How to safely delete old Time Machine snapshots from a sparsebundle?

Can I safely delete old snapshots from it to make the entire sparsebundle less in size?

Assuming "safely" implies without corrupting the entire backup, the answer to that question is no.

I can't answer your first question but Time Machine (TM) backups are on a strongly protected volume. You either have to do things through TM itself (if it will let you) or you have to erase the entire TM volume. From your image, it appears that you could delete those files.

I don't know that there would be much point in doing so. TM is supposed to be self-managing when it comes to space and should delete older items if it needs space to do a backup of newer ones.

vitalii_with_apple wrote:

I have TimeMachine backups stored in a sparsebundle on my NAS. When I connect to the NAS via SMB and mount the sparsebundle by opening it in Finder, it shows me many snapshots (see the screenshot).

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/f99fdc13-14ac-46d8-92e4-e19323314362

Can I safely delete old snapshots from it to make the entire sparsebundle less in size? I will help with speed of downloading the entire sparsebundle when restoring remotely. I only need the latest snapshot.

If so, how? Is it save to delete them using Finder? Or the Terminal?

In older versions of the MacOS, one used to be able to delete some of these backup sets from within Time Machine. However I believe this is no longer an option and manually deleting any of them risks making the backups for this device unusable.

To explain why this is the case would take more space than is possible here, but briefly: Time Machine does not store separate, complete backups for each date/time. If your Mac and it was using 1 TB, then ten such backups would take 10 TB! Typically only a factor of 2x-3x space is required. Time Machine only writes new files when the file has changed, otherwise it "keeps" the older already backed up version in the new backup set via special links. One can open those backups manually in the Finder and copy individual files back but physically the file is being copied from a different place. Hence deleting backup sets directly will break those special links and some or none of the backups will be functional.

For instance, restoring your Mac completely to its state on a specific date in the past may require physically copying files from many different backup sets. Those special links make this transparent to the user. But manually deleting some of those backup sets breaks this and it will no longer function.

I'm not sure I can suggest a good solution for you. For those of us using individual directly connected Time Machine backup drives, typically drives do not fill up because older backups are removed to make room for newer ones automatically. The removal of older backups, by the way, is very time consuming for Time Machine due to that labyrinth of nested links, hence you may see Time Machine "cleaning up" or "preparing" for long periods of time. There is no longer a way for users to do this manually. Perhaps, if you really only need the latest backup, maybe Time Machine is not the best approach for you because its strength is in the versioned backups it provides. You might look into various "cloning" solutions (CCC, SuperDuper ...), I believe both work with NAS.