How to Delete Time Machine Backups

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Level 1

14 points

How to Delete Time Machine Backups

So... My time machine backups are taking up over 2TB of space. I've gone to the Backups.backupdb folder and deleted all the old backups from the system. (put them in the trash, and then clicked uption trash to gether all the files to delete. [this process takes forever]) And now that all of those previos backups that spanned back a full year and a half a gone!!!!!! BUT... I only saved like 100GB of space. Tell me how that makes sense? Hah.

I know there are some hidden folders within time machine, and those most have a ton of data in them. Is the best thing for me to do, just to delete the entire Backups.backupdb folder and redo time machine? That doesn't seem like the way an apple rep wuold tell me to do it. Hah. I would like to be able to keep at least one backup on my external harddrive where time machine is stored, just in case the computer hard drive crashed. I'd have a safe backup... but I can't keep running time machine while it's taking up 2TB on my 6TB Lacie thunderbolt drive.

Any suggestions? Any more information I can give?

Thanks a ton,

JS

iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9), 24 GB of Ram - i7

Posted on Nov 4, 2013 11:07 AM

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Answer 1

Rudegar

Level 10

170,748 points

Nov 4, 2013 11:31 AM in response to wetdog160

timemachine for me show up as a drive in finger there I can delete it as I see fit

finger is not just a full backup of your storage it adds changes over time so it will continue to inc in size because when you download a file it saves it as a story point when you delete it it's another story point and so on

it let you move in time not just go from now to then as a carbon copy would

when I run out of space I clear my timemachine backup drive and start over

I never need the time machine part of the backup system so I can clear it without problems

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Answer 2

wetdog160 Author

Level 1

14 points

Jan 9, 2014 3:51 PM in response to Rudegar

Ok. yes yes we've got all this info, but the part about how to delete the backups... that was my question. If you know of an easier way than 13 hours of deleting, please be my guest.

Thanks man,

JS

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Answer 3

Apr 16, 2014 2:21 PM in response to wetdog160

Not that I know of. Enjoy your 13 hours of deleting. Sounds about right. It just took me 25 minutes to delete a 200 GB sparsebundle file.

Also takes me over 30 hours to transfer my 2TB capsule, to a new 3TB capsule.

Probably the worst product/software they have, hands down. Soooooo slow, uninformative, and just generally not good.

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Answer 4

Apr 16, 2014 6:44 PM in response to dantothe4thpower

That still isn't an answer to the question. The question was: HOW to safely delete Time Machine backups completely from a disk?

I have the same question. I just started a backup, then changed my mind. Now 36 GB of my drive is missing. (I know, that doesn't sound like a lot, but I want it back.)

So: how does one completely delete a Time Machine backup without messing up a disk? I don't want to try to just reduce the space used. I don't want to preserve what is in the backup. I don't want to delete the FILES in the backup. I want the entire backup gone from the drive. How do I do that?

Surely there must be some way.

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Answer 5

den.thed

Level 9

77,176 points

Apr 16, 2014 8:39 PM in response to wetdog160

Time Machine was not designed to keep only one backup and deleting old ones is a real pain.

If you do not need hourly back-ups, then turn off Time Machine, erase the External Hard Drive using Disk Utility and use something like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper that allow you to choose when and how you backup.

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Answer 6

Apr 16, 2014 8:52 PM in response to den.thed

That isn't an answer either.

The question was: HOW do you DELETE an ENTIRE existing Time Machine archive, WITHOUT erasing the whole disk?

Not how to keep a backup, or how to reconfigure Time Machine, or how to delete some backups but not others. The question was how to completely remove it from a disk, preferably while retaining the other data on the disk.

But since I saw wetdog160's question and repeated it myself, I have found a possible answer: one of the methods on this page should do the trick.

http://pondini.org/TM/12.html

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