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c073186

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 2, 2007
821
3
My Time Machine backups are getting rather large and I really don't need backups dating back six months. Is there a way to go in and delete certain dates?
 
As soon as the parition fills, Time Machine will start deleting old backups to make room for new backups. Fooling around with the time machine partiton directly is a good way to have a problem.
 
I recently dragged the oldest backups into the trash and caused chaos, I had to use apple care for the first time and had to start all over again as i had trashed the first backup and blocked up the trash!!
I think there is a proper option for doing this but i am not the person to tell you about it!!!!!!
 
The proper option is to just let Time Machine take care of itself. If you want free space on an external disk then you should have partitioned it.
 
I recently dragged the oldest backups into the trash and caused chaos, I had to use apple care for the first time and had to start all over again as i had trashed the first backup and blocked up the trash!!
I think there is a proper option for doing this but i am not the person to tell you about it!!!!!!

Download MacPilot or Onyx- both have a "force empty trash" option which does just that even with multiple time machine backups in the trash. I saved loads of disk space this way
 
Download MacPilot or Onyx- both have a "force empty trash" option which does just that even with multiple time machine backups in the trash. I saved loads of disk space this way
Thats interesting, I tried something called super empty trash and then could not get rid of that either.
The chap i spoke to at apple care explianed that there is one proper backup and the rest are aliases, I had thrashed the proper one and could not restore it??. I even went into terminal and very carefully typed in a sudo command:eek: that didn't work. I tell you i was stumped:confused:
 
I recently dragged the oldest backups into the trash and caused chaos, I had to use apple care for the first time and had to start all over again as i had trashed the first backup and blocked up the trash!!
I think there is a proper option for doing this but i am not the person to tell you about it!!!!!!

Haha I did this too. DON’T do that!

Like people said, Time Machine will delete your oldest backups when it needs the space. But if you’re using the HD for other things than just Time Machine, you might want to manually delete some backups to make space.

Despite what people are saying, there is a simple and proper way to do it. Enter Time Machine, go to the backup you want to delete, click the action button (this guy Screen shot 2009-10-06 at 6.23.22 PM.png), and click “Delete Backup”. You’ll just have to type in your admin password then. So simple, it’s easy to miss.
 
Haha I did this too. DON’T do that!

Like people said, Time Machine will delete your oldest backups when it needs the space. But if you’re using the HD for other things than just Time Machine, you might want to manually delete some backups to make space.

Despite what people are saying, there is a simple and proper way to do it. Enter Time Machine, go to the backup you want to delete, click the action button (this guy View attachment 197790), and click “Delete Backup”. You’ll just have to type in your admin password then. So simple, it’s easy to miss.

Yeah I did eventually find that ... only problem is that it is rather time consuming to have to individually delete 60 backups...
 
Yeah I did eventually find that ... only problem is that it is rather time consuming to have to individually delete 60 backups...
Uh boy...

Dude, you were given a solution. A solution 999/1000 people would never need because of the inherent protection TM provides by actually "keeping" its backups. (what a novel idea).

And now you are complaining because you have to type and click your mouse for a few minutes? Unbelievable.
 
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