Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

I had totally forgotten that I had setup one of my machines with Time Machine. Most of the time it has no impact, but when you are trying to download 500GB of LLM models it makes a difference. Time Machine is supposed to be smart about local snapshots, but when you delete a lot of things like 100GB, then Space Gremlin will show that this is Restricted Files which are really Time Machine snapshots.

This gives you lots of undo, but what a pain!

Turns out it is nearly impossible to turn Time Machine off. In Sequoia even if you remove the Backup Drive in System Settings > Time Machine it is on.

So you have to go to the command line and run

tmutil listlocalsnapshots
tmutil deletelocalsnapshot
# I made the mistake of stoop tmutil too early
# so now there is an exposed /Volume file
tmutil stop

And now Time Machine is gone and at least in my case, I recovered 200GB of disk!