Deleting old Time Machine backups from another Mac?

Discussion in 'macOS' started by jent, Jan 22, 2012.

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  1. jent, Jan 22, 2012

    jent macrumors 6502a

    jent

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    #1
    My entire family and I back up to a Time Capsule and it works great. I no longer live at home and when I visit I don't bring my old MacBook with me (which accounts for half a terabyte of backup data). Now that I'm on my new MacBook Air, what can I do to safely delete my old MacBook Time Machine backup on the family's Time Capsule? Thanks!
     
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  2. Weaselboy, Jan 23, 2012

    Weaselboy Moderator

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    #2
    While on the family network, just start Finder and click on Time Machine at the left, then look at the backup sets like I show in my screen cap. From the backup name and date figure out which one is for your machine. Then just select it and do command-delete to delete the file (it is actually a sparse bundle disk image). If it is a large file, it will take some time to delete. That's it.

    [​IMG]
     
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  3. jent, Jan 23, 2012

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    #3
    Weaselboy, thanks for the suggestion and screenshot! I just want to cautiously ask if that has the ability to corrupt anything on the Time Capsule or Time Machine backups for other family members. A few forums posts in the Apple Community Discussions board say to use the Terminal and not to do what you said, and I'm wondering why that might be.
     
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  4. Weaselboy, Jan 23, 2012

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    #4
    Each backup set has its own sparse bundle like the two you see in my Finder window. One has nothing to do with the other and can safely be deleted. I have done it several time when I got new machines.

    I think the terminal commands are talking about deleting older version of the same backup set?
     
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  5. jent, Jan 24, 2012

    jent thread starter macrumors 6502a

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    #5
    Should it take several hours to delete a Time Capsule Time Machine backup?
     
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  6. Weaselboy, Jan 24, 2012

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    #6
    It could. In your original post you said your Macbook TM backup is about 500GB? Last time I deleted about 25GB when I swapped MacBooks, I think it took 15-20 minutes or so. So with yours being much larger, I suppose a few hours could be required.

    Did you turn off TM backups in your Macbook before you started this? Otherwise it might try to do a backup while you are deleting maybe and hang things up?
     
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  7. jent, Jan 24, 2012

    jent thread starter macrumors 6502a

    jent

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    #7
    I got my MacBook, disabled Time Machine, it didn't delete the Time Machine backup, and even though I was not at my parents' home on their wifi, I was still able to remote start deleting (I have about 100GB left to delete which I'll do when I'm back from school).

    On that note, could I theoretically back up to a Time Capsule on a different wifi network since I was able to delete a backup off one yesterday?
     
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