Time Machine question

[jamike]

Hey folks,

I have installed Leopard yesterday and got everything to work pretty well. The last thing that's left is time machine. I have an external harddrive with some extra movies and music I dont need on my internal macbook drive. Both drives are the same size (120gb).

If I'm not mistaken, TM will use all the available space on the external drive and make incremental backups. The extra files on the drive should stay untouched.

My question is whether it's okay to manually delete some of the older backups from time machine when the time comes and I need to use some more space on my external hard drive instead of using it for historical backups. Is it going to break anything if I simply browse through the file structure on the external drive and remove some of the older backups?

Thank you in advance for your answers!!

 

[jamike]

anyone?

 

[davebz]

First post in a while for me. I've been out of the loop. Anyhow, I don't see why you couldn't manually delete some of the really old backups that you probably don't have to worry about. Don't forget, Time Machine will automatically delete the old ones anyway. It will warn you first or you can uncheck that option. Happy MACing.

 

[jamike]

I was just worried, with the whole complex system of hard link and all that (I'm not really sure how it works...) so that I don't delete some of the actual data when deleting the older backups. You know, maybe my thinking is completely wrong but what if the actual data is stored in that exact backup that I'm about to delete and the newer one's are just hardlinking to it. Just an idea...

Thanks.

 

[Gnomo]

The only way that you would be losing the actual data is if the backup you are deleting is the only remaining backup that contains a link to that version of the file.

If the file was changed after that backup was made, you would be losing the oldest version, but still have the newer version(s). However, if you had deleted the file a while back, you would be permanently losing the file. But this would have happened to you anyway when Time Machine deleted that backup.