[rangibaby]

I “lost” a lot of space due to time machine local backups. It was frustrating to research and I thought there was something seriously wrong with my computer. Try deleting the local backups and see if you get some space back

[T-N-T]

I had to make room on my MBP SSD to install windows through bootcamp and bashed my head against a wall on the same issue. It took me half an hour to find the reason why so much of my hard drive wasn't available despite me having deleted almost all third party apps and personal data on my macOS partition. Time Machine does 'local backups' and there is NOWHERE in the user interface that fully explains the space they occupy and how to get rid of it. To delete those local backups you need to use the terminal program tmutil.

That gave me even more vindication for my move. Also, you really don't know how fast your hardware is until you've used something other than macOS on it. From booting the system to launching software.. everything is snappier now.

[rangibaby]

Yes it’s a really poor design decision. They could have at least added “local time machine backups” color to Disk Utility, or added a way to turn them off.

Agreed re: snappiness of other OS. Ubuntu flies on my 2013 MBP.

[wila]

There used to be a way to turn in off before High Sierra, now the only thing you can do is delete the local snapshots. [0]

[0] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/solution-reclaim-storag...

[tlo]

unfortunately it's not the local backups. I guess the missing disk space is related to the error I get when I check the partition. I guess I need to reinstall... :(