Mac Time Machine Manual Delete Old Backups

11 min readJun 28, 2021

Remove Old Time Machine Backups
Delete All Time Machine Backups
Mac Time Machine Manual Delete Old Backups Mac

Apple’s built-in backup program for the Mac, Time Machine, makes it incredibly easy to back up all of your important data so you can restore your computer if something should happen. You can even recover deleted files if you accidentally lose them.

See How Much Space Backups Are Consuming. RELATED: 10 Ways To Free Up Disk Space on Your Mac Hard Drive To see how much space those local Time Machine backups are consuming, click the Apple icon on the menu bar, click About This Mac, and click the Storage heading.

On Apple laptops, like the MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro, Time Machine includes the added feature of creating local snapshots so that, if you disconnect your MacBook from its external hard drive, you’ll still have backups stored on your internal hard drive so you can recover data if you need to.

Local snapshots are invaluable for certain situations when you’re out and about and need to recover data but don’t have your backup hard drive. They also, eventually, start taking up noticeable space on your hard drive.

Why do I have 100 GB of backups on my hard drive?

You need an external hard drive in order to set up and use Time Machine because that’s where your backups are stored. So why do you have a large number of backups taking up space on your MacBook’s internal hard drive? Because local snapshots.

As soon as you set up Time Machine on your Mac laptop, local snapshots are created automatically. Time Machine makes one daily snapshot every 24 hours when you start up your MacBook and also stores weekly snapshots. It keeps those weekly snapshots on your internal hard drive until you start to get low on storage. So, if you’ve been backing up your Mac for years with Time Machine, you could potentially have 100 GB of backups stored in your internal hard drive, as long as you have space for them.

How do I get rid of all these backups?

First, let me preface this by saying that you shouldn’t worry about those backups and all the space they are taking up. If everything is working properly, Time Machine will automatically delete the oldest snapshot backups as soon as your internal hard drive has less than 20% of storage space left. If you then, say, download some large program and your internal hard drive plummets to below 10% (or less than 5GB of internal storage), Time Machine will delete all local snapshots except the most recent. The program will then continue to replace the old snapshot with a new one until you free up space on your Mac’s internal storage, at which point it will go back to saving weekly snapshots as long as space permits.

That being said, everything doesn’t always work properly and you may find yourself out of storage space on your internal hard drive, and those snapshot backups just won’t go away. If you really need to delete those snapshots (which I don’t recommend unless you desperately need that space), there is a way to purge local snapshots from your internal hard drive. You can use a Terminal command that will disable Time Machine’s local snapshot feature, which will delete all of the local snapshots on your internal hard drive. It will also stop Time Machine from creating new snapshots.

To disable local snapshots in Time Machine and remove them from your internal storage:

Launch Terminal on your Mac laptop.
Enter the following command into Terminal.

sudo tmutil disablelocal

Press Enter.
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This will remove those local snapshots from your internal storage. You can then re-enable the feature, which I highly recommend.

Open Terminal on your Mac laptop.
Enter the following command into Terminal:

sudo tmutil enablelocal

Press Enter.

Time Machine will start over, saving local snapshots to your Mac laptop’s internal storage.

Any questions?

Before you decide to purge your local snapshots, be sure you really need to do this. Time Machine should work automatically to remove older backups as you need the storage space on your internal hard drive. If you delete old backups, you can never retrieve data from them if something were to go wrong while you aren’t connected to your backup hard drive. If you have any questions about local snapshots, drop them in the comments and I’ll help you out.

Updated October 2018: Updated for macOS Mojave.

Backing up: The ultimate guide

Main

Summary :

Find your backup disk is full and you cannot continue to back up your operating system or files? To get out of trouble, some of you choose to delete old Windows backup files to free up some space for new backup creation. This post will walk you through how to delete backup files in Windows 10/8/7, as well as the best way to manage Windows backup disk space.

Quick Navigation :

It’s Necessary to Delete Windows Backup Files in Case of Full Backup Disk

Windows operating system includes two features — File History, Backup and Restore, helping you to back up your data and system regularly to protect your computer from data loss, system corruption, etc.

