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pbenji

Q: Deleting back up, problem?

Hello everyone,

 

My question is,

 

Is every copy made on my external disk just an addition of things I acquired since the last back up

or

Is every copy made on my external disk a full copy of my mac?

 

I have 24 back ups on my external disk which takes a huge amount of space and I was wondering if I could delete all the other 23 copies...
Do I explain myself?

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)

Posted on Jul 21, 2016 1:35 AM

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Q: Deleting back up, problem?

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  • by Esquared,

    Esquared Esquared Jul 21, 2016 1:55 AM in response to pbenji
    Level 6 (8,405 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jul 21, 2016 1:55 AM in response to pbenji

    Normally only new items are added to the backup, and there should be only Backups.backupd item on the disk. If new ones are created everytime, there's something wrong – possibly with the disk you are backupping to.

  • by pbenji,

    pbenji pbenji Jul 21, 2016 2:48 AM in response to Esquared
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jul 21, 2016 2:48 AM in response to Esquared

    There is in fact only one file called backups.backupdb but inside this file are 24 dates when backups were made.

    The whole backups.backupdb is 655 GB. That's a lot!

  • by Esquared,

    Esquared Esquared Jul 21, 2016 4:12 AM in response to pbenji
    Level 6 (8,405 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jul 21, 2016 4:12 AM in response to pbenji

    Ah, now it's clear. Please ignore anything you see in that folder. The items within it are just 'aliases' or 'symlinks'. As I said only new items are added. Only when the disk gets full, Time Machine will start deleting the oldest items in the backup.

     

    To summarize: what you are seeing is absolutely normal.