Mac – delete all backups of all machines and reset time machine drive

time-machine

Delete all backups of all machines and reset time machine drive.

As you can see I just want to start over. There are some great discussions on deleting one backup at a time. I have 30 or so. I am changing mac and I would like to just reset time machine.

Please note the drive I have is external. So I can do it through disk utility by directly plugging in but I remember reading somewhere that it's not a good idea.

Best Answer

Just wipe the drive clean using Disk Utility and then have Time Machine start it all over again. I'm not sure what kind of issues you are going to run into because I've done that probably 50 times in my life and never had an issue besides falling asleep while I wait for an entire Time Machine backup to finish.

Related Solutions

macOS Time Machine – Delete Another Machine’s Backup

You can use the tmutil tool to delete backups one by one.

sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/drive_name/Backups.backupdb/mac_name/YYYY-MM-DD-hhmmss

If you are sure you have selected the correct name, you can delete all backups from that one Mac by not passing in the time and letting it delete the entire folder:

sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/drive_name/Backups.backupdb/mac_name

The sudo command needs your password (and it won't echo to the screen, so just type it and pause to be sure you're dating the correct files before pressing enter).

Mac – Backing up Time Machine to an external disk also used by other machines – no sparsebundle

The sparsebundle is how Time Machine backs up using the network method. The Backups.backupdb method is how it backs up when the drive is hooked up locally therefore you can't make it create a sparse bundle if its connected locally because that's the way time machine works. If you want it to make a sparse bundle you have to backup through a network. It should not make a difference to you since you'll be accessing it through time machine without having to worry about files etc.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

macOS Time Machine – Delete Another Machine’s Backup

Mac – Backing up Time Machine to an external disk also used by other machines – no sparsebundle

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