How can I disable Time Machine local snapshots?
How can I disable local snapshots in Time Machine? They use my storage and I’d like to turn them off. Deleting them via Terminal does help, but it’s not practical to do it manually all the time. sudo tmutil disablelocal doesn’t work.=
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Ryder Cragie
I don't think there is a way.
But you don't really need to disable them. Local snapshots will only use extra space on your drive. Turning it off and then having that space go completely unused does you no good. You might as well use that space for backups. Your Mac knows to only use the extra space.
Note that because of how APFS works, it isn't actually making copies of your files there. Only if a file has changed since your last regular backup does it need to store a copy. So these snapshots should be pretty small if you are just connecting to your Time Machine drive at night instead of all day long.
Okay, thanks. Also related to Time Machine — I have a Parallels virtual machine which is 30 GB and I have it set up to back up with Time Machine (which is recommended by Parallels themselves). So if I modify anything with that virtual machine, does it have to back it up again entirely? Or will it ONLY BACKUP THE NEW CHANGES so it'll only take a few minutes rather than, say, half an hour?
Ryder: I'm not sure. I would assume it backs up entirely. But maybe Parallels has figured something out. I would ask their support. I have my Parallels disk image manually excluded from Time Machine. But I only use it for occasional testing and wouldn't care if I had to recreate it from scratch.
Yeah, it gets confusing as well with the "SmartGuard" and "Optimise with Time Machine" features Parallels has. I will ask them to clarify. Thanks!