Deleting Time Machine folders

[Tex-Twil]

Hi,
I would like to make my TM backup a bit slimmer and delete some folders but I'm not sure how TM works.

Can I simply delete an entire TM folder of a given date e.g. 2009-08-29-190000 without affecting the others ? Or are the backup made "incrementally" in which case the last backup needs all previous backups in order to be restored ?

I believe that the backups are independent but I just want to be sure.


Thanks,
Tex

 

[sananda]

I'm not sure but I don't think what you are proposing will work out.

You can go into the Time Machine interface, use the big silver arrow to go back to the date you had in mind (or use stacked dates on the right), then click on the gear symbol and then on "delete backup". The folder will then be deleted.

 

[Tex-Twil]

I'm not sure but I don't think what you are proposing will work out.

You can go into the Time Machine interface, use the big silver arrow to go back to the date you had in mind (or use stacked dates on the right), then click on the gear symbol and then on "delete backup". The folder will then be deleted.

I don't want to delete a folder which inside a backup. I want to delete several entire "snapshots" (= dates) of the TM and just keep the most recent one since each backup folder is huge.

 

[sananda]

I don't want to delete a folder which inside a backup. I want to delete several entire "snapshots" (= dates) of the TM and just keep the most recent one since each backup folder is huge.

The method I set out will delete an entire single backup such "2009-08-14-005831" (the last five digits being the exact time of the backup) if you navigate to the correct day AND time.

 

[Tex-Twil]

The method I set out will delete an entire single backup such "2009-08-14-005831" (the last five digits being the exact time of the backup) if you navigate to the correct day AND time.

ok.
Now the thins is that my external HD is not set as a TM disk of my current installation. It is a backup of my previous Leopard. Now I have SL and before setting TM again (from scratch) I want to backup one backup of the previous one

Damn it's getting complex

I think I will just copy the folder linked by the "latest" link and delete the others. Then set up TM again.

Thanks for helping,
Tex

 

[dyn]

In theory you can delete those folders since Time Machine uses hard links to link to files & folders. Using hard links is a way of saving disk space. Instead of copying the file/folder again you just simply hard link to it. By using hard links it seems as if the file/folder is real and in each backup, this would not be the case with symbolic links (they appear as "aliases").