Preview Taking Up space, (Auto Save), no info on the net

[michael chang4]

G'day I recently Purchased a Mac Book Pro( 2 months old) and the hard drive space is being gobbled up by preview.

http://puu.sh/81qDU.png

I pretty much exclusively use this mac for uni stuff (very little movies/games etc etc), i've noticed that when ever I HIGHLIGHT on a pdf document using preview, preview autosaves and constantly eats up my hard drive space.

Does anyone have a solution for this? I can't find any explanations on the internet

 

[Kaveman]

I'm not sure its Preview, as the saves are not full document saves. The Mac is always making a series of saves so you can rollback the document to any point. If it doesn't have enough space it will purge these saves.

Remember 120 Gig is a very small computer SSD drive now days, my wife is constantly off loading files because space is so limited.

I use Grand Perspective to find the files taking up drive space.

 

[michael chang4]

i think i've found the problem,
http://puu.sh/81vFE.png
On the left hand side is my current pdf document, and on the right hand side is like the autosaves that are made continuously, each save is about 1gb( big text book) and has taken up heaps of space, is there anyway to get rid of these old saves?????

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Do you have a Gmail account by any chance? That has been known to eat up free hard drive space:

If so:

-Apple Mail > Preferences... > Accounts
-Highlight Gmail on left
-Click Advanced
-Under "Keep copies of messages for offline viewing" set the drop-down to "Don't keep copies of any messages"

Also, make sure you don't keep hundreds or thousands of emails in your inbox.

C

 

[Kaveman]

I think changing the name of the Document will break the backups.

But as I said these are maintained by OS X and it will delete them when it needs the space.

 

[Cory Cooper]

You posted that right when I was typing my response, so ignore it.

You latest image looks to me like that PDF document, which looks to be huge, is being replicated hourly on your hard drive as a local Time Machine snapshot, instead of a regular Time Machine snapshot. If you are opening that PDF (is it a textbook?) and adding notes all day, them Time Machine sees that it has changed and re-adds it to the snapshot.

If you have a portable Mac - MacBook/MacBook Pro/MacBook Air, then TM is creating local snapshots which can quickly fill your hard drive. Simply turn off Time Machine and it will stop doing the hourly updates. Turn TM on when you have a dedicated hard drive , let it run, then off again.

OS X Mountain Lion: About local snapshots

You can also totally disable the local snapshots by entering the following in Terminal:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

Then enter your admin password when prompted.

It will disable the hourly snapshots eating your hard drive space, but still work normally with your dedicated Time Machine drive.

C

 

[michael chang4]

thanks guys much appreciated,
yeah it's a textbook (1400 pages ahha)

 

[harsha]

G'day I recently Purchased a Mac Book Pro( 2 months old) and the hard drive space is being gobbled up by preview.

http://puu.sh/81qDU.png

I pretty much exclusively use this mac for uni stuff (very little movies/games etc etc), i've noticed that when ever I HIGHLIGHT on a pdf document using preview, preview autosaves and constantly eats up my hard drive space.

Does anyone have a solution for this? I can't find any explanations on the internet

I have the exact same problem, stil not able to find solution for this, can you please tell me how you solved your problem?