How do I delete Time Machine local snapshots?

List them with 'tmutil listlocalsnapshots /' and delete with 'tmutil deletelocalsnapshots '. This is safe for your current files - snapshots are history, and backups on your external Time Machine disk are unaffected.

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Time Machine local snapshots

Q: Why doesn't deleting files free space on my Mac?

When Time Machine is on, macOS keeps hourly APFS snapshots of the disk on the disk itself. Snapshots hold on to every file you've deleted since they were taken, so freeing 50 GB sometimes frees nothing. This space shows as 'purgeable'.

CacheCleaner guides · Updated July 18, 2026

When Time Machine is on, macOS snapshots your whole disk every hour – onto the same disk. The snapshots hold on to every file you've deleted since, which is why freeing 50 GB sometimes frees nothing. They show up as “purgeable” space.

List them

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

Each line is one snapshot, named by date: com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-07-18-093012.local.

Delete them

# one snapshot, by its date part
tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2026-07-18-093012

# every snapshot on the boot volume
for d in $(tmutil listlocalsnapshots / | cut -d. -f4); do
  tmutil deletelocalsnapshots "$d"
done

This is safe for your current files – snapshots are history, not your data. You lose the ability to restore this Mac to those points in time; backups on your external Time Machine disk are unaffected.

Why macOS doesn't just do it

It does – eventually. Snapshots thin out automatically after 24 hours or under disk pressure, but “disk pressure” kicks in later than you'd like, and a full disk during an Xcode build or a container pull fails now.

CacheCleaner lists local snapshots with their real reclaimable size alongside all the other invisible space eaters, and deletes them via the same supported tmutil path.

Get CacheCleaner for Mac