Intel Mac :: Permanently Deleting Time Machine Back Ups?
Apr 8, 2012
I've got a 2011 iMac 21" running on Lion. I've been backing up using Time Machine since september, and now need to delete from september-march. i've placed these into the trash and have attempted removing them, but when it says items to delete (normally a positive number) it goes into negative eg. -14,923. It isn't allowing me to place them back in the Backups.backupdb folder, and it will not remove them, so they're in the trash folder and can't be removed. i've attempted the sudo rm rf trash command, but terminal isn't allowing it. So if I want to completely remove this backup, is there a command or a process that i can use?
I know this is a common issue and I've read all the other posts and tried everything, but time machine still won't back up. I need help figuring out if there's anything I can do, or if I need a bigger back up disk. If so, how big?
I have deleted old backups, excluded unnecessary files, and cleaned out folders. It says 157.46GB available of 159.7GB; but when it backs up it says it requires 188.30GB but only 157.46GB are available.
My time machine won't back - up on my desktop. It says it has 77GB of space on my Iomega but needs 88? Why does it need so much space? Just also got a Macbook today and tonight is first time tried setting it up.
i deleted the wrong folders in Lightroom and this has stopped me from viewing some photos in iPhoto,the thumbnail is there but when i click on it there is no image,can i use time machine to get the photos back and how do i do it as i have never used time machine before.
I am trying to copy some folder from my time machine back up onto my desktop but the operation can't be completed because you don't have permission to access certain files. And I have changed the privilege for my back up to read and write...but it's still not letting my copy the files. How come?
I've just accidentally deleted the Hotmail mailbox from Mail. Mac says it's removed 'permanently' unless Time Machine is on, which is not. Does anyone know any other way I can add Hotmail to Mail again?
Yesterday I used Migration Assistant to recover the contents of a failed MacBook Pro (Snow Leopard) from a Time Machine backup to a new MacBook Air (10.7.4). Using the same external disk for backups, I now have a folder for both the old and new machines in
/Volumes/time_machine/Backups.backupdb/
The instructions here
[URL]
explain how to reconnect time machine to the old machine's backups. Once I've done this and checked that I can access the old backups, can I simply delete the new machine folder to save space?
I'm an idiot, pleased to meet you.I had 2 external drives connected to my Macbook Pro, both had time machine back ups on...I meant to delete one of these but deleted the wrong one, and dragged it into Trash. On realising my mistake I tried to drag it back out of Trash, as you would normally but after "preparing to copy" for four hours it told me the drive was full...It's a 500gb drive, and the Time Machine back up is the only thing on it, so presumably it's just trying to copy itself when the back up is still present on the drive, albeit in the Trash.
Why isn't TM deleting my old back-ups to make room for the new ones? I have 25 GB space left in my TM partition and 35 GB is needed for a new back-up but it keeps telling me it is failing to do the back-up for lack of space.
i have a WD 250gb HD that i used to use for my TM backups...a few months ago i switched and am now using a new HD for my TM backups. Today i went and tried to delete the old TM backup folders from my WD HD and dragged the folder to the trash (the whole folder..backups.backupdb) now im not sure if its all in the trash, cause it still appears on my WD HD as well...when i try to empty the trash, there are over 30.000 files to delete and is says some are locked
I have just deleted some folders from Time Machine (by clicking on the gears and then clicking "delete all backups of ..... "), but I didn't get the hard drive space back on the Time Capsule.
I deleted about 50GB but Time Capsule reports having the same amount of space available as before the deletion.
I would like to make my TM backup a bit slimmer and delete some folders but I'm not sure how TM works. Can I simply delete an entire TM folder of a given date e.g. 2009-08-29-190000 without affecting the others? Or are the backup made "incrementally" in which case the last backup needs all previous backups in order to be restored? I believe that the backups are independent but I just want to be sure.
I want to remove a file from Time Machine. I'm thinking I'll do: find /Volumes/Time_Machine/ file.name -exec rm {}; Is there anything special about files stored on the Time Machine Volume? By deleting a file throughout, will it corrupt my backups?
