So OSX Mavericks has been released and, what’s more, as a free upgrade for ALL MAC USERS! After downloading the file (a whopping 5.29 GB), users might be faced with a problem saying that OSX Mavericks cannot be installed on this disk because it is being used as a Time Machine Backup as seen below.

Note that the highlighted disk is actually the hard drive of the Mac!

The culprit turns out to be the folder on the hard drive named Backups.backupdb
This folder is located when you first enter you hard disk. Go to Finder, then press on the hard drive’s name and you should find Backups.backupdb there.

First of all, it is very important that you back up using Time Machine and on an external disk (or Time Capsule).

After making sure you have your backups somewhere safe, simply drag the folder Backups.backupdb to the Trash BUT DON’T EMPTY THE TRASH!
(unless you have saved your backups on an external disk and want to permanently delete the backups from your mac).

Then drag the folder from the Trash to Desktop.

After this, Mavericks’ installer will allow you to install Mavericks on your Mac’s hard drive. Depending on your machine’s speed the installation should take between 60 and 90 min. After successfully installing Mavericks, drag Backups.backupdb from the desktop back to its original location and you should be fine!

UPDATE:

If you are unable to find this folder on your hard drive, here is another approach that will work:

1) Open terminal

2) Type the following command to temporarily disable local Time Machine backups

sudo tmutil disablelocal

3) Enter your admin password

4) Install OSX Mavericks

5) When Mavericks finishes its installation, to turn local Time Machine backups back on type the following command

sudo tmutil enablelocal

6) Enter your admin password

7)Enjoy Mavericks!

Let us know if this helped you in the comments section!