Time Machine and Backup Disk space

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bluebravo

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My time machine (TM) app has done its job well for the past several years. So well that now the dedicated (to TM) 3TB external HD now only has 29 GB free. When I browse the TM files I see they go back 4+ years (April 2015). I appreciate the oldest backups are weekly snapshots and the more recents are hourly. I would like to delete much of the ancient backup in TM to free up space for more current backups. For me it would seem reasonable to keep one week every 6 months or so up until more recently, but I really don't know the most effective and strategic way to go about this. Any advice about what deletions will give me the most space back? And once you decide what to delete, how do you actually select it and then delete? Thanks in advance for your thoughts and your help. I am running 10.14.6 on a late 2013 MacPro
 
bluebravo said:
My time machine (TM) app has done its job well for the past several years. So well that now the dedicated (to TM) 3TB external HD now only has 29 GB free. When I browse the TM files I see they go back 4+ years (April 2015). I appreciate the oldest backups are weekly snapshots and the more recents are hourly. I would like to delete much of the ancient backup in TM to free up space for more current backups. For me it would seem reasonable to keep one week every 6 months or so up until more recently, but I really don't know the most effective and strategic way to go about this. Any advice about what deletions will give me the most space back? And once you decide what to delete, how do you actually select it and then delete? Thanks in advance for your thoughts and your help. I am running 10.14.6 on a late 2013 MacPro
Click to expand...
You'll have to decide how far back you want to keep. A month or so should do.
Open the folder of your backups, and drag all the rest to the trash. Empty.
Be prepared for a 'slew' of cannot deletes. It will take you an hour or so.
After all that can be deleted is deleted, restart, and the remaining trash can be deleted again.
 
OTOH - If the Time Machine volume fills up, it begins to remove the oldest backups automatically.
It's not really necessary for you to do anything.
 
SGilbert said:
You'll have to decide how far back you want to keep. A month or so should do.
Open the folder of your backups, and drag all the rest to the trash. Empty.
Be prepared for a 'slew' of cannot deletes. It will take you an hour or so.
After all that can be deleted is deleted, restart, and the remaining trash can be deleted again.
Click to expand...
thanks for the tip. if i need to delete anything, now I know how.
 
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