Deleting files from hard drive

selmascho wrote:

I have a backup on an external hard drive, and now I want to delete files from this hard drive. I do not wish to delete the entire backup file, but items within it. Whenever I try to delete any item, a message saying that this can not be done as backup objects cannot be changed appears. What can I do?

Additionally, I have deleted whole backup files from the hard drive disk, but now I can't delete them from the waste bin on my Macbook, saying I do not have the rights to delete such files.

For information, I have a MacBook Pro, and the hard drive in question is a LaCie one.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.14

You should not try and micro -manage Time Machine backups....it is easily corruptible.

The main advantage of TM is that it creates recursive backups—enabling you to restore a specific file or the entire drive— from a certain point in time.

Back up your Mac with Time Machine: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250

You can read much more on the subject:

Time Machine and the new APFS, ref: etresoft—

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252352344?answerId=254443010022#254443010022

Trying to delete TM backups in Finder—misguided ref: Grant Bennet-Alder

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252351169?answerId=254445017022&login=true

The only way to properly manage the size of TimeMachine data set is to manage the amount of the data being backed up to the TM drive. You do that by deleting data off your internal drive. That can be accomplished in several ways: copying data to an external drive and then deleting the copied data file on the internal drive, the use of iCloud to manage file storage and/or the use of a cloud backup service. iCloud was not designed o be a backup solution.

Once you've reduced the size of the internal drives data to be copied, you have to wipe the TM drive and reestablish that drive as a TimeMachine drive. The very nature of TimeMachine is to retain all data once copied unless space is running low then TM itself will start to delete the oldest data. That wiping removes all data but if you don't start fresh you'll not be managing the amount of data of the Time Machine.

Hi selmascho,

Time Machine backups are not meant to be managed directly - doing so will cause various errors and issues.

If you want to delete previous backups manually, you can do so via the tmutil command-line tool. Also, Time Machine already removes the oldest backups if it starts to run out of space.

Just out of curiosity, why do you want to remove files from the drive? Are you trying to store other data alongside the backups?