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WestKester Author

Level 1

91 points

Time Machine backup disk space

This is on an iMac 2021 M1 using Ventura 13.6. It has a 1Tb drive of which typically ~100Gb is used. I needed to do some backing up of old files onto external SSDs and in the process I copied ~800Gb onto the iMac HD and then copied it back to a SSD and deleted from the iMac HD. And in the process Time Machine updates ticked over. After some to-ing and fro-ing I now have two files on the Time Machine backup SSD, one from yesterday of ~700Gb and one from today of ~100Gb. If I need to use the backup I would use the current file. Can I delete the older file to make sure there is sufficient space on the backup drive in case it is needed?

iMac 24″, macOS 13.6

Posted on Sep 27, 2023 8:22 PM

Top-ranking reply

steve626

Level 6

11,501 points

Posted on Sep 27, 2023 9:06 PM

Don't manually delete backup files or folders. The backup won't be usable if you do.

One used to be able to delete older backups when the Time Machine drive was HFS+ formatted, but I believe with APFS formatted backup drives, that is no longer an option.

I would obtain a second Time Machine backup drive and Time Machine will alternate between them. Eventually the one with the large files will delete older backups to make room for more backups. If it ends up not being able to do that, you would have to erase and reformat that drive and start it fresh in Time Machine, but you will still have the other good backup drive.

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Time Machine backup disk space

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