Today I decided to do some maintenance on my MacBook Pro. Maintenance normally includes, backups, sorting out downloads and of course deleting junk. I discovered that one of my clients work folder was a whopping 180GB, so I backed up his work onto an external drive and deleted it from my internal hard drive. By the way, I have two Seagate Momemtus XT 750GB hard drives running on RAID 0 configuration. This gives me speed and “enough” hard drive space. If hard drive space is ever enough these days.
Anyway, after deleting some files I still only had 320GB left out of 1.5TB. My machine had become a little slow as well.
According to About This Mac, I had 475GB of backups. What backups?!!! My only backup really is my Time Machine. After consulting a friend – Google, the culprit was a folder called .Mobilebackups. This folder is created if you use Time Machine.
The folder contains your Local Snapshots, and has been there since you started using Time Machine on Lion or Mountain Lion. The modified dates are always the date of the last Local Snapshot; and the sizes are meaningless. These are similar to Time Machine backups, so you’ll have access to (at most) the last week’s worth of changes while you’re away from your normal backup volume. They’re temporary and expendable — if your disk gets to 80% full, they’ll be deleted, so under most circumstances, you don’t need to worry about them – but I was worried – I wanted my space back!!!
Fortunately there is a way to disable this feature by simply going to TERMINAL and pasting the code below:
sudo tmutil disablelocal
It might ask you for a password. Reboot once disabled.
I disabled mine and recovered a couple hundred GB of drive space. See my BEFORE and AFTER pics below.
BEFORE
AFTER