However, data backup files including app data keep growing and growing. After a period of time, you will find they’ll take up an enormous amount of space as they can. If the backup disk is full, no backups can be created, leaving your data and system at risk.

Periodically, you need to take a few minutes to delete old backups or remove app backup files to get the additional room on the drive to continue a new backup creation.

Where are Windows backup files stored? Usually, they are saved on your USB drive or external hard drive. This is why you ask how to delete backup files from external hard drives like WD My Passport in Windows 10.

Here, we will show you simple methods to clear Windows backup files.

How to Delete Backup Files in Windows 10/8/7

As mentioned above, Windows OS offers two utilities for file backup and system image backup. In the following, we will show you how to delete Windows image backup and how to delete old File History backup.

Method 1: Use Built-in Tool to Delete Windows Image Backup Windows 10

In Windows 10/8/7, its snap-in utility named Backup and Restore allows you to automatically create backups of files on your hard drive as well as the Windows OS as long as you turn the schedule setting on. Then, how to delete backup files in the case of Windows 10 backup drive being full? Follow the steps below:

Guide on Windows 10 Backup Delete Old Backups

Step 1: Go to the Start button, click Settings, and choose Update & security.

Step 2: On the Backup page, click the Go to Backup and Restore (Windows 7) link.

Step 3: Click the Manage space option in the Backup section.

Step 4: Then the Manage Windows Backup disk space window will pop up where two options are given for you to choose to free up disk space on the backup disk.

① If you click the View backups button in the Data file backup section, next you are asked to select a backup period to delete Windows backup files.

Note: Deleting previous backups will free up space on your backup location. All files backed up during the selected period will be deleted. Thus, be careful to choose the old period and then click the Delete button to manually remove backup files for more disk space.

② You can also click the Change settings button to free up disk space by changing how Windows retains older system images. This way will let Windows 10 Backup delete old backups automatically.

Next, you see two options to delete windows image backup:

Let Windows manage the space used for backup history. (Maximum X GB)
Keep only the latest system image and minimize space used by the backup.

The first option is selected by default. Windows will automatically save system images, but it won’t take up more than 30% of space on the backup drive if you allow Windows to manage space. Once it reaches the 30% range, older system images will be deleted.

If you care about having the latest system image available and want to conserve disk space, you should choose the second one to keep only the latest system image. Just choose the proper one to delete backup files in Windows 10/8/7 depending on your needs.

Tip: Here is one blog from Microsoft that shows you more information about how to manage Windows backup disk space. It should be helpful for you.

Method 2: Delete Old File History Backups

File History is the utility in Windows 10 and 8, allowing you to back up documents, your desktop, pictures, downloads, music and so on in the user account.

Get error ‘Your File History drive was disconnected for too long’ in Windows 10? Full solutions to fix File History drive disconnected are here!

With the increase of data in these folders, you also need to delete old backups to continue the File History backups when the backup drive gets full.

Wondering how to delete backup files in Windows 8/10 via File History? Here are the steps:

Step 1: Type Control Panel in the searching box and click this utility from the searching results to open it.

Step 2: Find File History in the System and Security section and open it.

Step 3: Click the Advanced settings link.

Step 4: In the pop-up window, you can decide how long to keep saved File History backup versions. For example, you set to keep saved versions for 1 month, then the versions that exceed this range will be deleted automatically.

In addition, you can also click Clean up versions to delete backup files in Windows 10/8. This option will delete versions of files and folders older than the selected age, except the most recent version of a file or folder.

Further reading: Delete System Points to Free up Backup Disk Space

Now the information about Windows 10 Backup delete old backups automatically has been shared with you. In addition to these built-in Windows backup tools, you can create a system restore point to undo unwanted system changes and restore protected files to the previous version.

Are you still troubled by the issue restore point cannot be created? This post shows 6 solutions to solve the problem restore point could not be created.

To free up disk space when the backup drive is full, you can also delete old restore points. Just open the system protection tab, click Configure and adjust the maximum disk space used for system protection. As space fills up, older restore points will be deleted.

Manage Windows Backup Disk Space in a Flexible Way

If you are looking for a flexible way to automatically delete backup files in Windows 10/8/7, we recommend using a piece of third-party software.

