Why is Apple such a control freak? Storage space issues

[itisntme]

I'm frustrated as hell. I've spent lots of money on macs, having a few MBP an imac and a MBP with retina 768GB. Most of the time I love them, but lately Mac is wrestling control away.

I wish I didn't set up Time Machine as it means you lose all control. With Snow Leopard it wasn't a problem, but with Lion and Mountain Lion, your MBP is not your own anymore. I'm a keen photographer so as you can imagine with a 36mp camera and a 40mp medium format camera and shooting RAW, my hard disc fills up quickly, so I need to back up and create space. This used to be simple. Move them in Lightroom to a external hard disc folder and hey presto, you had more space.

I have moved nearly 300GB of photos out of 500. This is what my storage looks like:

In my view, Mac products have got more expensive as they have become more popular. Their quality hasn't kept up with the price increases. I shouldn't have to wait days to get the hard disc space back. I should be able to overrule apple. If they want to keep control then they should give me some money back. RANT OVER....

 

[Bear]

I'm not sure what your issue actually is. There is nothing in Lion or Mountain Lion that prevents you from moving images in Lightroom like you did with Snow Leopard.

 

[blanka]

300Gb is peanuts. I only have the predecessor to your camera, 1/3rd the pixels, and my photo library is already 500Gb. You must trash a lot right away!

Guess the problem is all the local backups. Are you using a laptop perhaps for the above image? Then OSX has the weird habit to make local backups too. Guess you can turn that off somewhere, but I don't use laptops, so no idea.

 

[sonicrobby]

You need to start the backup process to your time capsule via time machine. Your "backups" section is taking up so much space because the photos you moved are still on the mac waiting to be backed up. Once you back up the data (through time machine), that space should be gone.

If you plan on having a "manual" backup of photos to an external hardrive, I recommend turning off time machine, or at least the "local snapshots". Or let it back up frequently to avoid buildup of the backup files.

 

[BaldiMac]

I'm frustrated as hell. I've spent lots of money on macs, having a few MBP an imac and a MBP with retina 768GB. Most of the time I love them, but lately Mac is wrestling control away.

I wish I didn't set up Time Machine as it means you lose all control. With Snow Leopard it wasn't a problem, but with Lion and Mountain Lion, your MBP is not your own anymore. I'm a keen photographer so as you can imagine with a 36mp camera and a 40mp medium format camera and shooting RAW, my hard disc fills up quickly, so I need to back up and create space. This used to be simple. Move them in Lightroom to a external hard disc folder and hey presto, you had more space.

I have moved nearly 300GB of photos out of 500. This is what my storage looks like:

Image

In my view, Mac products have got more expensive as they have become more popular. Their quality hasn't kept up with the price increases. I shouldn't have to wait days to get the hard disc space back. I should be able to overrule apple. If they want to keep control then they should give me some money back. RANT OVER....

I think you should be investigating what the 294.45 GB of "Backups" is on your primary drive rather than jumping to conclusions. I don't know why it would be there.

Maybe you haven't had your backup drive connected in a while, so it's waiting to be backed up. Which would be reasonable to me.

 

[itisntme]

Thanks for the answers.

It is a MBP Retina 768 SSD.

I have backed up 5 times today on Time Machine. Last one was done 8 minutes ago automatically, and the totals are still the same. Time machine is always connected when I am at home, but not always practical when I travel, which is fairly frequently. I have also restarted a few times.

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I'm not sure what your issue actually is. There is nothing in Lion or Mountain Lion that prevents you from moving images in Lightroom like you did with Snow Leopard.

They appear to move, but a copy moves to backup as well as to the external drive. This did NOT happen on Snow Leopard even with time machine active.

 

[BaldiMac]

Thanks for the answers.

It is a MBP Retina 768 SSD.

I have backed up 5 times today on Time Machine. Last one was done 8 minutes ago automatically, and the totals are still the same. Time machine is always connected when I am at home, but not always practical when I travel, which is fairly frequently. I have also restarted a few times.

