OS X V10.7 Lion :: Deleting Old Time Machine Backups From External HD
Apr 29, 2012
I have a 1 TB external hard drive that I've been using as a time machine drive & also as a place to put random files i dont need on my computer and its starting to get very full. Most of whats on there is old backups from the past year & 1/2 that I have no use for anymore. is there a way to delete all of the backups that are on there right now without deleting the other files I've put on there. I have a bunch of projects and files on there that I cant put anywhere else and just format the drive. Basically, i need a way to delete all of my time machine backups off my external hd without deleting all my other files on there.
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 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 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. Â
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 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 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?
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.
Just wanted to know if the method I used to delete some back ups were save. What I did was just drag two back ups that I didn't need anymore into my trash, held option and clicked delete. I am asking this because I came across this video saying if I used this method, I would be "screwed" [URL]. Is the method I used safe, or did it some how mess up my TM or leave left over data?
I used to be able to make Time Machine backups on my external HD and now I cant. Whenever I try it says my drive isnt big enough as my backup would take 500 gb yet my hard drive is only 250 gb.
I just wanted to share my experience and hopefully answer any questions people may have about doing this:
I purchased a 1.5TB HDD and external enclosure to increase the backup size of my 500GB TC, and not wanting to start my backups from scratch I tried copying the sparsebundles to the new drive. To my surprise, I was able to switch my TM source disk to the new drive and the backups picked up where they left off! It proceeded to do an incremental backup, and after it was done I went into Time Machine and could see all the backups from the beginning! Now I can use my TC's internal as storage and keep the external for backups. Hope this helps anyone looking to increase the size of their backups without starting fresh...
I have an iMac and send all my Time Machine backups to an Iomega 250gb external hard drive. Now Time Machine says the drive is full and cannot complete the back up- how can I delete some old back ups to make room for the latest one? And once I have room- restrict it to back up only once a week? I really want to use the drive for the music and photos- but fear not having a complete backup before i update to Mt. Lion.
I'm looking for a good, reasonably priced, external disk to temporarily use for Time Machine backups. My 10.9.4 install is messed up and Time Machine no longer works with my ReadyNAS NV+ system. I want to use the disk to backup my MBP and reinstall the OS. suggest a proven external disk (2TB+) with a USB 2.0 (or Ethernet) interface?Â
Info: MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9), 2007 15" Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz
I have been using a 1 TB Iomega portable HD as my external HD for Time Machine backups of my early 2011 17" MacBook Pro with a 750GB Internal HD with only 190GB utilized. I just got a Time Machine message:Â
1) that backup couldn't be performed because of HD problem, and 2) to repair the HD with Disk Utility.
I ran DU Repair Disk and got the following Red Type messages interspersed between normal lines of DU activity reports:
"Invalid Sibling link"The volume Iomega_HDD could not be repaired."Error: Disk Utility can't repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files."Â Â
Can I recover the original and older time machine backups from my ext. HD in a procedure that would allow me to continue backing up with TM but restarting with the most recent recovered "uncorrupted" TM backup as the base, thus allowing me access to older backups?
Or is my ONLY alternative to start Time Machine afresh with a full backup today (on a new ext. HD!), and just deem all those valuable Time Machine backups as lost forever?
I have an iMac running the latest version of Lion (10.7.4) and which I have upgraded to a one terabyte hard drive and full memory capability. I back up to a My Book 2 terabyte external hard drive using Time Machine. My iMac is often very sticky, though I've done most of the diagnostics I know of and preferences etc. are seemingly all OK and fcuk -fs gives a positive result! The Mac is often hard to wake from sleep and in particular seems to spend a lot of time backing up very-very slowly, with the result that it frustratingly seems to be backing up most of the time with the consequent effects on using other programs. Also the whole thing seems to grind to a halt after a hard days work with quite a few applications open. I'm wondering what can be causing this and what I can do to overcome this very frustrating and debilitating problem?
I've backup my Macbook Air Using time machine before reformat it to have window partition.However, after installing OS Lion 10.7.4, how do I restore back all my application and data on my last backup from time machine?
