Is there any way to protect that one backup only and delete all the others one so that TM can perform? If I leave as is, it will delete that oldest backup, which I dearly need.

Thanks! Bill

As far as I understand Time Machine takes an initial back up and then incremental or Delta back ups to use the back up disk more economically. So this means the total image of your system is the sum of all of the back ups. If this is true surely something will be lost if you delete any of the back ups. So how does Time Machine ensure the integrity of the system if it goes around deleting back ups either randomly or in some logical order?

* Open Airport Utilities App
* Click on your Time Capsule (Airport Extreme)
* Click on Discs
* Erase

Then, I just start a new backup.

I have resorted to this as I have noticed for some reason the time machine starts consuming a lot more more disk space even if I delete all the old backups using the proper commands. In fact, on one occasion, the more backups I deleted, the more space was consumed on the disk (even after trash emptied). This method, which I do once a year, seems to free up about 200GB of my 800GB of use. It is tantamount to starting over, but the erase in the Airport Utilities menu seemed to erase faster than the one in Disk Utilities.

Also, when I first ran hdiutil, I got the following error:

hdiutil: compact failed – Resource temporarily unavailable

This was because TM was running a backup. To avoid any further interference, I turned TM off on all machines that were writing to this volume before running hdiutil again.

I just reclaimed 160 GB by not backing up my Downloads and DropBox folders from 2 Macs, and deleting all backups for these directories.

Why does our Finder state that the available space is the same “post-deleting” as it was “pre-deleting?” Meaning, I had about 80GBs of free space before deleting files. After deleting (drum roll) still 80GBs.

So, before someone goes off on a tangent about how to delete individual files, etc, etc — please, please answer this question.

Thanks!

And I’ve read at other places, it’s a pity you can’t delete individual backups and stuff…

Well, it may be hidden, but this works. Very happy!

I’ve found the FREE trial version of Back-In-Time is really helpful if you want to delete specific versions of backed up files from a Time Machine volume. If you’re trying to clear space on your TM volume, I find it extremely useful that Back-In-Time shows you all versions of a backed up file on one screen, so it’s extremely easy to see which to delete and which to keep. I also like that you can see package content of backed up files (such as, the files insides an iPhoto Library) with Back-In-Time, and am currently deleting many of GB of large, old backed-up iPhoto files (Thumb64Segment.data and ThumbJPGSegment.data), while keeping only the most current versions.

Note that when you delete large files, you’ll often have to wait many many hours (in Time Machine or Back-In-Time) until the deletion is complete — be patient, and don’t start the process unless you have time to let it finish! Not sure if one way is faster or slower than another, but I do like that Back-In-Time shows you your progress more accurately than Time Machine seems to.

Also, GrandPerspective is a great application to visually see what files are taking up a lot of room on your Time Machine volume, it’s how I realized the iPhoto files were taking up soooo much room (I also saw some large Picasa files, which I will be deleting).

All-in-all, GrandPerspecitve and Back-In-Time have been a live-saver for me to intelligently clear large unneeded files from my Time Machine volume, extending the time until the volume is full. Hope this helps someone out there… Though I also feel the need to warn, if you don’t feel sure what you’re doing, deleting files in your backup could result in deleting only back-ups of important files, and you might not realize it until your main drive fails and you turn to TM to recover. This is true no matter what program you use.

BTW, I do have a curiosity question (it was more than curiosity, until I discovered how well Back-In-Time works): I sometimes read you can delete TM volume files directly from the Finder, and sometimes I read you cannot (or should not) do that. Any experts know if that should or shouldn’t be done? Does Time Machine use it’s own catalog to keep track of backed-up files (which means Finder deletions would seem bad), or does it just read what is on the disk (which would make Finder deletions seem fine)?

Oh, another question for any TM experts (if they exist)… Why does deleting TM files often take so so long? I just don’t understand what is happening under the hood that makes it take thousands of times longer than it takes to delete a file from a non-TM volume.

I haven’t had any major things I’ve needed to keep in my backups and I’ve been itching to delete a few of them…

What tricked me in your instructions was that you have to be in TIME MACHINE, viewing the Computer window in the finder. I tried to find the “Delete Backup” under the gears (Actions) menu when I wasn’t in Time Machine, and of course it wasn’t there… lol. Didn’t catch that.

I don’t understand the opening Finder and clicking on my computer.
Finder in Time Machine? Or Escaping from Time Machine and clicking on Finder… then what gear do I press?

Little bit confused. I’ll check back the next time I need to delete any backups, because so far, Time Machine hasn’t deleted any for me :S

If you find a particular file in TM that you know is useless to save as a backup, you can delete a specific version of it by selecting “delete backup”, or you can “delete all backups”, effectively removing many versions of it. That works great if you are targeting files or folders that you wish TM to forget.

Now take that logic to the folder that represents the entire day of files, and in essence you are instructing it to “delete all backups” of days…. even though it says the specific “date”, it is really deleting all dates.

The folders at the root of the backup are named as the date and time of backup, so they appear to be unique, yet this function assumes all folder at that level are the same.

I see this as a bug. It should not allow us delete all dates in that manner. A reformat would be cleaner way to start over.

BenR

1. Open time machine (not the preferences window)
2. Use the time line date selector to choose the backup you want to remove
3. In finder, in the left hand side panel under devices, select your computer
4. Open the gears menu drop down and you should see ‘delete backup’
5. Enter your password
6. Close time machine
7. Watch the finder window with a progress bar deleting the backup

Job done!

ps i have movies etc on my back up drive as well. are those threatened?

I was quite pleased, overall, with the experience. It was:
1) Step one, run Mac OS X installer on machine with clean hard drive
2) Installer asked if I was restoring from Time Machine, I said yes
3) Pointed installer at Time Machine backup.
4) It ran for a few hours.

I did notice some small issues – there were some aliases that I had to re-establish for example. Overall, it was pretty good.