How to clean up Time Machine drive?

[thadoggfather]

I have a 1TB external but it's almost full. I have so many backups of Time Machine I made along the way, but I don't need all the Applications folders that have been copied a million times.

What I want to do is consolidate my Movies, Music, Documents, and Photos folders from each partition and that's all I really need. The rest I can wipe so I can clear up half this drive for future backups and such.

Thanks help please!

 

[sadcamper]

As long as you don't need the old backups, Time Machine will replace them automatically once the drive is full.

 

[raxafarian]

As long as you have everything you need on your computer I'd probably repartition the external drive and set time machine to exclude whatever you want excluded and start fresh.

Time machine will utilize the entire volume so partition the drive into two (or whatever you need) and assign one partition to time machine. You want a pretty good chunk available for TM though so I'd probably make a 300GB partition for misc. backups and 700GB for time machine.