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Out of curiosity, I'm wondering where in the file system Time Machine stores its local backups/snapshots.

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This seems likely to be a common question. Have you tried looking to see if there's already an answer to this on the site? – Chris Page Jan 3 '14 at 1:22
up vote 9 down vote accepted

The actual data is stored in a hidden directory called .MobileBackups at the root of the volume.

There is a special virtual filesystem type called mtmfs which translates the raw data in these hidden directories into a virtual Time Machine drive which is automatically mounted on /Volumes/MobileBackups

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Not sure if this works for El Captain anymore, I can't find anything at least. I cd'd into volumes and did a ls -a (which shows all files, so including the hidden ones, in a directory) which gave nothing, tried this in both recovery and normal boot mode. Did the same thing for the root volume. – rien333 Jan 23 at 20:46
    
I can still see it on my El Capitan laptop (10.11.4). /Volumes/MobileBackups exists and has a Backups.backupdb directory inside it. It's still a mtmfs mount according to mount, and I'm pretty sure the actual data is still stored in /.MobileBackups but the format has changed. – Kris Shannon May 14 at 16:07

They are stored on your hard drive in the folder entitled:

/Volumes/MobileBackups
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