MacOS – Correct way to free up Time Machine space

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I manage a Time Machine backup for a photographer. We had a 2TB drive for photos and a 2TB drive for the Time Machine backup of those photos. The Time Machine backup drive has run out of space and we realized that it's time that we can remove photos from the main photo drive (and burn DVD backups) anyways. Since Time Machine keeps deleted files, simply deleting them from the main drive won't help us in freeing up the space on the Time Machine drive. What is the correct way to handle this problem?

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Here is a Q&A covering manual ways of cleaning backups.

How can I manually delete old backups to free space for Time Machine?

You can always just wait for Time Machine to delete old backups as there really is no need to free up space on the backup volume. In cases where you may need to recover old backups and don't have a proper archiving solution, some people archive the entire drive once it fills and start with a clean one.

As a photographer almost always has a separate archiving solution, letting Time Machine manage the backup space is often a workable plan and maintains a good 6 months of deleted data in all the cases I've seen on 2 TB drives.

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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.

MacOS – How to manually delete old backups to free space for Time Machine

Be careful with sudo and making sure you pick the correct Mac's files since there is no undo or confirmation of the following command:

sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/drive_name/Backups.backupdb/old_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). If you want to be safer, you can pick one snapshot to delete first to be sure the command works as intended. This is nice since it could take hours to clean up some larger backup sets and you want to leave the Mac confident it's deleting the correct information store.

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

Since tmutil was introduced with Lion, this will not work on earlier OS versions.

If you want to get the current directory of backups (there can be multiple destinations defined and only one will be "current")

sudo tmutil machinedirectory

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Mac – Time machine backups and deleted files

MacOS – How to manually delete old backups to free space for Time Machine

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