Time Capsule: 4 macs, 1 to be removed, how to recover space on time capsule

On your "main" Mac....the one that you usually use to set up new devices or make changes on the network......

Open Finder > Applications > Utilities > AirPort Utility

Click on the picture of the Time Capsule, and another small window will appear with information about the Time Capsule

Just under the network name, look for the IP Address of the Time Capsule, and write that down

The IP address may be something like 10.0.1.x or 192.168.1.x for example.

Post back when you have completed this task, and we will continue.

OK, thanks. The following is not easy for most users, so please read very carefully.

Now click anywhere on the open desktop of your Mac so that the Finder menus appear at the uppermost top of the computer screen

Click the Go menu, then click Connect to Server

Enter afp://IPAddress in the Server Address box.....so for example, if the IP address of the Time Capsule is 192.168.102 then you would enter.....

afp://192.168.1.102 and then click Connect

You may be asked to enter the Time Capsule device password if you have not accessed the Time Capsule drive in the past

Another window will now open that displays a number of different sparsebundle files.....one for each of the Macs that have been backing up

Click on the name of the sparsebundle file for the Mac whose backups you want to delete so that the file is highlighted

Please be very careful to select the correct sparsebundle file here....the one whose backups you want to delete.

Now click the "gear "icon that appears at the top of the window and then click Move to Trash. This action cannot be cancelled.

You will need to leave your Mac powered on during the process. It will take a long time for the file to be deleted.....at least as long as it took when you originally backed up the Mac for the first time.....so you might want to to do this late at night....right before you head to bed, so the file deletion will occur overnight and be done by the next morning.

Very strange. Take a look at the Trash on your Mac and see if the file is in there. If it is, it should be deleting files.

Make sure that you don't need the backups for the specific Mac if you delete the sparsebundle file for the Mac.

Once you click "delete", there is no going back.

If you had previously deleted backups from within the Time Machine application, then it is possible that the sparsebundle file did not have that much data in there when you deleted the other sparsebundle file.

I deleted a sparsebundle file for an old Mac recently, and it took at least 3-4 hours with a wired Ethernet connection to the Mac. Over wireless, it would probably have taken 2-3 times longer.

The "quick delete" appears to be a new, undocumented feature with Yosemite. I asked Apple Support about this.....and the basic response was......"this is news to us".

I did try this on a Mac running Yosemite, and the sparsebundle file did indeed delete in a few minutes. That is good news for users who need to delete older backups without having to wait a long time for the process to complete.

I don't have another Mac handy that is running Mavericks to test things out that way, but if I remember correctly, sparsebundle files delete very slowly on that operating system and all other previous operating systems.