[OSX-Users] Re: lion -or something - eating gigs?

[dr. m.c. schraefel]

Julian and mischa, thanks for this insight - julian i remember you talking about the fact that time machine does these dumps, but this is after in fact i got home from a big road trip and multiple time machines had been done - syncing hourly. 

Thanks for the util tip for time machine.  i'm not sure however what the list from listbackups is telling me and what i might do about it. THere are about a dozen entries

hockeypuck:~ mc$   tmutil listbackups
/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/HockeyPuck/2011-09-14-095724
[snip a bunch of entries to last one:] 
/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/HockeyPuck/2011-12-13-211717

(yes hockey in canadians is genetic: let me just get that out of the way here)

this tells me the paths for the computer's snapshots i think, but does that mean they're still on the local disk? it seems like this is just a log?

sorry to be so naive on this one.

(nice page here by the way http://real-world-systems.com/docs/tmutil.1.html)

plainly you could give us tutorials on TM, Jules.

thanks as well all for the utility help - i've been using disksweeper by omni - cool to hear of other tools.

mc

On 13 Dec 2011, at 20:50, Jules Field wrote:

> That's the reason I would bet on. TM does indeed do local snapshots every hour if it can't reach its proper backup destination, so that if you delete or corrupt a file by mistake you can roll back, despite not having a backup destination connected. If you do a proper TM backup to an external device, it should hose the local snapshots as they are no longer relevant.
> 
> Do a 
>     tmutil listbackups
> and it will show you what its got, which may include recent local snapshots. It does often take a few seconds.
> See the manpage for "tmutil" for how to manage Time Machine in detail and control everything from the command line. It's quite comprehensive.
> 
> Jules.
> 
> On 13/12/2011 20:06, Mischa Tuffield wrote:
>> 
>> Could be offline time machine backups. If time machine hasn't had a chance to backup to where it normally does, it creates local backups, as far as I am aware.
>> 
>> Mischa
>> 
>> -Mischa's phone
>> 
>> On Dec 13, 2011, at 8:03 PM, "dr. m.c. schraefel" <mc at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>> 
>>> what keeps eating space on my drive?
>>> 
>>> i had cleaned out many many gigs on my drive. last night, i got a notice "less than a gig left" and thot "what??"
>>> 
>>> restarted, recovered a few gigs (??) but today, after adding nothing, see that it's already 6 gigs less than last night. 
>>> 
>>> this seems peculiar. 
>>> 
>>> any thoughts?
>>> 
>>> with thanks
>>> 
>>> mc
>>>  
> 
> <julessig.png> 
> --  
> sysjkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk

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