09-25-2012, 07:03 AM

I back up my macbook to an external wireless hard drive through time machine. However when looking at my hard drive today on the Macbook it is virtually full. The reason for this is 350gb of 'backups'.

What are these, where did they come from and how do I get rid of them? I thought I was backing up to my external hard drive? (i checked my time machine, its definitely going to the external drive).

Can anyone help with this as my hard drive is virtually full because of this.

09-25-2012, 07:21 AM

What version of OSX are you running

And in what folder (path) are these backups stored?

09-25-2012, 07:29 AM

Hi mate I am running Mountain Lion 10.8.2 and to be honest I dont know where the folder paths are. I just know that when i go into 'about this mac' then into storage, it gives me my full hard drive status in a coloured bar, and this is almost full now because of these 'backups' (and thats all i can tell you about it really i am afraid)

09-25-2012, 08:03 AM

Open the Terminal in the Utilities folder and enter or paste the appropriate command line. Press RETURN and enter your admin password when prompted. It will not be echoed.

To turn them ON: sudo tmutil enablelocal

To turn them OFF: sudo tmutil disablelocal

Note that turning them OFF will also delete all existing snapshots.

09-25-2012, 09:59 AM

Originally Posted by techo91

Open the Terminal in the Utilities folder and enter or paste the appropriate command line. Press RETURN and enter your admin password when prompted. It will not be echoed.

To turn them ON: sudo tmutil enablelocal

To turn them OFF: sudo tmutil disablelocal

Note that turning them OFF will also delete all existing snapshots.

what is the appropriate command line?

09-25-2012, 10:07 AM

Type in terminal:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

and hit enter. Type in your admin password when prompted and you should be ok.

09-26-2012, 05:36 AM

that did the trick, you guys are geniuses!

So does this mean this wont happen again? What exactly was this process? Was it acting alongside time machine or something?

09-26-2012, 07:56 AM

Maybe would be a good idea to check the setting after an update to the system because by default it's on. Y can verify by looking at time machine settings :



If this setting is on you will see the text in red, if it's off (doesn't keep local backups) you won't.

Take a look at this for a little bit more info my friend: OS X Lion: About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs

08-10-2013, 04:17 PM

I followed these instructions and it also worked perfect, except now instead of it showing backups. I have over 400GB of Other.

Any ideas how to clean this up?

Screen Shot 2013-08-10 at 12.14.53 PM.png

12-01-2013, 12:26 PM

this exact same thing has happened to me now, all the backups have been deleted, and now I just have a big yellow 'other' section. I have no idea how to remove this? I need to as I am swapping out hard drives and I need to make the space

Currently listed in my hard drive I have 3/4 of it full of 'other'...what is this and how can I remove it? Basically I turned off keeping a local snapshot of TM backups and this basically then transferred to this. I need this space back really as I have my entire hard drive filled with it. (i see this when i go into 'about this mac' then 'storage')

What is 'other' and how can I remove it?

thanks!!!!

12-01-2013, 01:20 PM

To find out what is taking up space (and where) on your drive, grab one of the following:

Disk Inventory X - free
Daisy Disk - $10
WhatSize - $13 - still my favorite

Also, a single post is adequate - merged duplicate threads/posts

See the sticky about 'Other' here.

12-27-2013, 05:32 PM

Reboot computer and yellow "other" should be gone. Worked for me!

05-02-2014, 12:49 PM

If you will turn your time machine off the back up storage will go away. Turn your time machine back on and you will see storage come back but it will only be a few KB, it will build up over time. The command line you entered was not necessary. The storage will slowly decrease as you fill your hard drive with other data. You can try to do the terminal command line "on" action that may fix the yellow bar but I would recommend turning off Time machine backup to remove the storage and then just turn it back on. Simple fix for a simple issue

05-04-2014, 06:21 AM

Just for the record: "other" refers to ANY file -- important or not important -- that is not a standard audio file, standard video file, app, local backup or image. On ANYONE's computer system, there are literally thousands of files that don't fall into that category, including (just as an example) the system itself. So when you see "other," that doesn't mean it's time to press the panic button or do a cleanup necessarily.

I have about 145GB of "other" on my machine, and I've used Disk Inventory to look over how my space was being used. Nothing is on my drive that I don't know what it is and want it (or need it) to be there.

05-04-2014, 01:13 PM

Ditto. Member chas_m beat me to the punch. I just checked my drives out of curiosity and because I had not checked in a whole. My SSD has almost 150 GB of "Other" files and the other drives are between 25 and 75 GB.

My general rule for dealing with "Other" files is to find out what they are first. See post 11 above. Then apply the following rule to any file you are going to delete/move. Did I create this file? If not it stays till I know what it is/does.