Freeing up space on my external?

Hey! i have like 800GB of backups on my external. Am i safe to delete earlier back ups, as long as i keep sayyyyy the most recent 2 or 3 back up folders?

Need to free up lots of space

Thread moved to better sub-forum.

- Nick

Backups of what or what kind of backups (made how)?

just my time machine back ups each one is like 200GB haha!

When my TM backups get too large, I just turn off TM - delete the entire backup, turn TM back on and create a new one.

bobtomay said:

When my TM backups get too large, I just turn off TM - delete the entire backup, turn TM back on and create a new one.

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please may you further explain how to do this? thanks

Open TM preferences
Turn it off
Delete the backup from your external
Open TM preferences
Turn it back on

When the Time Machine backup disks gets full Time Machine itself will delete earlier backups automatically so you don't need to do anything.

Sawday said:

When the Time Machine backup disks gets full Time Machine itself will delete earlier backups automatically so you don't need to do anything.

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Hi Bobtomay & Sawday - that was my understanding above; but a question - on a computer, I like to have about 15% or so of the hard drive space 'free' just so that there is room to do regular maintenance/installations/etc. Now on an external HD running Time Machine (TM), how full does that drive become before TM starts deleting older BUs? And does this 15% generalization even apply to a BU external HD? Dave

It will delete the older backups all by it's lonesome.

I am of the group that maintains a 30-40% free space on any hard drive partition that contains an operating system.
I would be considered at the extreme end of this particular discussion.

No, the minimum free space requirements that should be maintained for an operating system partition to function properly and with adequate speed for all the reads and writes it needs to perform is not applicable to data only partitions.

Don't know exactly - mine was recently under 1GB free space with the stupid notice popping up on all 3 computers that use the same external for their TM backups. Don't think TM deletes anything until the point where there is not enough room for the new backup.

bobtomay said:

Don't think TM deletes anything until the point where there is not enough room for the new backup.

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Thats been my experience. As part of the preparation for a backup Time Machine estimates/calculates the space needed for that backup. If there is not enough space you get that warning.

I'm not 100% sure but I think Time Machine needs a bit of "headroom". A bit more space than the backup requires.

You can switch the Time Machine warning off so you don't even get the warning. It's not meant to be a permanent archive so that's just fine by me. TM just does it's own thing leaving me in blissful ignorance (save for occasionally checking that it's working)