how to delete old back ups from time machine for mac

How to delete old back ups from time machine for mac how to#
How to delete old back ups from time machine for mac download#

Here’s how to delete Time Machine backups from an external hard drive using the Time Machine app itself. And if that happens, you’ve lost your backup. If you use the disk for other things, you increase the chance of it failing. It’s good practice to have one dedicated disk for Time Machine. Note: If you want to free up space on your Time Machine disk so that you can use it to store other data, don’t. However, you may want to free up space before then here’s how to do that. Time Machine will ask you if you want to delete backups when you start to run short of space.

It keeps every hourly backup for 24 hours, then one backup per day for the previous month, and one backup per week from every month before that.Īs you can see, once you’ve been using Time Machine for a while, the backup size will grow.

After that, it backs up your Mac every hour, copying only those files that have changed since the last backup. The first time Time Machine backs up your Mac, it copies everything, except the folders you’ve excluded, to the backup drive and saves it as a sparse disk image. So the chances are, you’ll be backing up to a USB hard drive or SSD. However, Apple no longer sells the Time Capsule and recommends only directly attached storage drives for use with Time Machine. And makers of network-attached storage devices added support to those for Time Machine. When Apple launched Time Machine, it also launched a network storage system called Time Capsule to make it easy for MacBook users to back up wirelessly. You can also specify where the backup should be stored. However, when you set it up, you can specify folders, such as your Downloads folder, to omit from the backup. Time Machine backs up everything on your Mac by default. But before we do, it’s worth recapping how Time Machine works, so we know what we’re going to delete. In this article, we’ll show you a couple of ways to delete Time Machine backups when you need to free up space. Not only will it bail you out if the worst happens and you need to delete your boot drive reinstall macOS from scratch, but it allows you to recover individual files that you may have accidentally deleted or modified. Time Machine is such an incredibly useful tool and so easy to use that everyone should be using it to back up their Mac. But to help you do it all by yourself, we’ve gathered our best ideas and solutions below.įeatures described in this article refer to the MacPaw site version of CleanMyMac X.

How to delete old back ups from time machine for mac download#

So here’s a tip for you: Download a free version of CleanMyMac to quickly fix some of the issues mentioned in this article.