I regularly back up my system ( every couple of weeks! ) and data to an external 2TB drive however I only really need a copy of recent state of system and data. Will it be good practice to enter time machine and go back to the old back ups and delete so that only recent backs up are maintained on drive. This would also free up space on my external drive? I just want to ensure deleting old back ups does not harm the integrity of the data.
Also i wanted to ascertain if it is possible to use time machine drive in another mac and simply drag and drop files from the latest back up onto this other computer?
I bought a IMac and had preloaded ilife apps ready to be downloaded in purchased tab and accidentally deleted iphoto and imovie. How do I get them back?
I have foolishly moved a time machine back-up file from my external drive to trash. My problem is now that I cannot delete it properly from trash. Moreover, I my external hard drive is acting up. I can�t eject the drive, I can�t write to it and I can�t delete or repair it from Disc Utility.
The file in the trash has got ...inProgress and I have tried to empty trash with normal empty, secure empty and through Terminal.
I got a new MBP awhile ago to replace my old MB, and am using the same HD for Time Machine backups. For awhile I wanted to keep the old backups around, but now that I'm fine without them, they're just taking up space, and they're not automatically deleting as the HD fills up, it seems that it only deletes backups of the computer that it's backing up when it needs the space. I know usually deleting Time Machine backups through the Finder is a really bad idea, but since I don't have the old MB to do it through the Time Machine interface any more, it's the only way. Would I be OK to do it that way, since I want to delete all the backups from that Mac? Or would I risk screwing up the backups of my MBP?
I deleted a bunch of epubs by bringing up my time machine drive in Finder. I did not delete the epubs through time machine. I now have pointers to the epubs in time machine. How do I delete the pointers.
Time machine failed in progress as my hard drive failed. I have an "in progress" file on my external harddrive that is about 160 GB. I would like to try and load this back onto a new harddrive. Migration assistant is not responsive nor does Time Machine recognize the external drive when connected.
Renaming my hard drive caused Time Machine to make a new 190 GB backup. How can I delete this single backup to get the space back and still keep the previous and following backups? I tried deleting the single backup for whole hard drive in the Time Machine UI, but I didn't get any the space back, the next newest backup is now 190 GB using Time Tracker as seen below. Just tried deleting all the backups of the renamed hard drive from 3 Oct and now the first backup of today is 191 GB.
I don't know if its supposed to do this or not because I am a new time machine user. I have a HFS + Backup Drive using the GUID partition table that is used by time machine. Yesterday I had quite a few backups in my backup directory, today I come on to find that some of these backups are missing. Does it delete some backups?
Last week I was doing some late night backing up of some DVD's I own. (7x7GB).
I MTR'd them to get the video_TS folders on my desk top, so I could toast them back on to DVDs,
I tought I may as well put them on to my iPhone, so I re-encoded them into MP4 (7x500MB), then copied them into iTunes (again 7x500MB).
I reaslied today that I forgot to turn off Time-machine when I was doing all this and my backup grew by 60 GB!!
MY QUESTION IS:
If I go into Time-machine and track down these video files and "deleate all instances" of them, will it free up the 60 GB on my external drive for Time-machine to be able to back upu more vital stuff?
I'm looking for a program that will let me delete old Time Machine backups on a schedule. I am aware that TM will delete old backups once the drive is full. However, I don't want to let TM fill up my hard drive (having a ton of backups is not useful to me, and I use my hard drive to store movies as well), and I don't like having to manually delete backups when I want to add more files to my external hard drive. I've read many forum posts that recommend "just letting TM do its thing."
I'm just looking for a way to minimize the number of backups that are kept so I can keep plenty of open space on my hard drive for when I add to my movie collection. I'm already using TimeMachineEditor to back up less frequently, but what I would really like is a program that will automatically delete an old backup every time I add a new one. Ideally, I'd like to back up once a day and keep a week's worth of backups. So, once I have 7 backups on my hard drive, the next time my computer backs up the oldest of those 7 will automatically be deleted.
