70 gigs of backup

I purchased my 13" macbook pro three days ago. I've transferred all my music and photos from my pc. I'm really wanting to keep my hard drive as clean and organized as possible, so I've been keeping close tabs on the storage. So imagine my surprise when I look at the storage and apparently 70 gigs of space is being used for "backups."

I'm new to macs, obviously. But certainly this isn't normal. How could I remedy this and free up my hard drive again?

ericajeanette said:

I purchased my 13" macbook pro three days ago. I've transferred all my music and photos from my pc. I'm really wanting to keep my hard drive as clean and organized as possible, so I've been keeping close tabs on the storage. So imagine my surprise when I look at the storage and apparently 70 gigs of space is being used for "backups."

I'm new to macs, obviously. But certainly this isn't normal. How could I remedy this and free up my hard drive again?

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That's odd. I did a little digging, and it appears this may have something to do with Time Machine. If you are using it, it will maintain backups on MacBooks if you are unable to connect to your regular Time Capsule drive. Once you are connected to the TC drive, it will all get consolidated.
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the Ars Technica review

Of course, if you aren't using Time Machine, then it's something else.

That was very helpful! Thank you very much. It's all taken care of now. I decided to keep time machine off as it really doesn't seem helpful or quiet efficient with a laptop.

The space is all cleared up now!

ericajeanette said:

That was very helpful! Thank you very much. It's all taken care of now. I decided to keep time machine off as it really doesn't seem helpful or quiet efficient with a laptop.

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Well Time Machine backups can be very helpful if you work on a lot of documents. I have a friend who recently and accidentally overwrote a thesis she was working on, wiping away a significant amount of time and effort put into it. If she had a Time Machine backup, it'd have been a trivial matter to go back in time to retrieve the original copy of it. It's for situations like that in which Time Machine is its most useful.

Yeah, I'll probably reinstate it once I begin this semester.

ericajeanette said:

That was very helpful! Thank you very much. It's all taken care of now. I decided to keep time machine off as it really doesn't seem helpful or quiet efficient with a laptop.

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You might not think that when your hard drive crashes or your machine gets stolen.