How to Delete Time Machine Backups

Time Machine is the best Delete Time Machine Backups for your Mac because it automatically makes backups that are just a little bit bigger than the last one. With an incremental backup, Time Machine keeps more than one version of your files. This makes it easy to undo changes or even bring back files and folders that you have deleted.

Even if you do backups regularly, the old ones can quickly fill up your external or network drive. There are a few ways to get rid of old backup files and free up space. If you’re having trouble getting the Time Machine backups out of Trash, all you need is a simple Terminal command. The problem with these backups is that they can end up taking up a lot of space. You can delete old Time Machine backups from your Mac or an external hard drive in a few different ways. 

Delete Time Machine Backups Using Finder

1. Connect the external backup hard drive to your computer.
2. Click the Finder icon from Dock.
3. You can see your external backup drive under Devices from the left list. Then, you need to click that backup drive to continue.
4. Then, you can see a folder that is named backupdb. You need to expand that folder and then find the subfolder for your Mac that has been backed up.
5. Open the subfolder and you can see your backup files are named as the date they were created. Then, you need to find the backups you want to delete (you can select the target ones according to their created dates).
6. Right-click the backup file you want to remove and then select Delete.
7. Confirm your deletion operation.
8. The deleted Time Machine backups have been moved to Trash. You need to go to Trash to permanently delete them if necessary.

Use Terminal

1. Open the Finder and go to Applications > Utilities > Terminal
2. Type in this command: tmutil listbackups
3. Backups are displayed by date. Once you locate the backup you want to delete, make a note of its directory path, enter the below command followed by its path: sudo tmutil delete
4. Press Return to delete it.

Via a Network Drive

1. Find the file on the external hard drive.
2. Double click the sparsebundle file and wait for it to mount onto your Mac.
3. Double click the new location under Locations.
4. Browse the location to find the files you wish to delete.
5. Right-click the file or subfolder of the date you wish to delete, and click Delete.

How Time Machine works

Time Machine automatically backs up everything on your Mac. But when you set it up, you can tell it to leave out certain folders, like your Downloads folder. You can also tell it where to store the backup. When Apple released Time Machine, it also released Time Capsule, a network storage system that makes it easy to back up a MacBook wirelessly.

And the makers of networked storage devices added support for Time Machine to their products. But Apple no longer sells the Time Capsule, and if you want to use Time Machine, you should only use directly connected storage drives. So it’s likely that you’ll back up to an SSD or USB hard drive.

After that, it backs up your Mac every hour, copying only the files that have changed since the last backup. It keeps every hourly backup for 24 hours, then one backup per day for the previous month and one backup per week for every month before that.

When should you delete Time Machine backups

Apple lets Time Machine delete old backups automatically when it runs out of space. So, there’s nothing you need to do to get rid of your Time Machine backups. But there are still times when you need to do it by hand. For instance, if you want to make room on your external drive for files that aren’t backups, you might have to delete Time Machine backups by hand.

This lets you control how much space is on your external drive, so you can save everything you need to. Sometimes, Time Machine might tell you that there isn’t enough space to back up a large file, and it won’t let you delete old backups to make room.