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I use Time Machine a lot (on an old iMac [24"and 8GB of memory] from early, 2009 under El Capitan). I use it to back up everything -- even Parallels Desktop for Mac and Photos.The trouble is that my Time Machine backup is too big on the Time Capsule. How do I make it smaller without starting over?
iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6), Time Machine and Time Capsule
The biggest backup will be the Parallels VMs. Every time you access a VM, especially if you update applications or even just edit documents, it will change the size of the VM. This will trigger Time Machine to treat it a changed file and will need to back it up.
I would venture to say, if you exclude these VMs from your TM backups (note: you can do this via Parallels for each VM), your TM backups will decrease significantly. You can then copy the VMs manually when required to another drive for 'backups.'
The biggest backup will be the Parallels VMs. Every time you access a VM, especially if you update applications or even just edit documents, it will change the size of the VM. This will trigger Time Machine to treat it a changed file and will need to back it up.
I would venture to say, if you exclude these VMs from your TM backups (note: you can do this via Parallels for each VM), your TM backups will decrease significantly. You can then copy the VMs manually when required to another drive for 'backups.'
Well, you can risk trying to manually delete some of the older backups from the Time Capsule, but this is not recommended due to the very real possibility of the entire backup becoming corrupted.
Your best bet.....if you want to preserve your existing backups......would be to copy or Archive the contents of the Time Capsule drive to an attached USB drive for safe storage.
Then, erase the Time Capsule drive and start over with backups of the Mac again.
After a few months, chances are that you will have a good backup history on the Time Capsule, so you may no longer need the old backups on the USB drive, and you can erase the USB drive.....or.....keep the backups for a longer period if you prefer.
When the Time Capsule starts to fill up again, copy or Archive the data on the Time Capsule disk over to the USB drive again and start over again with new backups on the Time Capsule.
The way it works for me is that my Time Capsule starts to fill up after about 6-8 months. I then copy all the backups over to a USB drive at that time, erase the Time Capsule and start a new backup. I keep the backups on the USB drive up until the Time Capsule starts to fill up again, then I repeat the process. This method has worked very well for years.
Tesserax has a great suggestion for you if you can consider excluding it from your normal Time Machine backups and then backing up Parallels separately to another drive as needed.
how make time machine backup smaller?
