How do I delete Time Machine backups in Big Sur?

MissSuperYellow wrote:

When I'm in Time Machine, that dropdown menu no longer has an option to delete backups, and right clicking on a file or folder in Time Machine also doesn't have an option to delete that backup anymore.

Yes it does. You must be in yesterday or earlier for that option to be visible.

Time machine should delete the old backups if needed. You can no longer delete as before within TM. In your case not sure why it will not make the room. Worse case is to start a new clean TM backup with a new drive and keep your old one if you need the info..

There is a point when it can no longer delete old backups.

When it says it is deleting "old" backups, it is deleting backups of files that no longer exist on your Mac. It doesn't duplicate files that have not changed, so there isn't any space taken up at each backup if the file has not changed.

If you are at the point that it cannot free space, you might as well erase and start over. Time Machine is not an archival backup in that it keeps a copy of everything you once had on your Mac. It is only designed to provide a copy of the current state of your Mac's drives. If it cannot free any more free space, all historical data should have been deleted already.

If the backup drive is a spinning hard drive, then it must make contiguous space available to make more backups. If the only space available is scatter about the drive, it may not be able to write a backup even though there may be enough space scattered about the drive.

I Have this issue too. I'm using a trashcan 6,1 12 core maxxed and I use it professionally working intimately with many peoples' intellectual property so it very important to me. But TM is just hosed once it decides i don't have enough space on my TM partition, it does not let me continue where to 8500 GB of data left off. Took me 20 minutes to send the 2021-06-09-160510.inProgress file to the trash. But i did, and now its still doing same ishlez le sigh

Just erase the Time Machine partition.

Is Big Sur missing this function?

Missing? More like removed, it seems. I would imagine it has to do with it using APFS snapshots, but not sure.

I agree. I no longer see any menu to manually delete backups no matter how far back I go. Appears to be gone with Big Sur and APFS TM.