Deleting Old Time Machine Backups
I have old time machine backups that I need to delete. How do I go about that?
MacBook Air 15″, macOS 15.4
Akfarmer wrote:
I do have other backups that I want to keep. The external drive serves to back up two different computers and I just want to eliminate backups from 2017.-2019
Sometimes it is possible to erase just the volume that one set of backups is on. But, depending on how the drive was configured and how long ago, that sometimes does not work.
I would suggest a variation on what others have suggested in earlier replies: leave your existing Time Machine drive as it is, and start a fresh backup set on a new external drive newly formatted to APFS + GUID. Those "unwanted" backups will still be available as a sort of archive, and your new backups are guaranteed not to interfere with those from the other computer. Also, it is safer to have backups on separate drives for separate computers: if/when that backup drive fails, if it is being used for multiple computers' backups, then you lose all the backups for all the computers at once.
