Time Machine has stopped automatically deleting older backups to make more room. To make more room on my Time Capsule if I opened the iMac.sparsebundle and accessed my Time Machine backups and deleted 1 whole backup (1.46TB) what effect if any would that have on my more recent backups? iMac OS Big Sur
Thanks for any help
iMac 27″, macOS 11.3
Apple does not support this if there are any problems. I would not recommend that you do this unless you are willing to risk corrupting your entire backup file.
If you decide to risk this anyway, make a backup of all the data on the Time Capsule.....before....you try to manually delete any backups.
A better and much safer plan would be to connect a USB hard drive to the USB port on the Time Capsule and use the Archive function in AirPort Utility to copy all of the data on the Time Capsule hard drive over to the USB drive.
Then, Erase the Time Capsule hard drive and start over again with a new backup and move forward.
Chances are, after a month or two, you won't really need all the old backups on the USB drive and you can erase the USB drive and use it as a spare.
Apple does not support this if there are any problems. I would not recommend that you do this unless you are willing to risk corrupting your entire backup file.
If you decide to risk this anyway, make a backup of all the data on the Time Capsule.....before....you try to manually delete any backups.
A better and much safer plan would be to connect a USB hard drive to the USB port on the Time Capsule and use the Archive function in AirPort Utility to copy all of the data on the Time Capsule hard drive over to the USB drive.
Then, Erase the Time Capsule hard drive and start over again with a new backup and move forward.
Chances are, after a month or two, you won't really need all the old backups on the USB drive and you can erase the USB drive and use it as a spare.
Thanks for your response and I thought I would try your
suggestion. I opened the Airport Utility and brought up
the same window as shown on your link. it showed the
Data folder as in yours and the “Archive Disk” option
which brought me to the destination option which was
greyed out with “No Airport disks available” shown and
no other options. I have 2 USB external drives ( don’t
ask :)) 1 is a thumb drive if that matters. They both have
less storage than the Time Capsule. Do you think that is
why they don’t show up? If you think that is the case I can
certainly get a larger one.Thanks for your help.
I would not recommend that you trust all of the data on the Time Capsule drive to a thumb drive, but it is your call.
The drive must meet the following requirements for the Archive process:
1) Formatted in Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
2) Be at least as large as the Time Capsule hard drive in terms of capacity
The drive will not show up in AirPort Utility unless it meets the requirement in 1), and even if the drive shows up in AirPort Utility, 2) You won't be able to initiate the Archive process to copy data over to another drive unless it is at least as large as the Time Capsule drive.
The Time Capsule indicator light will blink amber during the Archive process, which will probably take 8-10 hours or so.
Time Capsule
