Apple time machine was eating my disk

01.08.2024, to see all post click here.

I am using Dropbox on Mac, and it for a while I had a trouble running out of space - I have about 400GB of data in Dropbox and 1TB ssd - that should be plenty especially when I make some folders online only.

But for some reason my Mac was constantly running out of space, Disk space analyzer showed only as a system files without further explanation - I initially thought it is somehow related to dropbox but it was not. The culprit was apple time machine:

$ tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

listed 16 backups overall eating about 400GB.

I deleted them using

$ sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2024-07-29-180814

now I have to wonder if this will keep happening every day. I only connect my HDD with backups every few weeks so maybe the local snapshots will accumulate quite a bit. Having a network connected always available device would probably solve this.

Other things to try: