Some of my most popular blog posts, over time, have been tips & tricks I’ve posted about how to get certain things done on the Mac. My rule of thumb for these posts is simple – if I get stumped about how to get something set up, and then after an hour of searching I find the answer, I share it here. My hope is that I’ll save other people that hour of searching.
This post is about a question I had today:
How to delete individual backups from Time Machine?
The problem I had was that the 1TB drive I have for Time Machine backups was full. Now, Time Machine is very good about deleting the oldest backups on an ongoing basis to manage space. But what if you just “need” extra space on that drive? In my case, I needed to free up about 200GB so I could copy over some files, temporarily, from a drive I was retiring.
Time Machine has a very unique UI. No menu bar, so no obvious place to click “delete a backup”. I looked everywhere. I clicked through to individual backups, but could see any button that said “remove” or “delete”.
Then I found this Mac OS X Hint from the always helpful macosxhints.com.
Turns out, when Time machine presents you with the “Finder-like” interface to your drive, it changes, subtley, the menu-items of the “gears” menu on the window. I say subtley because, of course, there is no visual indication that the “gears” menu has different menu items in this context.
One of those menu items is “Delete Backup”.
So, to delete a full backup, you just do the following:
- Navigate to the date you want to delete. In my case, I wanted to delete my oldest backup, from 1/30/2008.
- Navigate in the Finder window to your overall machine. In my case, it’s called “Powersmash G5″, where I have 2 internal drives that are backed up.
- Select the “Gear” menu, and select “Delete Backup”
- Enter the admin password for the Finder, if it asks.
My guess is that Apple wasn’t trying to make this hard – they are just suffering from a non-standard interface, and then an overloading of that “gears” menu, which I’m sure is theoretically supposed to be a “contextual menu”. For me, a menu that showed on on right-click of either the finder window itself or the Time Machine backup marker on the right would have been more obvious to me.
Hope this tip is useful to someone. It sure helped me today.
Filed under: Apple
Yes, thank you, that is very helpful! I have been searching for just over an hour.
You’re the first person I’ve found who explained this process clearly, step by step. All I wanted to know was how/if you can navigate to a certain date and delete just that date. Couldn’t get a straight answer for that simple question.
I’m buying a new external drive for my iMac, and I want to use it for a SuperDuper bootable backup, and also for Time Machine. The new version of SuperDuper allows this. What I didn’t understand was what to do if SuperDuper didn’t have enough room for the next backup, due to Time Machine eating all my drive space.
So if Time Machine doesn’t delete enough of its backups to allow SuperDuper proper space to function, then I’ll just go in there and delete the oldest backup myself. Easy enough.
Thanks again. I didn’t want to buy two drives (or partition a huge one), 1 for SD and 1 for TM, at this point. I’d like to at least use Time Machine for a while first and see how valuable it is to me.
Life saver! I’ve been trying to delete via the Finder by dragging to the Trash can, but it spent most of the day and it was only counting the items to trash – I aborted once it was counting into the millions.
Then I disabled ACLs on the external disk and tried to delete it with UNIX commands, that ran for over 12 hours and was still nowhere near done!
This method does the job and damn quick too, thankyou very much.
I have the latest updates on Leopard and I don’t see “Delete Backup” when I open Time Machine in Finder… I have “Move to Trash” and that’s it… any suggestions?
thanks!
You need to do this by going to the Finder and selecting “Computer” from the Go menu. Once that is open click on the Time Machine icon in the dock, or launch it via Spotlight. Navigate to the time of the backup you want deleted and select “Delete Backup” from the gear menu.
I found that following these instructions resulted in ALL of my backups being deleted. Perhaps there’s a bug or unclear wording in Time Machine.
After starting Time Machine, and selecting the oldest backup folder, the Gears menu displayed “Delete All Backups of ‘2008-01-13-205847′”. When I choose to continue, Time Machine displayed the dialog ‘Delete All Backups of ‘2008-01-13-205847′ with a progress bar, and removed EVERY backup on the system. The dialog always showed the January 13 date, but I could see outside of Time Machine that all backup folders were being removed one by one. Eventually every backup was deleted, except for the most recent.
