Pruning Time Machine Backups

[joshstrange]

Not sure if this really qualifies as unraid specific but I'd love to hear how you all are handling this.

 

I set my TM share to be 3TB and a week or so ago it filled up. I still have around 6TB free on my server and while I can just increase the size I'd really like to prune it as my laptop is only 1TB and not even full. I have cloud and clone backups of my laptop as well so TM is not my primary backup so I'm ok if I don't have every version of a file back to the beginning of time. So how you clean out older backups safety?

[Delarius]

I use Time machine but haven't had to do this for ages. Google is your friend but I believe last time i did this it was as follows:

- Open up Time Machine on the Mac that's being backed up.

- The timeline scale thing is on the right - move that 'slider' to a date in the past - from this date all older backups will be removed.

- Then if I remember correctly - right click on 'Macintosh HD' or the name of your hard drive - and you should be able to 'delete the backups' from there.

 

I'm fairly sure you can just delete backups on specific directories as well. You might want to test how it works on a smaller directory first to ensure it doesn't delete ALL the backups but I remember this just worked for me last time.

 

Del

[wgstarks]

Time Machine will prune itself automatically. There shouldn’t be any need for manual pruning.