Renamed hard drive - new Time Machine backup

[richard.mac]

renaming my hard drive caused Time Machine to make a new 190 GB backup. how can i delete this single backup to get the space back and still keep the previous and following backups?

i tried deleting the single backup for whole hard drive in the Time Machine UI , but i didn't get any the space back, the next newest backup is now 190 GB using Time Tracker as seen below.



p.s. just tried deleting all the backups of the renamed hard drive from 3 Oct and now the first backup of today is 191 GB im stumped

 

[maflynn]

You really cannot delete a specific backup within TM, its not designed that way.

To Time Machine it appears that everything changed and it will back up the entire drive as you noticed. Short of using another external drive as your TM backup and keeping this for a period of time, there's little else you can do.

 

[richard.mac]

oh ok thanks! sorry for the late reply. so there is definitely no way of clearing off this duplicate 190GB backup? anyone know?

i very much value your opinion maflynn but i just thought there must be a way. what about rm-ing the backup from Backups.backupdb in Terminal with super root privileges?

i could just start again but, i have data on my Time Machine drives that i cant move, and want to keep the backup from years ago. ill start clean as a last resort.

 

[Hal Itosis]

You really cannot delete a specific backup within TM, its not designed that way.

Yes we can, of course it is.

• Go to the "Computer" window in Finder (⇧⌘C) and
  
  
• confirm that its toolbar is visible, and that the Action menu (gear widget) is in place up there somewhere.
  
  
• With that window active (icon view recommended), engage Time Machine to enter its starfield.
  
  
• To simplify matters, click on "window 2" there (the one just behind the frontmost) to navigate back in time one step. That will reveal all backed-up volumes only (hiding other irrelevant icons, as well as mounted images which might confuse or otherwise mislead Time Capsule users).
  
  
• At this point, we can select a volume (e.g., richthomas should see icons for both the old name and the new name of his HD), and then choose Delete all backups of "NewName'" from the Action menu.

It won't happen instantaneously. Time Machine needs to crunch on a bunch of hard links to disentangle the maze it created. But eventually it will finish the task.

 

[Hal Itosis]

oh ok thanks! sorry for the late reply. so there is definitely no way of clearing off this duplicate 190GB backup? anyone know?

If it's not too late, try the steps i posted above.

i very much value your opinion maflynn but i just thought there must be a way. what about rm-ing the backup from Backups.backupdb in Terminal with super root privileges?

Going behind Time Machine's back and mucking with its database from Finder's (or Terminal's) perspective is not the best approach. Just ask Time Machine to do its own housecleaning (as described above).

 

[richard.mac]

ahh! thank you very much! selecting the newly named hard drive in the Time Machine UI and deleting all backups from one window back did the trick!

i tried deleting a single backup of the hard drive from the date Time Tracker showed the 190 GB backup and it just ended up pushing the huge backup to the next date.

 

[richard.mac]

hmm crap Time Machine started to backup soon after and kept going overnight backing up 190 GB again may have to start again.