oldest snapshots once the internal drive has below 20% of total space left on it. And, for instance, if you download something bigger afterwards that takes the available space to less than 10 percent or below 5GB, all the local snapshots will be deleted by Time Machine itself and all it will keep is most recent snapshot that it might have taken. It will then keep on replacing old snapshot by a new one that it takes according to schedule until there is enough space created on your Mac. And when sufficient space is available, it switches back to that old routine of keeping weekly snapshots as long as the available space allows it to.
That said, things don’t work fine always and you might come across a situation when Time Machine doesn’t delete the backups automatically even when not enough space is left behind. In such situations, you have to take control of the proceedings and be your own boss. You can choose to delete those local snapshots eating space on your internal drive manually. A Terminal command can be used for disabling the snapshot feature of Time Machine and this will also delete the local snapshots that might be residing on the internal drive of your Mac. Besides, Time Machine will not take any local snapshots anymore unless it is instructed otherwise.
Here are the steps that you need to follow in order to disable the local snapshots feature of Time Machine as well as to remove earlier snapshot backups from the internal storage.
- Open Terminal on the Macbook you want to delete local snapshots from
- Enter the command given below
sudotmutildisablelocal
- Now press Enter
As soon as you do that, all the local snapshots residing on the internal storage of your Mac will be removed. It is recommended that you re-enable local snapshots again once you have removed the old ones, however.
Here are the steps to follow for re-enabling local snapshots feature of Time Machine.
- Open Terminal using the Macbook in question
- Enter the command given below
“sudotmutilenablelocal”
- Now press Enter
The Time Machine will start on your Macbook again now and the local snapshots feature will resume again and the snapshots will be stored on the internal storage of your Macbook.
It is important to mention here that before choosing to purge the local snapshots, you just need to make sure that that’s the only option you are left with. Let Time Machine take care of the situation first as it should delete older backups when you need space on your internal disk drive. If you delete those old backups manually, you’ll not even have one most recent snapshot and if something goes wrong in the process the data lost will never be retrieved. So, it’s better to be cautious, but if you don’t have any options left then follow the steps given above to enable and disable local snapshots on your Macbook.