Mac – How to create a permanent snapshot of a Time Machine backup

backuptime-machine

I did a clean install of my Mac and continued to use my same Time Machine drive. I want to preserve the last backup before I did a clean install, but Time Machine will delete old backups as the drive gets full.

How can I copy a backup without worrying it will be deleted?

My first guess was to just perform a copy, but I'm not sure this will work due to the structure of a Time Machine backup.

Best Answer

I've decided to use rsync to create an archive copy. This website also mentions hard links so I believe a rsync archive will be fine.

I'm using this command:

rsync -vahW [source] [target]

This SO mentions -W is best to speed up local network copies, plus I'm doing a new copy so no need for diffing.

Related Solutions

MacOS – How to delete another machine’s time machine 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 – Time machine backups and deleted files

By default, Time Machine keeps the following backups:

Hourly for the current day
Daily for the past month
Weekly for all the other months

If there's space constraints then Time Machine will start to delete the backups, but otherwise it keeps them for as long as possible.

To get to the individual photos you will have to have iPhoto as the active window when you activate Time Machine from the menu bar. This lets you go back and see all of the photos. If you did it from the Finder it's more complex because iPhoto bundles its whole library into one big package.

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Related Solutions

MacOS – How to delete another machine’s time machine backup

Mac – Time machine backups and deleted files

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