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besson3c · Jul 28, 2011, 11:07 PM

I just discovered that for some reason even though I haven't used Time Machine for years Time Machine had enabled itself after upgrading to Lion, and was attempting local backups via its new MobileBackup scheme. Normally the MobileBackup stuff resides in its own partition, but I guess since this partition could not be found it instead was dumping crap into a hidden directory, /.MobileBackup.trash . When I discovered this this directory was over 4Gb in size.

I fixed this by disabling Time Machine via the System Preferences pane, running:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

and deleting that crazy large directory. Not only was this consuming disk space, but it was also causing performance problems, as would be expected.

chabig · Jul 29, 2011, 07:03 AM

You went to the terminal when Time Machine has a big OFF-ON switch in System Preferences?

Good info: http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/30.html

besson3c · Jul 29, 2011, 09:42 AM

I wanted to make sure that if it enabled itself again without my doing so that it wouldn't be doing local backups

mduell · Jul 30, 2011, 04:49 PM

Oh god, FOUR gigabytes? The horror.

besson3c · Jul 30, 2011, 07:25 PM

What's with the stupid attitude mduell?

The main problem/annoyance was the performance loss, but if I had let this go long enough the loss in disk space could have become a problem too as it grew in size.

Really nothing to get all confrontational about though, chill. If the tip is not relevant or
helpful to you, move on... No big deal.

turtle777 · Jul 30, 2011, 07:43 PM

Thanks for the info.

-t

besson3c · Jul 30, 2011, 08:59 PM

No prob

angelmb · Jul 31, 2011, 02:38 AM

Time Machine is such a hard disk destroyer I don't use it anymore. Thanks for the info besson.

imdipped · Jul 31, 2011, 05:54 PM

I have a mid 2007 2.2 GB MacBook Pro. I drag backup any new stuff I do (mostly text) to an external HD. I plan to get another Mac after Lion shakes down. I was planning to get Airport Extreme and a separate HD to do backups on both my Macs using Time Machine. If Time Machine is not the way to go, Is there another program I could use?
Thanks in advance

jmiddel · Aug 1, 2011, 01:22 AM

I like SuperDuper, which costs 27.95 SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner free Carbon Copy Cloner - Home Although some folks don't like this method, many do, and I have created daily backups successfully for years using SD. For me the advantage is that I always have a ready to go B/U startup disk.

angelmb · Aug 1, 2011, 01:40 AM

Another vote for SuperDuper!

mduell · Aug 1, 2011, 04:09 PM

A clone is not a very good backup. There's a use for both, but a good backup is always a good idea.

besson3c · Aug 1, 2011, 04:36 PM

Just to be clear, I agree with mduell, but my post was not supposed to suggest that you should not use Time Machine. It was simply revealing a bug relating to the Snow Leopard to Lion upgrade. There are always bugs with upgrading an OS, that this had to do with Time Machine doesn't speak to Time Machine's weaknesses. Time Machine is fine (although it would be a lot better if OS X had a more modern filesystem)

CharlesS · Aug 1, 2011, 06:06 PM

Once you run the command to disable the local backups, Time Machine is just as good as any other backup system you'll find on HFS+.

besson3c · Aug 1, 2011, 06:27 PM

I think that even if I were using Time Machine I'd still want to disable the local backup thing. It's okay to thrash another hard drive every hour, but I don't want it competing for I/O with stuff I'm doing on the local drive every hour.