Mac OS Time Machine Local Backups

In Mac OS Lion, Time Machine brought a new feature: local backups. If you are using Lion on a laptop and your Time Machine is on an external drive, this feature is enabled.

What this feature does is to do backups even when not connected to the backup volume. All backups are written inside /.MobileBackups.

When you start Time Machine client, on the time scale on the right, the white backups are local backups while the pink ones are your regular external backups.

This feature is quite cool but a bit annoying when your drive is full. To disable it, run the following command in a terminal:

$ sudo tmutil disablelocal

This will stop Time Machine local backups feature and remove all local backups.

If you want to enable it back:

$ sudo tmutil enablelocal