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APFS local snapshots are generally a pain for me, especially on some of my systems with small internal drives. All of my systems have Time Machine backups and the hourly backups it performs are more than sufficient for my needs.

Is there any way to disable just local snapshots and keep Time Machine backups running?

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With macOS 10.14, it appears not to be possible to disable local snapshots.

You can remove local snapshots using a method documented in Apple's About Time Machine local snapshots support document:

How local snapshots use storage space

You don't need to think about how much storage space local snapshots are using, because they don't use space needed for tasks like downloading files, copying files, or installing new software.

Your Mac counts the space used by snapshots as available storage. Even so, Time Machine stores snapshots only on disks that have plenty of free space, and it automatically deletes snapshots as they age or as space is needed for other things.

If you want to delete local snapshots manually, turn off Time Machine temporarily:

  1. Open Time Machine preferences from the Time Machine menu in the menu bar. Or choose Apple menu  > System Preferences, then click Time Machine.
  2. Deselect "Back Up Automatically" or click the Off/On switch, depending on what you see in Time Machine preferences.
  3. Wait a few minutes to allow the local snapshots to be deleted. Then turn on Time Machine again. It remembers your backup disks.

See also the Apple forum discussion Disable local snapshots in High Sierra with APFS.

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This is part of Time Machine, not APFS. Using Time Machine is going to create a local snapshot for 24 hours and on other occasions.

See: About Time Machine local snapshots for more information from Apple.

Short of using another backup program that does not take local snapshots everything else is sort of a hack.

You may want to try automating deleting local snapshots using a shell script triggered by automator.

See: How to use Time Machine local snapshots to recover data on your Mac in 2019

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    disablelocal was removed from tmutil in macOS 10.13.
    – Bri Bri
    Commented Jul 17, 2019 at 4:38
  • Particularly if they removed it from the CLI then, like I said, it's not going to be possible without some messy hack. Like discussions.apple.com/thread/8612572 says you can cron a code snippet to delete the local snapshots.
    – Thomas Nelson
    Commented Jul 18, 2019 at 5:20
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Snapshots has the idea: Easy access to you backups even timemachine external drive isnt mounted. But that what Apple say, what they want is for you to buy bigger hard drives and/or subscripe to icloud (useless for backups/cloud storage) Timemashine is working wonderfully, just pls skip the snapshots. (And why would i (ever) keep a safety copy of my files external disk's and fill up my local drive too?) To delete snapshots i use either Cocktail or Carbon Copy Cloner. Here one can see size of snapshot and delete them without turning off timemachine. So as always with Apple money making comes first, then user friendlyness.

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    Right now this is more a rant than an actual answer. Can you edit in details on how to delete snapshots with the tools you mention to make the post more useful to others?
    – nohillside ♦
    Commented Aug 24, 2023 at 6:05

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