How to delete old back ups from time machine for mac

#How to delete old back ups from time machine for mac password
#How to delete old back ups from time machine for mac free

In my case that reported Starting to compactвЂ¦ The command to execute after sudo tmutil delete is sudo hdiutil compact /Volumes/YourTimeMachineDisk/YourBackupName.sparsebundle. It might well do and the fact it doesn't on a Time Capsule may simply be a peculiarity of the sparse bundle protocol.

#How to delete old back ups from time machine for mac free

I don't have TM backups that are not hosted in a sparse bundle so cannot check if using tmutil delete does reclaim free on those. In short, you have to compact the sparse bundle that actually holds the backup if it is hosted on a networked disk, or on a disk that is not formatted in HFS+. The answer to that mystery is given here: I did see the free backup space indication go up correspondingly once, but after the next backup I was down again to only 7% available space (858Gb used instead of around 450Gb). I spent about 2 whole days deleting backups from >2y ago, which according to final completion message amounted to approx. Tmutil delete does indeed delete backups, but doesn't actually reclaim the space they took, at least not in any guaranteed way. However there's an aspect that's lacking which may be a new implementation 'detail' that didn't exist when this question was answered. I've been asking myself this very question, and the answers on here certainly helped. sudo hdiutil compact /Volumes/drive_name/Backups.backupdb/mac_name.sparsebundle If you back up to a network share, you may have sparse bundle storage and if so, that needs to be compacted as well. If you want to get the current directory of backups (there can be multiple destinations defined and only one will be 'current') sudo tmutil machinedirectory Since tmutil was introduced with Lion, this will not work on earlier OS versions.

sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/drive_name/Backups.backupdb/mac_name/YYYY-MM-DD-hhmmss You can use the tmutil tool to delete backups one by one.

This is nice since it could take hours to clean up some larger backup sets and you want to leave the Mac confident it's deleting the correct information store. If you want to be safer, you can pick one snapshot to delete first to be sure the command works as intended.

#How to delete old back ups from time machine for mac password

The sudo command needs your password (and it won't echo to the screen, so just type it and pause to be sure you're dating the correct files before pressing enter). Be careful with sudo and making sure you pick the correct Mac's files since there is no undo or confirmation of the following command: sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/drive_name/Backups.backupdb/old_mac_name