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ignatius345

macrumors G3
Original poster
Aug 20, 2015
8,541
15,261
Time Machine seems to be hanging on to old backups of a device I've taken out of service and I'm wondering if there's a way to fix it.

I have mine set up to back up my main internal drive (Media) and my external media drive (iMac).

Some months back, I migrated the media drive to a new and larger SSD. But now, in Time Machine I'm still seeing backups of the old drive (which it's labelled Media 1) -- which you can see stopped being updated at the beginning of April. I had assumed that when it purged the last old backup on which the old Media drive was present, it would free up a bunch of space, but it seems to not be the case.

I'm down to like 10 days worth of backup versions, and I suspect the "phantom" old Media drive backup is taking up space so my backup history is so short. For reference, my backup drive is 4 TB and the total data on the iMac and Media drive is roughly 2 TB.

Anything I can do about this? Do I need to just wipe the drive and start over to clear out that old "Media 1" backup?

iMac 2025-06-30 at 10.02.23 AM.png
 
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(edit: I "resolved" this by wiping my Time Machine drive and starting over. You *used* to be able to right-click on an item in Time Machine and delete it from all backups but sadly they got rid of that feature.)
 
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