Delete Time Machine Local Snapshots on Mac (tmutil)

Time Machine doesn't only write to your backup drive — it also keeps hourly snapshots of your startup disk, stored on the disk itself. They're what lets you restore a file from an hour ago while your backup drive sits at the office. They also count as used space, and when the disk is nearly full you can clear them in seconds with tmutil.

What local snapshots are

When Time Machine is enabled, macOS takes an APFS snapshot of the startup volume roughly every hour — a frozen, read-only picture of the file system at that moment. A fresh snapshot costs almost nothing, but as you change and delete files, the snapshot keeps referencing the old versions, so the space it pins down grows. macOS deletes each snapshot after about 24 hours and thins them automatically when the disk runs low — but "automatically" can lag behind the moment you actually need the space.

List your snapshots

# list local snapshots of the startup volume
tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

Each line looks like com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-07-01-093012.local. The stamp is when the snapshot was taken: year, month, day, then hour, minute, second. A healthy Mac shows a couple of dozen entries at most, covering the last 24 hours. This command only reads — it changes nothing.

Delete one snapshot, or thin them all

# delete a single snapshot by its date stamp
sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2026-07-01-093012

# or thin snapshots until ~10 GB is reclaimed (urgency 4 = most aggressive)
sudo tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 10000000000 4

deletelocalsnapshots takes just the date portion of the snapshot's name. thinlocalsnapshots takes a mount point, the number of bytes you'd like back, and an urgency level from 1 to 4 — pass an oversized byte count like 999999999999 to clear as much as possible.

Know before you run it: there is no undo. A deleted snapshot is gone, along with the ability to restore your disk to that hour. Your real backups on the Time Machine drive are untouched, though, and macOS resumes taking hourly snapshots right away.

Prefer a graphical route? Disk Utility can do the same job: choose View → Show APFS Snapshots, select your data volume, and the snapshot list appears at the bottom of the window with sizes. Select a snapshot and click the – (minus) button to delete it. To confirm the space actually came back, run df -h / before and after, or watch the Available figure in Disk Utility.

When deleting is actually worth it

Because snapshots expire on their own within about a day, deleting them isn't maintenance — it's a tool for right now. Reach for it when:

• An installer or macOS update needs tens of gigabytes immediately and won't wait.
• You just deleted huge files and the free-space number barely moved — a snapshot still references them.
• You're about to export a big video or restore a virtual machine and need real headroom, not promised headroom.

If you can wait a day, do nothing: the snapshots will age out and the space comes back by itself. One caveat on the other side of the ledger: local snapshots are the only versions of your files Time Machine has when the backup drive isn't connected, so on a MacBook that rarely sees its drive, think twice before wiping them for a modest win — the trade is real restore points for temporary space.

Freed the snapshots and still tight?

Snapshots are only one slice of the space macOS holds in reserve. See our guide to purgeable space and how to clear it for the rest — evicted iCloud files, regenerable caches, and how to force a purge.