You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
I have been using Time Machine to back-up my Mac to a 1 TB external drive instead of backing up to the cloud. That hard drive is almost full even though the Mac internal hard drive is storing only 6 Gig out of 1TB. Instead of getting a new hard drive, can I/should I delete the oldest back-ups to create room for new back-ups?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
No! Time Machine does that automatically.
It is completely normal and expected for a TM backup drive to be "full". That is its normal state of operation when it has accumulated a number of incremental backups over a period of time. Older, "expired" backups are deleted automatically to make room for newer ones.
If you were to manually intervene and erase backups using the Finder, that will corrupt the backups, making them useless. So don't do that. Just let TM work.
You may wish to consider getting a larger capacity backup drive. Even 1 TB isn't that much any more. Keep using it, but one and only one backup drive does not comprise a robust strategy. Why? Any device can fail at any time, including backup drives, and you never want to be left with no backups — which would be the result of trying to manually delete TM backup files. Time Machine will back up to as many external drives as you wish to provide. The price difference between a 1 TB drive and a 2 TB drive has become negligible.
FYI iCloud isn't a backup system and cannot be used as such. It can store whatever you want in iCloud but it's not a backup system in any traditional sense of the term.
No! Time Machine does that automatically.
It is completely normal and expected for a TM backup drive to be "full". That is its normal state of operation when it has accumulated a number of incremental backups over a period of time. Older, "expired" backups are deleted automatically to make room for newer ones.
If you were to manually intervene and erase backups using the Finder, that will corrupt the backups, making them useless. So don't do that. Just let TM work.
You may wish to consider getting a larger capacity backup drive. Even 1 TB isn't that much any more. Keep using it, but one and only one backup drive does not comprise a robust strategy. Why? Any device can fail at any time, including backup drives, and you never want to be left with no backups — which would be the result of trying to manually delete TM backup files. Time Machine will back up to as many external drives as you wish to provide. The price difference between a 1 TB drive and a 2 TB drive has become negligible.
FYI iCloud isn't a backup system and cannot be used as such. It can store whatever you want in iCloud but it's not a backup system in any traditional sense of the term.
Extremely helpful. Thank you!
👍
Can I delete old Time Machine backups to save space on MacBook
