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Lion- Unreported Disk Space

A few weeks ago I had this issue. I first sent it to Apple and they just replied saying it is behaving like normal. Here is the scoop…..

I had an issue over the weekend where a hard drive running Lion had 395 gigs on it when booted into Lion but 596 gigs when under snow leopard.

I found a folder that was invisible called .mobilebackups which happened to be the exact size.

I discovered that Lion looks for your time machine volume but if you are away from it, Lion makes local backups so you don’t loose data. For someone like me who brings his laptop everywhere, that folder gets pretty large.

Lion does not report that disk space because it has the right to erase those files if needed. So Lion actually gives you an incorrect amount of true free space.

There are terminal commands (below) to disable the local backups that Lion makes. But according to Apple the computer will delete the space if needed so its not really there. They are created only on MacBook (including Air) or MacBookPro models.

Disable Time Machine Local Backup Storage

Here’s how to turn off local backups:

Launch Terminal from /Applications/Utilities Enter the following command:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

Enter the admin password when requested to disable local backups

Re-Enable Local Time Machine Backups

Launch Terminal from /Applications/Utilities Enter the following command:

sudo tmutil enablelocal