Mac OS Lion and 'About This Mac'

[moiraf100]

Hi there
I've just updated to OS 10.7.1, and I just happened to look at 'about this mac'.
I've not looked at this since the Lion update a few weeks ago, and I said to my husband "ooh look, there's a different layout"
Anyhoo, I clicked on More Info/Storage and there's a nice little coloured bar telling you where/how your disk space is allocated.
For some reason I can see 52gb of Backups. What the ****?
I back up to Time Machine and there shouldn't be anything 'backed up' on the laptop.
My husband has an iMac and he hasn't got anything 'backed up'.
Any ideas please?
I've got Parallels and wondered if that might be it?
But OH uses Boot Camp and as I say he has nothing - and of course we both have Windoze installed. (I only use it for a few HOG games that I can't get for the mac) ;-)

[Chris]

Lion repeatedly saves your documents as you create and edit them so you can always revert back, even to several versions previously. I suspect that's what's filling your HDD.

[moiraf100]

But 52gb? In less than a month. I need to find where it is stored.

---------- Post added at 08:45 ---------- Previous post was at 08:37 ----------

Found an article :-)
http://toti.posterous.com/hidden-loc...s-x-lion-filli

[Chris]

Yes, especially if you like to tinker with your pictures in iphoto ... Multiple backups of digital photos could eat up multiple GBs very quickly.

I spotted this in the feature list some time before Lion was released and suspected that this would happen. It's not likely to be an issue on the newest iMacs, for example, as all bar the entry level model come with a terabyte HDD, so plenty of room for a massive backup folder to hide away without you noticing. But I don't even use Time Machine on my Snow Leopard iMac because the model is 6 years old and while its HDD is still ample for my needs, it would very quickly fill up if I tried to keep multiple former states on it. And yes, I do have an external HDD but it's really only big enough for my video projects plus a couple of incremental backups using the ancient but functional Backup utility that was sold with DotMac subscriptions, back in the day.

[downquark1]

Surely the size reduces itself when low on disk space.

[Lew]

I would imagine it works in a similar way to the deleted items folder on the TiVo and older backups will be deleted when space is required.

[moiraf100]

All gone now :-)