How to delete Time Machine local snapshots on Mac

What local snapshots are

If you back up with Time Machine, your Mac also keeps local snapshots on its own startup disk. A snapshot is a read-only record of how your files looked at one moment. Because it lives on your Mac, you can restore a file from earlier today even when your backup disk is in a drawer.

Apple describes the schedule like this (Apple, About Time Machine local snapshots):

• Time Machine saves a snapshot of your startup disk about every hour and keeps each one for 24 hours.
• It keeps one more snapshot, of your last successful Time Machine backup, until the space is needed.

Apple also says that on macOS 10.13 High Sierra and later, Time Machine saves another snapshot before it installs a macOS update.

A snapshot is a read-only copy of a volume at one moment (Apple, View APFS snapshots). That has a consequence people trip over: if you delete a large file after a snapshot was taken, the snapshot still holds it, so the space doesn't come back until that snapshot is gone.

Do you need to delete them?

Most of the time, no. Apple says your Mac counts the space used by local snapshots as available storage, that snapshots don't use space needed for downloading, copying or installing, and that Time Machine deletes them as they age or as space is needed. It also only keeps them on disks with plenty of free space.

Deleting by hand makes sense in a few situations:

• An installer or app says there isn't enough space, even though Storage settings shows plenty available. Apps can measure free space in their own way, and not every app counts snapshot space as free.
• You just deleted a lot of data and want the space back now, rather than within the day.
• A disk utility shows much less free space than Finder and you want the two numbers to agree. The difference is often snapshots and other purgeable space; here's what purgeable means.

If none of those apply, leave them. They're your quickest way back from a mistake, and they expire on their own.

List your snapshots

Open Terminal (in Applications › Utilities) and run:

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

This only reads, and needs no password. The / means your startup disk. The output starts with a header and then lists one snapshot per line, by date and time. It looks like this (the dates here are examples):

Snapshots for disk /:
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-10-13-091512.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-10-13-101530.local

The part in the middle, such as 2026-10-13-101530, is the snapshot's date in year-month-day-hourminutesecond form. If you only want the dates, tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates / prints them on their own. If the list is empty, there's nothing to delete: the space you're missing is somewhere else (here's how to find it).

To see every APFS snapshot on your data volume, including ones made by other apps, run:

diskutil apfs listSnapshots /System/Volumes/Data

That's read-only as well. On a Mac with none, it prints No snapshots for disk3s5 (the disk number varies).

Delete one snapshot, or all of them

Delete one snapshot

Use the date from the list:

sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2026-10-13-101530

sudo runs the command as an administrator, so Terminal asks for your password (nothing appears as you type). Apple's manual page for tmutil says some of its commands need administrator rights and Full Disk Access; if you see a permissions error, give Terminal Full Disk Access in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Full Disk Access, then try again. Per the same manual page, a date deletes the Time Machine snapshots with that date on every mounted disk.

Delete all of them

Give the disk instead of a date:

sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots /

The manual page says this deletes all local Time Machine snapshots on that disk. Run tmutil listlocalsnapshots / again afterwards to check. Storage settings can take a few minutes to catch up.

Free a set amount instead

If you only need, say, 20 GB, you can ask Time Machine to thin its snapshots until it has freed that much:

sudo tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 20000000000

The amount is in bytes (20000000000 is 20 GB). The manual page also allows an optional urgency level from 1 to 4 after the amount; leave it out to use the default. Thinning is permanent in the same way as deleting.

The no-Terminal way: pause automatic backups

Apple's own method is to stop Time Machine from backing up automatically for a few minutes:

1. Open System Settings › General › Time Machine.
2. Click Options, choose Manually from the Backup Frequency pop-up menu, then click Done.
3. Wait a few minutes while macOS removes the local snapshots.
4. Set Backup Frequency back to the schedule you had. Don't skip this step: until you do, Time Machine won't back up on its own. Apple notes that Time Machine remembers your backup disks, so there's nothing to set up again.

Disk Utility

Disk Utility can show and delete snapshots too. Choose View › Show APFS Snapshots, select your startup disk's volume in the sidebar, and a table of snapshots appears at the bottom of the window. Select one and click the Delete Snapshot button (Apple, View APFS snapshots). Disk Utility lists snapshots from every app, not only Time Machine, so read the names before you delete anything.

What you lose

Only the ability to go back to those moments from your Mac's own disk. Your files as they are now stay exactly as they are, and so do the backups on your Time Machine disk or network backup. Once you connect your backup disk and Time Machine runs again, you can restore anything it backed up.

The one real risk is timing. If you changed or deleted something since your last full backup, the local snapshot may be the only copy. Let a backup finish first if you can.

macOS also starts making new snapshots at the next hourly backup. That's expected, and it's why deleting them is a one-off fix for a specific install, not something to schedule.

Snapshots that aren't from Time Machine

Time Machine isn't the only thing that makes APFS snapshots, and the others need different handling:

• Your macOS system volume runs from a sealed, signed snapshot. It's part of how macOS protects its own files against tampering (Apple Platform Security, Signed system volume security). It isn't a backup and isn't something to delete.
• Other backup apps such as Carbon Copy Cloner make their own snapshots and manage them from inside the app. Bombich, CCC's developer, explains how to delete them from CCC's snapshot list (Bombich, Leveraging snapshots on APFS volumes). Delete those from the app that made them.

If a snapshot in Disk Utility doesn't start with com.apple.TimeMachine and you don't know what made it, leave it.

How Tend helps

Tend's Maintenance page lists your local Time Machine snapshots with their dates, for free, so you can see whether there's anything to remove without opening Terminal. With Tend Pro, you can select snapshots and remove them: Tend runs the same tmutil deletelocalsnapshots command, asks for an administrator password first, and says plainly that removal is permanent. It only offers snapshots whose names match Time Machine's exact format, so macOS's own snapshots are never on the list. Free and Pro, compared.

Questions

Related guides

Sources

• Apple, About Time Machine local snapshots
• Apple, View APFS snapshots in Disk Utility on Mac
• Apple Platform Security, Signed system volume security
• man tmutil on macOS 27.0.1 (the listlocalsnapshots, listlocalsnapshotdates, deletelocalsnapshots and thinlocalsnapshots verbs)
• Bombich Software, Leveraging snapshots on APFS volumes

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