Comments on: Disable Time Machine Local Backups in Mac OS X Lion

By: natalia

natalia — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 07:46:36 +0000

same story here. It’s really sad. My mac is evicting everything that’s mine and getting filled up with this mysterious “other”.

By: Gerard

Gerard — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 10:56:01 +0000

I have the same problem. Time machine ruined my laptop. It now dropped to a speed of one byte per minute with everything. This beautiful colored little wheel is all I get now.

You can’t erase the damage done by time machine.
Buy a new laptop, seems to be the only answer.

(sorry, I pressed “reply” in the naive hope that I would get a reply, not be asked to give one)

By: Cinda

Cinda — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 22:44:11 +0000

Thank you for sharing your info. I really appreciate your efforts and I am waiting
for your next post thank you once again.

By: Junior

Junior — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 10:56:32 +0000

OK. I tried the “sudo tmutil disablelocal” suggestion
I typed in my pw successfully but then received this error:
“sudo: tmutil: command not found”
I then checked Time Machine and it was turned off
Still losing disk space. It was disappearing before my eyes but it seemed to stop when I shut off internet access
What gives?

By: Mac Power Users 122: Another look at iTunes « Mac Power Users

Mac Power Users 122: Another look at iTunes « Mac Power Users — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 18:28:56 +0000

[...] Disable Time Machine Local Backups in Lion [...]

By: Jonny

Jonny — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 23:43:23 +0000

I keep trying to find ways to minimize the ‘Other’ category of storage on my hard drive but I haven’t had much luck either…
I started with and continue to go through all my files deleting things which are duplicate and are not needed without a whole lot of luck. It always seems that this portion of what is stored is always almost exactly what makes up all of the other categories (apps, music, movies, photos, backups)… any ideas?

By: Nick

Nick — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 18:09:53 +0000

I am trying this to try to reclaim HD space from mysterious “Other” that is filling it up. Definitely seems to be related to Time Machine. I took the recommended steps but it’s not helping. Other is still taking up 254GB of my HD. I took this to the Genius Bar once before and they cant figure it out. The Other files don’t appear in the finder.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 20:45:23 +0000

You can also just open the Time Machine preferences, turn off Time Machine, turn it back on, and the local backups will be removed after a few seconds. This is nice when you just want to do it once in a while but generally like the feature. It’s not quite so cool, but it works.

Also, note these backups will *never* interfere with your disk space. So if you need 4 GB for something, and your backups are taking up that space, the local backups will automatically get removed to make room.

By: Ethan

Ethan — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 00:41:23 +0000

I typed in the password I set but terminal says incorrect password

By: mac0relios

mac0relios — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 02:08:08 +0000

Awesome!! jst freed up 137 GB on my 250 GB disk

By: pascal

pascal — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 21:49:51 +0000

Reclaimed 80Gb !!!
Many thanks

By: Harriet

Harriet — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 17:12:20 +0000

Really worked – thank you so much. Cleared 132gb that was being used for ‘Backups’ and I’ve never even bothered with Time Machine.

By: Brad

Brad — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 01:22:10 +0000

I get after I try the command “sudo tmutil disablelocal”

sudo: can’t open /private/etc/sudoers: Permission denied
sudo: no valid sudoers sources found, quitting

I am new to to this so be gentle

By: Thom

Thom — Sun, 20 May 2012 11:43:34 +0000

Thanks for this, that was driving me nuts !

By: Marie

Marie — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:57:47 +0000

Great thanks managed to clear out more than 50 GB of space, honestly thats a lot!