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I've used Time Machine for years but recently started TM on a new, larger, drive. It appears to be running correctly but after the first few days it has failed to delete intermediate backups older than 24 hours. In other words every backup for the last 4 days is visible.
Why is this happening? Does it matter? Comments appreciated.
iMac 27″, macOS 11.6
Apple states that Time Machine keeps hourly backups for the past 24 hours, a daily backup for the past month, weekly backups for as long as the external drive has available space. This has been the case before and after APFS was introduced. In my case TM is keeping every hourly backup for many days.
The system seems to be catching up. Most of the old backups have gone. I am closing this topic. Thanks to all who responded.
I don't know what schedule it uses to consolidate backups. Mine go back four days before dailies start.
My weeklies start about mid-December.
My set started 31 October, so I don't see any monthlies.
All I can offer is what I see. I don't expect it to consolidate constantly.
So far as I can tell TM always removed all but one hourly backup each day. It did that for a few weeks but now it isn't. The drive is very large so it isn't a space issue (yet).
You do realize that each backup is not a complete copy of everything in your backup. If nothing changed in that hour, there is nothing taking up space in that particular backup.
Yes, understood. However, my question is why is my Time Machine not behaving according to Apple's description?
I’m not sure you’ve actually determined that. Just because it hasn’t consolidated the daily backups, yet, doesn’t mean it won’t.
Time machine is retaining all backups. Is this right?
