how to free up space on mac time machine

$ sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/iMac/-123411 If you want to delete the -123411 backup, you must run the following command: Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/iMac This means that, if your machine is called iMac and your backup disk is mounted on /Volumes/Time Machine Backups, then backups will be located in the following folder: Time Machine currently stores its backups in a folder named after the backed up machine, into the Backups.backupdb folder in the backup disk. $ sudo tmutil delete /full/path/to/backup/Backups.backupdb/machine/backup-name The format of the backup folders created by Time Machine is YYYY-MM-DD-HHmmss. If you want to delete a specific backup, you can use the following command:.Make sure your time machine backup disk is mounted (the simplest way to do it is opening the Time Machine application).To delete a backup using tmutil you must perform the following operations: Not only it is simpler, but it will allow you to do it programmatically if you need to. Unfortunately this method is very clumsy if you need to delete many backups.Īnother way is using the tmutil command to perform the deletion. Time Machine will ask you to introduce the super user password and then it will delete the selected backup. Right click with the mouse on the empty space in the Finder.Navigate to the backup to be deleted double clicking on the corresponding position of the ruler on the right side of the screen.Open the Time Machine application when the Finder application is in the foreground.Old backups can be deleted in many ways, the simplest one being the following: Think about a virtual machine disk stored as a file in your disk: if just one bit of that file changes (and you can bet it changes every time you use your virtual machine), Time Machine will perform a copy of the whole file the next time a backup is run.įortunately, there exist tools which are able to examine a file and transfer only the difference with a previous stored state, such as rsync, on which you can rely to build your custom backup policies.Īnyway, no matter how Time Machine has eaten up a lot of your disk space, it may come a moment when you really need to free some of it, possibly deleting old backups and shrinking a Time Machine sparse bundle disk image.

Backups may take a huge amount of disk space.This fact has many detrimental consequences: Time Machine always copies the whole file because it is not able to transfer only the differences between the previous state of a file and the current one. The most important use case in which I strongly discourage anybody to use Time Machine is the backup of frequently updated big files. In my personal opinion Time Machine is not yet awesome and its shortcomings often force me to use alternative methods when I need to backup files and folders with certain characteristics. Time Machine is a backup and restore tool from Apple which is very well integrated into OS X.

How to free up space on mac time machine