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How do I free up space on Time Capsule?

For some reason, recently my Time Capsule decided to back up a directory as "new" several times. I ran iDefrag before, so maybe permissions were changed or something. Anyway, I went from having 200Gb free to have 17. I opened Time Machine and deleted the directory in question (using the "all") option, but the space has not freed up. I'm loate to format and start over because then I would lose 3 months worth of backups (one reason I bought te TC in the first place). Is there a way to force Time Capsule to mark that space as free?

Macbook 2GHz C2D, 3Gb RAM, 250Gb HDD, Mac OS X (10.5.2), Other : 8Gb iPod Touch, 500Gb Time Capsule, Wireless Alu Keyboard

Posted on Jul 21, 2008 9:47 PM

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2 replies

Sep 15, 2008 8:13 PM in response to Xian Rinpoche

Xian,

The answer and fix may have been discovered by a poster in the macosxhints forums: [http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-84284.html]

Essentially, while Time Machine DOES delete old backups from the sparsebundle, it DOES NOT free up the space occupied by those old backups. Eventually, "all previous backups were deleted and no space was gained. . . . What appears to be going on here is that the sparsebundle isn't self-shrinking - unused bands aren't being automagically discarded."

The solution is to compact the TM backup sparsebundle in Terminal using:

hdiutil compact yoursparsebundlefilename.

He concludes, "I gained 30+gb of space on the backup volume by compacting that sparsebundle. And now TM runs just fine, since it has plenty of space."

Obviously, this is a bug in TM. It does not appear to effect everyone, and only seems to appear under certain curcumstances.

Let us know if this works for you.

How do I free up space on Time Capsule?

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