#Clear up mac space download

It will also stop Time Machine from creating new snapshots. You can use a Terminal command that will disable Time Machine's local snapshot feature, which will delete all of the local snapshots on your internal hard drive.

If you really need to delete those snapshots (which I don't recommend unless you desperately need that space), there is a way to purge local snapshots from your internal hard drive. That being said, everything doesn't always work properly, and you may find yourself out of storage space on your internal hard drive, and those snapshot backups won't go away. The program will then continue to replace the old snapshot with a new one until you free up space on your Mac's internal storage, at which point it will go back to saving weekly snapshots as long as space permits.

#Clear up mac space download

If you then, say, download some large program and your internal hard drive plummets to below 10% (or less than 5GB of internal storage), Time Machine will delete all local snapshots except the most recent. If everything is working properly, Time Machine will automatically delete the oldest snapshot backups as soon as your internal hard drive has less than 20% of storage space left. How do I get rid of all these backups?įirst, let me preface this by saying that you shouldn't worry about those backups and all the space they are taking up. So, if you've been backing up your Mac for years with Time Machine, you could potentially have 100 GB of backups stored in your internal hard drive, as long as you have space for them. It keeps those weekly snapshots on your internal hard drive until you start to get low on storage.

Time Machine makes one daily snapshot every 24 hours when you start up your MacBook. So why do you have a large number of backups taking up space on your MacBook's internal hard drive? Because of local snapshots.Īs soon as you set up Time Machine on your Mac laptop, local snapshots are created automatically. You need an external hard drive to set up and use Time Machine because that's where your backups are stored. Why do I have 100 GB of backups on my hard drive?