We did some additional experimentation (on a different machine) and navigate to a sub-folder such as “Downloads” within a particular backup. When we choose “Delete Al Backups of ‘Dowloads’”, Time Machine delete all Downloads folders from EVERY backup. This was the behavior that we expected, based on the message.
We found that it is safest to delete an old backup from Finder (outside of Time Machine), drag the folder to the Trash, and empty the Trash. When we went back into Time Machine after deleting the backup, the backup was no longer available as expected.
JW,
Very strange… I’ve just repeated this again on my system, and it only eliminates the single backup. I’ve done this many times to free up space. Not sure why you are seeing the behavior you are.
JW
I think you are doing step 2 wrong – you appear to be navigating to a backup folder, not to the highest level on your computer. In mine I click on “David’s computer” in the folder, and the gears menu says “Delete Backup”, not “Delete All Backups”.
thanks so much, this is exactly what i need!
JW,
I just started working on this myself and was similarly confused. The problem is navigation is ambiguous. I believe you and I NAVIGATED in the file structure to where our backups were being stored. The navigate that I think is being suggested is going to the earliest date in time machine without getting into the file structure. I started doing the same thing you did and noticed it was slowly taking out each one of my backups. I restarted my machine to kill the process. Hopefully, the major pieces for a full restore are still in place (or will be put back in by future backups)
Ben…
@JW, Dave d and Ben: Thanks for those explanations! I inadvertently deleted all of my time machine backups due to navigating to the backup volume, selecting the folder I wanted to delete and using the ‘gear’ to ‘delete all backups of YYYY-MM-DD-TTTTTT’ thinking it would only delete that particular folder.
The correct method, as Ben states, is to use the fanning display to navigate to the backup that you want to delete and then use the gear to select ‘Delete Backup’.
By the way, the reason I wanted to do this was that my backup folders were suddenly weighing in at > 40GB and it only took a few days of that before I started losing my earliest backups (and at 40GB/cleaning, the oldest archives were quickly lost!). I still haven’t gotten to the bottom of that problem.
After starting over, things seem to be working fine. A tough lesson. Thanks for the thread.
This was exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!!! I dunno why I never thought to look in the gears button – i kept trying a right click or seeing if a menu bar came down from the top.
Many thanks!
When i delete files from the backup using this method, the sparse file does not update the size. I deleted 100’s of gigs from my back up and the size did not change at all.
Does anyone know what might be causing this?
I find TM’s rigidity frustrating. Why can’t we have an option to just save the latest backup, or delete old files after X amount of time? This couldn’t be that hard to add. So what is the easiest way to tell TM to delete all but the most recent backup, of all files? Thanks.
Great Blog, Adam.
J
JW and all:
Wanting to protect my first backup, I manually removed all intermediate backups from the backup drive in Finder. Took a while but worked.
What I do NOT know is whether or not Time Machine is working by recursively checking for differences all the way through it’s list of backups.
If that’s the case, then deleting backups manually is fine as long as you do a new backup immediately after, because of these possible problems:
- Intervening backups being the only instances of files needed. Fixed by doing a new “backup now”.
- Something that may not be possible: That the “first backup” is actually an alias to a previous (deleted) backup: Doign “Backup now” would fix this obviously – because the live version of the file would by definition be different. So fixed by “backup now”.
The reason I’m doing this is I have a corrupt catalogue file apparently: On startup, Macbook pro won’t get past spinning wheel thing on grey screen before shutting itself down again.
Permissions repair works, disk repair fails “invalid record count”
… and I’m not sure if a backup-restore rewrites the catalogue file – does anyone know?
But that’s the reason I need to keep the ‘first’ backup – the one that predates the problem.
Anyway I’d be grateful for any thoughts out there.
One of the clever things Time Machine does is hard-linking every unchanged file or folder to the previous change. Because of this, each revision of the backup is essentially a full backup. When you delete any one version, it just deletes those hard links. Thus, if any other hard links exist, the data remains in the filesystem.
Thank you! Worked well. I appreciate it.
(What happens if you click on “Delete all backups of… ” ?)