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Resolved Disappearing HDD/SSD Space

thatoneguy82

thatoneguy82

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 23, 2008
1,895
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Beach Cities, CA
The freespace indicator, as far as I know isn't reporting the correct amount of free space with the same amount of data several days ago. I had deleted over 60 gb of data and the free space didn't show it all it all. It remained the same and the trash was emptied. I used time machine to go back to yesterday before I had the huge files that started occupying my drive and the freespace seemed to be right. I then deleted some more disc images and the free space didn't really change. And also on iStats, the Used and Free indicators was changing by the second, as if something was being added to the disk. It's a lot slower now after it occupied around 12GB of the space it had since I booted it from my time machine backup. The deletion of about 8-9 GB of disc images also didn't affect the space indicators.

What's going on? I've fixed done the permission fixes twice now and still doesn't work. It was fine just yesterday. It's a 256GB Crucial M4 with the recent 0309 Firmware.
 
Last edited:
thatoneguy82

thatoneguy82

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 23, 2008
1,895
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Beach Cities, CA
simsaladimbamba said:
I guess you are using the wonderful Lion?
Can this help? - What is this "Other" in the storage tab? What is eating up my space? by theSeb
Click to expand...

Yep. Lion 10.7.2

Thanks for that link! I did the command in terminal to disable local backups and the space was slowly going up. None of the programs that you listed showed that folder "./. MobileBackups" had 29GB of data. It showed it as having 0. Only the terminal command showed it. But yeah, I'm back to where I should be - freespace 117.6GB, used: 120GB. Hopefully I didn't do too much damage to my SSD with all the read/write.

Interesting though is that I have my Time Machine set to backup on my Time Capsule, which it has been doing and it's still set that way. I don't know why it had it here.
 
T

thundersteele

macrumors 68030
Oct 19, 2011
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thatoneguy82 said:
Interesting though is that I have my Time Machine set to backup on my Time Capsule, which it has been doing and it's still set that way. I don't know why it had it here.
Click to expand...

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4878

You had to do absolutely nothing. The local snapshots are deleted after a week. In the meantime, clicking on Macintosh HD and using "Get Info", you would get the correct "available space" reported.

If instead, you go to About this Mac, More Info, storage, then OSX tells you how much space is currently occupied by local backups. As said above, this space gets freed up with a delay of a week, but earlier if you would actually need the space.
 
thatoneguy82

thatoneguy82

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 23, 2008
1,895
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Beach Cities, CA
thundersteele said:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4878

You had to do absolutely nothing. The local snapshots are deleted after a week. In the meantime, clicking on Macintosh HD and using "Get Info", you would get the correct "available space" reported.

If instead, you go to About this Mac, More Info, storage, then OSX tells you how much space is currently occupied by local backups. As said above, this space gets freed up with a delay of a week, but earlier if you would actually need the space.
Click to expand...

Link is broken.

However, I've never seen my disk space go down right before my eyes for all the years I've owned a mac or months I've had Lion or weeks with my SSD. So, I don't know what happened this time.
 
simsaladimbamba

simsaladimbamba

Guest
Nov 28, 2010
22,670
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located
thatoneguy82 said:
Link is broken.

However, I've never seen my disk space go down right before my eyes for all the years I've owned a mac or months I've had Lion or weeks with my SSD. So, I don't know what happened this time.
Click to expand...

Link is not broken, just press the RELOAD button or press CMD+R to reload the page. Apple has some problems with their KB articles in recent months.
 
thatoneguy82

thatoneguy82

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 23, 2008
1,895
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Beach Cities, CA
thundersteele said:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4878

You had to do absolutely nothing. The local snapshots are deleted after a week. In the meantime, clicking on Macintosh HD and using "Get Info", you would get the correct "available space" reported.

If instead, you go to About this Mac, More Info, storage, then OSX tells you how much space is currently occupied by local backups. As said above, this space gets freed up with a delay of a week, but earlier if you would actually need the space.
Click to expand...

simsaladimbamba said:
Link is not broken, just press the RELOAD button or press CMD+R to reload the page. Apple has some problems with their KB articles in recent months.
Click to expand...

Read the KB. So basically the TM does a backup twice, one more frequently than the other? The more frequent one is store on the drive and the other on the Time Capsule? Is this done by default? Anyway to change this and place it on another internal disk (my additional HDD) without changing its usual backups to my Time Capsule?

I think that's how it works right?
 
T

thundersteele

macrumors 68030
Oct 19, 2011
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Switzerland
thatoneguy82 said:
Read the KB. So basically the TM does a backup twice, one more frequently than the other? The more frequent one is store on the drive and the other on the Time Capsule? Is this done by default? Anyway to change this and place it on another internal disk (my additional HDD) without changing its usual backups to my Time Capsule?

I think that's how it works right?
Click to expand...

I understand it as follows:

On the external drive, Time Machine keeps a full backup of your HD, together with a history of changes. These backups are updated once per hour, but only when an external disc is plugged in.

The local snapshots keep a week long record of changes - i.e. when you delete a file, it is just moved to the backup folder. The benefit of having the internal backups on the same disc is that the file does not have to be moved - only it's address is changed.

What I'm not sure about is
a) whether local snapshots are also created when an external disc is plugged in
b) if the local snapshots are created instantly, or just once per hour like the external backups - it seems to be hourly though
 
thatoneguy82

thatoneguy82

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 23, 2008
1,895
2
Beach Cities, CA
thundersteele said:
I understand it as follows:

On the external drive, Time Machine keeps a full backup of your HD, together with a history of changes. These backups are updated once per hour, but only when an external disc is plugged in.

The local snapshots keep a week long record of changes - i.e. when you delete a file, it is just moved to the backup folder. The benefit of having the internal backups on the same disc is that the file does not have to be moved - only it's address is changed.

What I'm not sure about is
a) whether local snapshots are also created when an external disc is plugged in
b) if the local snapshots are created instantly, or just once per hour like the external backups - it seems to be hourly though
Click to expand...

I think I understand what you mean about the local snapshots. Is there anyway for it to change it's address and have it moved to the other internal HDD drive when it's been deleted and such?
 
T

thundersteele

macrumors 68030
Oct 19, 2011
2,984
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Switzerland
thatoneguy82 said:
I think I understand what you mean about the local snapshots. Is there anyway for it to change it's address and have it moved to the other internal HDD drive when it's been deleted and such?
Click to expand...

I guess one could create a folder for the backups somewhere on the other internal disc, and then put a symlink from /.MobileBackups to that folder.

I'm not sure if OSX will accept that though.
 
thatoneguy82

thatoneguy82

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 23, 2008
1,895
2
Beach Cities, CA
thundersteele said:
I guess one could create a folder for the backups somewhere on the other internal disc, and then put a symlink from /.MobileBackups to that folder.

I'm not sure if OSX will accept that though.
Click to expand...

Ah okay, I thought it was a lot simpler, like changing a setting in the preferences for Time Machine.

Would I still be able to use my Time Machine to restore back to a previous/date time without this storage and using the storage on my Time Capsule?
 
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