I don't know where else to put this but I set up a external hard drive to using time capsule. The hard drive is 500 gig and within 3 months worth of backing up I only have 287 gigs. How can I remove movies and other stuff off the hard drive? I tried deleting the a movie by looking into the back up folders on the hard drive but it keeps telling me it can't be modified.
My time machine backups to an external drive stopped with a message that the backup could not be done because the drive could not be repaired and needed to be reformatted. Prior to reformatting I copied the TM backup file of 250GB to my desktop. My internal drive is 500GB and this only leaves me with 33GB of available space. I then reformatted the drive with the proper OS extended journaled and GUID partition. The external drive is 500GB. When I try to copy the backup file from the desktop to the reformatted drive the process begins normally with the message "preparing to copy files" but as the preparation process reaches 13,000,000 files it stops with the message "there is not enough sufficient space to copy files" even though it never even got to the actual file transfer. I have tried copying the backups in small batches to the new drive but I get an error message that backup files cannot be modified.Â
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 inÂ
/Volumes/time_machine/Backups.backupdb/Â Â
The instructions hereÂ
[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?Â
I accidentally used time machine on my external hard drive and backed up everything. I only want to back up photos and music on this hard drive, but now it won't let me delete it. How can I wipe the hard drive and only save what I want?
I have recently connected a NAS and have attemted to use Time Machine as a backup and have been met with failure. I have attempted most things in the forums to no avail. I have also transferred about 700gb from another mac to the NAS with no problem. Here is the syslog:Â
Feb 19 12:15:47 Office-Mac com.apple.backupd[1154] <Notice>: Attempting to mount network destination URL: afp://admin@192.168.17.107/Mac%20Time%20Capsule Feb 19 12:15:49 Office-Mac com.apple.backupd[1154] <Error>: NAConnectToServerSync failed with error: 2 for url: afp://admin@192.168.17.107/Mac%20Time%20Capsule
There appears to be several threads regarding deleteing Time Machine backups but I can't seem to get the correct answer to delete the entire backup folder (Backups.backupdb). I move the location of my backups files and they are working fine now so I want to delete the folder on the disk it used to backup to. How can I do that? I have everything backedup to the proper disk so I don't need this folder any longer.
My new MacBook Air running latest as of today Lion seems to do full backups way more often than I'd like. Just this morning it finished up a full back up, then I noticed it did a small incremental. Now it is doing another full back up for no apparent good reason. I have not made any significant changes to the system at all. I'm backing up to an external drive that is attached to my AE. How to reduce the amount of Fulls it does because each day seems it does a couple.
I'm having a strange problem with Time Machine. Any backup older than 1 week seems to go missing when viewed from Time Machine. Time Machine preferences shows my oldest backup as February 13th, 2012. But, when I enter Time Machine only entries back to March 14th, 2012 are shown. When I use "sudo tmutil listbackups" all my backups are shown including the one from February 13th. Why aren't they showing up in Time Machine? The disk still has 89 GB available and I can see that the log is adding incremental backups and deleting old ones from February that are no longer useful (daily-backups removed so that only weekly ones are visible).
Info: MacBook Pro (13-inch Early 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.3), Time Machine
I just bought my time capsule. It works doing backups manually but the button is in 'on' and the next backup field always says 'automatic backups off'.
I installed Snow Leopard, upgraded it to OS X 10.6.8, paid for and spent the hours necessary to download Lion, but Lion will not install. Even though it says the requirements are 10.6.6 or greater, when I try to install, I get a message saying I need 10.7. to install Lion.
There is possible to lock down a generation of my time machine backups?I want to lock permanently a version of my backups using Time Machine. I can copy to another disk but, I want to know if there some kind of configuration available using Time Machine to configure for not delete from my disk?Â
Info: MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3), Time Machine
I had a Mac from 2006. Bought a new one in 2011. I have a time machine back up from my old mac.. This HD was damaged in 2010 and recently repaired. I bought a new HD and used it with time machine on my new mac. I am looking for something on my old Time Machine... Specifically iTunes playlists.. They are very difficult to find by just searching through the back up folder.. What I want to do is, enter the old time machine on my old HD and export some of the iTunes playlists to my new HD. Then of course go back to my current time machine back up and continue using my computer... Can I do this? and Can I have both Time machine devices connected to the computer at the same time?
Info: MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)
