Effective Methods To Delete Time Machine Backups

Creating a Time Machine backup can be a good idea if you want to keep a copy of your device. The truth is that it can get very problematic to deal with Mac issues. In this case, having a Time Machine backup can prove to be extremely useful. That being said, these backups accumulate and eat up a lot of space. You must figure out how to remove those time machine backups, and here’s how you can do it.

Is It Necessary To Delete Time Machine Backups?

It’s not mandatory, but when you end up not having enough space, the Time Machine backups need to go. Not only will it allow you to save time, but it’s by far the most effective way of dealing with such a situation. The advantage when it comes to deleting Time Machine backups is that you are saving quite a bit of space. And realistically, few people need more than one or two backups anyway. If you have 10 or 20, those are just wasting space on your side.

How Can You Delete The Old Time Machine Backups?

There are different methods when you want to learn how to delete old Time Machine backups. It can be a bit tedious, however, the process involves the following steps you need to go through:

• First, make sure that you connect the backup drive to the Mac.
• Now, open the Time Machine App.
• Go to the Macintosh HD or the drive that you saved the Time Machine backups on. here you want to check the backups and see the most recent one. Ideally, you want to keep that one, and you can decide if you want to keep others as well. 
• Select the backups that you want to delete and click the gear to delete all backups. 
• You will normally be asked for your username and password, provide those. 
• Once the backups are deleted, you can start creating a new one or just stop using Time Machine.

The process of deleting Time Machine backups is not very complex. It’s designed to be seamless, however it can get tricky if you forget to delete old backups. And it can be challenging if you automated it and have a ton of backups. It’s not a huge issue at first, but it can totally become one, that’s for sure.

Deleting Snapshots

Wait a minute, Time Machine snapshots are not the same as backups? No, snapshots are made when Time Machine wants to run a backup, but it can’t connect to the original backup drive. It will save the snapshot on the boot drive until Time Machine can connect to the backup drive. Naturally, just like backups, these add up and will eat quite a lot of space. It’s extremely important to assess the situation and identify the best way of approaching this.

• Open the Terminal
• In here, type “tmutil listlocalsnapshots /”
• You will receive a list of the Time Machine snapshots available on your device.
• In order to delete the snapshot, you type “tmutil deletelocalsnapshots” followed by the date of the snapshot (which is the combination of numbers you find before .local)

Repeat the step for every snapshot you want to delete. It’s a great way to ensure that all the snapshots are removed properly. Yes, not everyone knows how to use the Terminal, nor are they are accustomed to it. But it can prove to be extremely useful in most cases, so you have to keep it in mind.

Using A Cleanup Tool

There are Mac cleanup tools that will help you with the deletion process without an effort. The idea is to use the app, tell it to delete old items, including the older Time Machine backups, and it will do that for you. It’s a very effective and comprehensive process, and the best part is that it works seamlessly. It’s definitely worth taking that into account, especially if you are very serious about deleting old files.

With that in mind, you can use this method along with the others shown above. It’s up to you to figure out how comprehensive you want the deletion process to be. However, you do want to check how much space you saved with this process, and in the end it can be quite handy.

Conclusion

Overall, it’s clear that deleting Time Machine backups is beneficial for your device. It allows you to save a lot of space, and it’s very effective. That’s why it comes as highly recommended to check this out and you will find the results to be very good. Yes, it does take a while to narrow down all the backups you want to delete, if you have a lot of them. But in the end, it’s always going to be worth it, so keep that in mind.