Time Machine questionable "cleaning up"

[Waters]

Hello everyone I am not pretty sure if this is the right section, having a problem with time machine (software?) on a time capsule (hardware?)

Anyway: I have a macbook air 13' (early 2015) running Mac OS High Sierra 10.13.4, and a Time Capsule A1409.
The time capsule is not full by far, it has actually a Terabyte of free space out of 2.

I had noted, in the past, that backups of dates that I tought I should have had were greyed-out, as if they were too old (the hard drive has never been far from full in the past, either) but I wasn't sure and I still not am, so it is a moot point now.

What seems weird now, and the reason why I'm writing, is that Time Machine is performing a "cleaning up". Why is that, having so much free space? Is it compressing old files maybe, or deleting them? And if it is deleting, why?

I could not find any option to limit the space dedicated to time machine, so I have always assumed that this kind of operation should have been performed when there was not space enough, which is not the case. Can you help me to figure this out?

Thank you in advance for any help!

 

[cmaier]

Hello everyone I am not pretty sure if this is the right section, having a problem with time machine (software?) on a time capsule (hardware?)

Anyway: I have a macbook air 13' (early 2015) running Mac OS High Sierra 10.13.4, and a Time Capsule A1409.
The time capsule is not full by far, it has actually a Terabyte of free space out of 2.

I had noted, in the past, that backups of dates that I tought I should have had were greyed-out, as if they were too old (the hard drive has never been far from full in the past, either) but I wasn't sure and I still not am, so it is a moot point now.

What seems weird now, and the reason why I'm writing, is that Time Machine is performing a "cleaning up". Why is that, having so much free space? Is it compressing old files maybe, or deleting them? And if it is deleting, why?

I could not find any option to limit the space dedicated to time machine, so I have always assumed that this kind of operation should have been performed when there was not space enough, which is not the case. Can you help me to figure this out?

Thank you in advance for any help!

It's normal for it to "clean up." For example, even if you have plenty of space on the backup disk it will clear out "hourly" backups if they are very old, and replace them with "daily" backups, etc.

 

[Waters]

It's normal for it to "clean up." For example, even if you have plenty of space on the backup disk it will clear out "hourly" backups if they are very old, and replace them with "daily" backups, etc.

Do you mean that it won't delete anything but redundant files, or files that have been on the hard drive for just a fraction of a day (like downloaded-and-deleted)? That would be acceptable in this case...

Thanks for your answer!

 

[cmaier]

Do you mean that it won't delete anything but redundant files, or files that have been on the hard drive for just a fraction of a day (like downloaded-and-deleted)? That would be acceptable in this case...

Thanks for your answer!

In theory some files may be removed. For example, if six months ago you edited a file every hour over the course of a day, after “cleaning up” there may be only a single version of the file available.

 

[Waters]

More than acceptable then. Thank you.