macos – How can I manually delete old backups to free space for Time Machine? – Ask Different
Posted by jpluimers on 2018/03/23
For me the easiest is on a sudo terminal (so I can omit the sudo part in the below commands), but if you’d do it “rather safe then sorry”, you can go from the fine-grained individual backup level:
sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/drive_name/Backups.backupdb/mac_name/YYYY-MM-DD-hhmmss
step by step
sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/drive_name/Backups.backupdb/mac_name
all the way back to
sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/drive_name/Backups.backupdb
Incidentally, the tmutil documentation is now regarded as legacy (I’m not sure why) so before it goes away, I’ve archived it:
[Archive.is] https://developer.apple.com/legacy/library/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/tmutil.8.html
It’s not at http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/Manpages/man8/tmutil.8.html as for instance [WayBack] man tmutil … – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+ referred to a few years back.
Anyway:
- A time machine backs up at most 52 weeks; this article shows some calculations on how much disk space you might need for it: [WayBack] Time machine compression ratio | Official Apple Support Communities
- There is a cool
enablelocalfeature that Kristian Köhntopp refers to that I didn’t know about yet:
“enablelocalTurn on local Time Machine snapshots. Requires root privileges.
disablelocal
Turn off local Time Machine snapshots and trigger automatic cleanup of accumulated local snapshot data. Requires root privileges.”
- Kristian got it via [WayBack] Mac Stuff » Creating local snapshots in Time Machine in Lion 10.7
–jeroen
–jeroen
via [WayBack] macos – How can I manually delete old backups to free space for Time Machine? – Ask Different
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