This may be what you are looking for:

Disable Time Machine Local Backups in Mac OS X Lion

 

[itisntme]

This may be what you are looking for:

Disable Time Machine Local Backups in Mac OS X Lion

I have spoken to my local apple store in the UK and they have told me NOT to do this saying it will invalidate my warranty. I don't understand why Apple doesn't just give people the option to say yes no without having to cripple part of the machine.

 

[blueroom]

I have spoken to my local apple store in the UK and they have told me NOT to do this saying it will invalidate my warranty. I don't understand why Apple doesn't just give people the option to say yes no without having to cripple part of the machine.

It won't affect your warranty. But your backups will only be as recent as the last time you connected to your Time Capsule.

 

[ElectricSheep]

What you are seeing here are Time Machine local snapshots. You can disable them with sudo tmutil disablelocal.

Local snapshots are automatically pruned if the amount of free space on the drive goes below a set watermark to prioritize new allocations over preserving snapshots. In practice, unless you need to allocate tens of gigabytes in a single action the space can be considered unused. This is why the Finder does not take into account local snapshots when reporting disk usage metrics.

Some people think that its best to disable local snapshots for SSDs to extend its life. In practice, this depends on the capacity and quality of the device. Smaller budget MLC drives that are only rated to 1,000-20,000 write cycles will wear out much faster than high-capacity SLC drives which are rated between 100,000-1,000,000 write cycles.

For a 256 Gig SLC SSD drive, it would take over 3 years of continuous writing saturating an SATA 3 bus before the drive reached 10% wear assuming 100k write-cycle endurance. Those numbers scale with capacity.

 

[BaldiMac]

I have spoken to my local apple store in the UK and they have told me NOT to do this saying it will invalidate my warranty.

Yep. Though you could simply re-enable them if you need warranty service. Of course, this is an unsupported feature.

I don't understand why Apple doesn't just give people the option to say yes no without having to cripple part of the machine.

Because Apple wouldn't be Apple if they didn't make decisions like Apple.

 

[Weaselboy]

Thanks for the answers.

It is a MBP Retina 768 SSD.

I have backed up 5 times today on Time Machine. Last one was done 8 minutes ago automatically, and the totals are still the same. Time machine is always connected when I am at home, but not always practical when I travel, which is fairly frequently. I have also restarted a few times.

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They appear to move, but a copy moves to backup as well as to the external drive. This did NOT happen on Snow Leopard even with time machine active.

I have spoken to my local apple store in the UK and they have told me NOT to do this saying it will invalidate my warranty. I don't understand why Apple doesn't just give people the option to say yes no without having to cripple part of the machine.

Let's back up a bit. As mentioned, what you are seeing there is Time Machine's local backups that started with Lion and now continue in Mt. Lion.

Local backups keeps a copy of your data when you are away from your Time Machine disk. When you do backup to Time Machine, the data is not removed, it stays... and this is what you are seeing.

The good news is you can just completely ignore this as OS X manages the space. When the OS sees your total disk capacity has filled to 80% or more, it will start thinning the local backups space automatically. If you notice, when you look in Finder the space used by local backups is not included as it really is not "used space" as far as you are concerned since it will be reduced if you do need the space.

Turning off local backups in Terminal will not void your warranty, but that said, I would leave it on. It does no harm and can be good to have that extra backup version when away from home.

If you like, just turn Time Machine off then back on and you will see the space reduced back to zero.

Short story... ignore it.

 

[sonicrobby]

I have spoken to my local apple store in the UK and they have told me NOT to do this saying it will invalidate my warranty. I don't understand why Apple doesn't just give people the option to say yes no without having to cripple part of the machine.

You can disable them in the preferences/settings app :| go to the time machine section. Or right click the icon in the task bar and select "Time Machine Preferences". There is no reason that should void any kind of warranty, even if you do it through terminal

 

[GGJstudios]

I have spoken to my local apple store in the UK and they have told me NOT to do this saying it will invalidate my warranty.

Rather than ranting about Apple "controlling" you (which is completely false), you should be ranting about the ignorance of the local store employees, who claim that disabling local backups will void your warranty. That's complete BS. Whether you use Time Machine or not has absolutely nothing to do with your hardware warranty or AppleCare coverage.