[rgomes]

Hi!

How does one go about deleting old backups from Time Machines? I have backups from months ago that I do not need and it sucking up a lot of space on my external hard drives.

Do I just go into the directory and simply delete them by date or is there a more proper way to go about it?

Thanks!

 

[Gino Cerullo]

You don't need to manage Time Machine backups like that. As the Time Machine backup drive fills up it will automatically delete old files to free up space for newer files.

 

[doglips]

IIRC when you are in time machine travel into the past and go to the backup you wish to delete and click on the "action" button (looks like a wheel with spokes or gear) up on the toolbar and an option should be to delete backup. It was suggested on another forum not to delete by dragging the folder to the trash while in the external drive.

HTH.

 

[Pinza]

I just delete directly from the drive, never had an issue with doing so.

 

[57]

As stated above, there should be no reason to delete since Time Machine (TM) looks after itself.

I have not found a way to tell time machine when to do backups, so it does one each hour and I don't feel this is necessary for me - once a week would be fine. I don't like the drive being accessed each hour and I've also found that if TM is operating, it can cause issues if you're also downloading a file on the internet at the same time (multitasking is often not good).

So, what I've done is set a reminder in Entourage for a once a week backup and I manually go to the menu bar and select "Back Up Now" having turned off TM in the preferences. This way I will run TM when I'm not doing anything else and also once a week instead of hourly.

 

[QuickSilver]

http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor/

Free software I have used in the past. I currently just let TM do its thing. I do not find that having TM running effects any part of OS X though.