MiniTool ShadowMaker is a good choice. As reliable and professional backup software for Windows 10/8/7, it can easily back up your files, disks, partitions, and the operating system.

This software allows you to perform an automatic backup, as well as incremental and differential backup. It is important that you can use it to make advanced settings to automatically delete previous backup files so that the backup disk will never run out of space.

Manual icloud backup macbook. MiniTool offers a Trial Edition of this software that allows you for 30 days for free. Just download it by clicking the button below to have a try.

Here is the guide on how to delete Windows image backup Windows 10:

Step 1: Run MiniTool ShadowMaker Trial Edition that is installed on your computer. Then, a window will appear where you can choose one edition to upgrade or click Keep Trial to continue. Here, we choose the latter one. Next, select one computer to start a backup.

Step 2: Go to the Backup feature where you will see system partition(s), as well as the destination folder for image storage, are selected by this software.

Actually, you can enter the corresponding section to reselect the backup source and storage location. In addition to Windows OS, files, disks or partitions can be backed up, it is allowed to back up your PC to an external hard drive, USB flash drive, and NAS.

Step 3: After deciding the backup source and target, you can make an advanced setting to delete Windows image backups automatically with MiniTool ShadowMaker.

So, do you wonder how to delete backup files in Windows 10/8/7? On the Backup page, you can see there is a feature called Scheme allowing you to do this job easily. After clicking it, you will see this feature is disabled by default. Just turn it on, then choose one backup scheme and set it retain the latest versions of the backup image file.

In general, Incremental or Differential is recommended for enabling you to create incremental or differential backups for changed or added data and manage disk space. Here is a document to help you learn some information about these three backup schemes.

Finally, go back to the Backup page and click Back up Now button to execute the backup.

Actually, you can manage Windows backup disk space in the Manage page. So, how to delete old Windows backup files this way?

Repeat step 1 and step 2, and click Back up Now to start the backup creation in the Manage tab. Then, choose Edit Scheme to choose one scheme to perform backup disk space management. After the setting, this software will automatically delete Windows image backup Windows 10.

Want Windows backup software to back up your PC and manage disk space by deleting backup files in a flexible way? Just free download MiniTool ShadowMaker Trial Edition or you can share this tool on Twitter to let more people know about it.

Tip: How to Delete Backup Files on Mac Hard Drive

By now, all the information about how to delete backup files in Windows 7/8/10 has been shared with you. If you are running a macOS, how can you delete backups taking up space on it? Read this part to learn some information.

On a Mac, the system comes with a utility called Time Machine, making it incredibly easy to back up all your important data so as to restore the Mac when something goes wrong.

It keeps local snapshots as space permits, hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for all previous months. Normally, deleting backup files on Mac means to delete Time Machine backups.

In most cases, you shouldn’t worry about those backups and the occupied space. If everything works properly, this tool will automatically delete the oldest backups when less than 20% of the space on your internal hard drive is available.

However, something may occur and you may find the disk becomes full. Then, you must delete multiple Time Machine backups. Here is a way to purge local snapshots from your internal hard drive:

Step 1: Press Command + Space to open a window, type Terminal and press the Enter key.

Step 2: Input the command: sudo tmutil disablelocal and press Enter.

This will stop Time Machine from creating new snapshots. After a moment, your Mac will automatically delete all of the local snapshots on the hard drive. To keep using local snapshots in the future, you can run this command to re-enable this feature: sudo tmutil enablelocal.

How to delete time machine backups from an external hard drive?

Step 1: Connect the external hard drive to your Mac.

Remove Old Time Machine Backups

Step 2: Open Finder and click Time Machine in the menu bar.

Step 3: Go to the drive containing backups, open the Backups.backupdb folder, find the backup folder titled by date of the backup you want to delete, right-click it and choose Move to Trash.

Tip: You may also be interested in how to delete backup files on Android. Actually, this is quite easy and you can clear old backups via Google Account or third-party software. For more information, search for the detailed solution online.

Bottom Line

Delete All Time Machine Backups

Reading here, you should know more information about how to delete old backups in Windows 10/8/7. To delete Windows image backup automatically to manage Windows backup disk space, MiniTool ShadowMaker is strongly recommended here. What’s more, now you also know how to delete backup files on Mac hard drive.