Possible to manually purge/delete old Time Machine backups?

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Level 1

5 points

Possible to manually purge/delete old Time Machine backups?

I use a 1.5TB eSATA drive for my Time Machine backups. It's gotten to the point where that drive has been hovering around 5GB of free space and TM keeps telling me it's deleting old backups multiple times a day. Except from being a nuisance, that's not a problem as far as I can tell, but I'm wondering if there's a way to tell it to delete older backups within a certain range of dates... say purge everything older than a couple months. Either manually or by some preference in TM. Any way to do something like that???

Thanks in advance.

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Posted on Jun 16, 2010 11:05 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Jun 16, 2010 11:11 PM in response to smilingdog

Do not attempt to delete files or folders from the TM backup manually or you risk completely damaging the backups. TM purges automatically until it no longer can free up sufficient space. Either erase the backup drive and start over or replace the current drive with a larger one.

For more information read the User Tips at the top of this forum's Topics list or visit A whole lot about Time Machine.

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Answer 2

Király

Level 6

10,017 points

Jun 16, 2010 11:15 PM in response to smilingdog

You can delete old backups one at a time through the TM interface (click the gear button.) But there's no way to delete multiple old backups in one operation.

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Answer 3

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Jun 17, 2010 8:10 AM in response to smilingdog

smilingdog wrote:
I use a 1.5TB eSATA drive for my Time Machine backups. It's gotten to the point where that drive has been hovering around 5GB of free space and TM keeps telling me it's deleting old backups multiple times a day. Except from being a nuisance, that's not a problem as far as I can tell,

No, that's exactly what it's designed to do:
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As the others say, unless there's a problem, it's best to just let it do it's thing.

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Answer 4

ashhast

Level 1

0 points

Jul 28, 2010 2:38 PM in response to Király

Király wrote:
You can delete old backups one at a time through the TM interface (click the gear button.) But there's no way to delete multiple old backups in one operation.

i need to delete one specific part of a recent TM back up..160gb in size..

can you step me thru how to do this?

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Answer 5

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Jul 28, 2010 3:42 PM in response to ashhast

ashhast wrote:

Király wrote:
You can delete old backups one at a time through the TM interface (click the gear button.) But there's no way to delete multiple old backups in one operation.

i need to delete one specific part of a recent TM back up..160gb in size..

can you step me thru how to do this?

You can delete all backups of selected items. But that gets all backups of all versions of it. If you created a file and it was backed it up, then changed it and it was backed-up again, you cannot delete the backups of only one version.

See #12 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

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