Manually Thinning a Time Machine Backup?

Question

Manually Thinning a Time Machine Backup?

I've got Time Machine backing up to a 100 GB internal partition and it currently occupies about 90 GB of that disk. I would like to shrink that partition to 80 GB, which I would do using iPartition. However, due to the data being over 80 GB, I need to lose at least 10 GB. Is it possible to manually thin my backups?

3GHz Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.5)

Posted on Oct 31, 2008 6:08 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 31, 2008 6:40 AM in response to Stuart Wheeler

Hello Stuart:

You can manually delete backups from Time Machine.

Open Time Machine. Click on the backup you wish to delete. Click on the little gear. A dropdown menu will give you the delete backup option.

Barry

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Answer 2

Oct 31, 2008 9:26 AM in response to Barry Hemphill

Hi Barry,

thanks for your response. I was already aware of the ability to delete the backups of individual items from Time Machine. What I really want is a way to prompt Time Machine to thin the backup by a certain amount as if it was making space for more recent data, which would prompt it to delete old, archived data, rather than me have to pick through 10 GB of data and delete each file by hand.

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Answer 3

V.K.

Level 9

56,192 points

Oct 31, 2008 9:46 AM in response to Stuart Wheeler

Stuart Wheeler wrote:
Hi Barry,

thanks for your response. I was already aware of the ability to delete the backups of individual items from Time Machine. What I really want is a way to prompt Time Machine to thin the backup by a certain amount as if it was making space for more recent data, which would prompt it to delete old, archived data, rather than me have to pick through 10 GB of data and delete each file by hand.

barry is not talking about backups of individual items. when you click on the "gear button" while in TM interface you'll see two choices: "delete all backups of this item" and "delete backup". choosing the latter will delete the whole TM backup for that time point.

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Answer 4

Oct 31, 2008 9:53 AM in response to V.K.

Oh sorry. My apologies to Barry for misunderstanding. Thanks, VK, I'll give that a go.

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