Reset Time Machine?

[Jungo]

As we all know TM backs up constantly and keeps files you've long ago deleted - obviously the TM backup can grow and grow -

Short of trashing the actual TM back up and re-backing up the entire computer is there a way to have time machine trash all 'trashed' content?

 

[johnhurley]

As we all know TM backs up constantly and keeps files you've long ago deleted - obviously the TM backup can grow and grow -

Short of trashing the actual TM back up and re-backing up the entire computer is there a way to have time machine trash all 'trashed' content?

No because the whole premise of time machine is that at any point in time you could restore your machine to a point in time.

Well you could restore your machine to that point in time IF your time machine backup device has enough room so that prior backup point is still around.

So conceivably you might choose to restore your machine to 11 1/2 months ago ... and any and all stuff that has been trashed after that point in time obviously needs to be around "just in case".

I use the approach of rotating multiple external disk drives into and back out of my backup ( rotation ). Periodically and somewhat randomly I do erase the time machine partition on one of them to make it all start over. This is a deliberate choice on my part that obviously eliminates the ability from any given drive to be able to go very part back in time as a recovery point.

 

[Steve's Barber]

I really don't know why you'd want to do this. Perhaps to conserve disk space? If so you might be better off using SuperDuper (the one that costs money) to do smart backups. It will only backup changes to a single backup file.