Mac help please

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Mark
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I'm trying to free up some space and as you can see from the screenshot below, I have nearly 90GB of backups

Can anybody please tell me what they are, and where can I find them? Thanks

Screen-Shot-2017-03-18-at-13.50.24.png
 
This is a pile of automatic Time Machine backups waiting to be copied to an external hard drive.

If you don't use TM: go into System Preferences and switch TM off - you should regain your 90GB.

If you do use TM: plug in your designated TM external drive and wait for your backup to happen (be extremely patient, it's a lot of data!). You won't get your 90GB back for a week or so, but it will eventually be released.

If you want your 90GB back instantly, but do use TM, switch TM off and on again, the drive space should be returned but you'll have lost all that backed up data.
 
Not sure why you are backing up to the same disk- looks like your backup size equals your other,photos, movies and audio. No point backing up unless its to another external disk.
 
Not that I can think of. I tend to use this just for tethering and that gets backed up to an external HD when I'm shooting so it shouldn't have much on it.
The reason I say this is because I found I had 'safety net' backups on the internal drive from my external backups. The safety net backups were the files that had changed (mainly deleted files) since the last backup. The idea of 'safety net' backups is stop external backups mirroring accidental deletions. I've now set it up so the 'safety net' files auto delete after 6 months. It's good to have the 'safety net' file copies but I don't need to keep them forever so auto deletion should work well.
 
Thanks folks, much appreciated.

TM was on, I've turned it off and then back on again, but it now says the storage that was showing as "backups" is now "other". So still not freed up any space, any ideas?
 
It's usually recommended not to put time machine on your single internal drive because for obvious reasons it's not then a backup.
I have sometimes found that it has been impossible to delete unwanted time machine files by any means other than formatting the drive :-(
 
Thanks folks, much appreciated.

TM was on, I've turned it off and then back on again, but it now says the storage that was showing as "backups" is now "other". So still not freed up any space, any ideas?
There really is very little point in having time machine backup to the same disk, especially when the local disk is so small.

The unwanted backups should purge themselves as disk space becomes short, especially if they are not linked to an active timemachine anymore. This can take some time if the system doesn't think it's a priority action - perhaps leave the Mac on overnight so it will run its clean up routines.

If they are still linked to an active timemachine (ie. local copies pending re-connection of an external drive), it's best to just connect the drive and let it run through - again, it may take some time, but it will free the space up as soon as the local caches are copied over.
 
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