Leopard Time Machine: Delete Files or Folders from Backup
Contributed by David Kirk 
Tagged: Mac OS X Leopard Time Machine does an amazing job of backing up all files on your system. However, sometimes you do not want every file saved forever and ever and evar. Here is how you remove a backed up file or folder from the time machine.
I really will not judge you for your huge file collections. Images, videos, programs — whatever they are. However, you may not want these files saved on your backup drive in perpetuity.
Here is how to remove files and folders from your Time Machine backup.
1. Hit the Time Machine icon to jump into the starfield view
2. For some crazy reason, you can’t ctrl-click (right-click) in the starfield view. So pull-up the options by clicking the “gears” Options icon as shown below. From here, select Delete All Backups…
Ahhh… safer you are, young Leopard Jedi.
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A User said on November 6, 2008
Thanks that’s really helpful.
I was trying to right-click.
Peter da Silva said on November 17, 2008
Any way of getting this without going into the damn starfield view?
Fred said on November 26, 2008
Finally someone who can actually explain me how to do it! Puff, thanks a lot man!
John said on November 29, 2008
What if you do this, and nothing happens. I am trying to delete the movies folder from itunes, (it is huge and I manage another backup of it elsewhere) but it does not go anywhere. Nothing happens at all.
Franky said on December 4, 2008
Thank you so much for that tip.
You are my hero :-)
micros said on December 21, 2008
So after doing that, does it still have a backup of the most recent state of this folder, or is that one also removed?
TM Newbie said on January 12, 2009
I tried to my back ups of Parallels XP from TM. The files disappeared in the Star Field view, but the free space on the disk did not change? Do I need to empty the trash somehow?
TM Newbie said on January 12, 2009
I forgot the word “delete”, i.e. I tried to delete my back ups…
Jim said on January 27, 2009
After following your instructions, it then asks for my password, but I can’t type anything into that area. No curser, so I still can’t delete pictures.
Jim
Diane said on February 1, 2009
I can’t enter my password either. Guess it’s time to wipe the drive and start over.
Diane Bechtler said on May 9, 2009
it takes a longish time depending on what is being deleted and how big the files are. Previous system in my case. 10 copies
CSims said on June 11, 2009
Thanks a ton. That is the fastest tech answer I have found in some time!
d2 said on June 11, 2009
Did you try entering entering the starfield view, selecting the item to delete all backups of, telling Time Machine to delete all backups from the gear menu, EXITING THE STARFIELD VIEW, then typing your password in the pop-up window that remains popped up?
Anonymous said on June 13, 2009
hmm, too bad that it is not possible to selectively delete files from time machine …
* all instances prior to a certain date;
* all instance in a range(s) of dates;
* all instances of a certain attribute … such as size; or label (eg draft1, draft2 etc); or permission mask (ie ACL); or f-stop; or geo-tag; or comment; etc etc
as usual, apple takes a great idea & never finishes the proper execution of it!
… and because apple has not offered any OSAX support (for scriptable plugins) nor designed a proper API (for parametric control from the shell), there is no way for the user to implement the features they need extensibly or modularly …
as is usualy with apple :-(
sigh.
Klaus Huber said on June 24, 2009
I can`t see the gears, what is wrong?
Greatings from Germany K. H.
Anonymous said on June 24, 2009
Klaus:
Before you enter Time Machine do the following:
1. Open a Finder Window
2. Click the View menu
3. Select Show Toolbar
Now enter Time Machine and you will see the gears.
Klaus Huber said on June 24, 2009
Thanks, now it`s all working perfect.
Greatings from Germany.
Eric said on July 24, 2009
Loved your comment about Apple. Yes, Apple never quite makes anything clear, and always falls short in their functionality. Another good example of this is the Mail program, which allows you to turn off external HTML loading for all messages or for no messages. Every other mail reader in the entire known universe allows you to selectively load based on your address book.
Time Machine bugs me because for something as important as backup software, you never know quite what is going on. I don’t really trust it because I don’t really know what it has backed up and what it hasn’t. Love the error messages too. (“Your backup has failed! Error -12345″). Very reassuring.
Anonymous said on August 15, 2009
You can actually see what’s gone wrong with Time Machine by opening the Console, clicking on “All messages” and searching for “backupd” in the upper right corner. It will give you all log messages from Time Machine. Hope that helps. :)
rafi said on September 30, 2009
Hi there,
a Question: I made a big big mistake of deleting a folder (with all my pictures over the past 4 yrs!), that was in the actual time machine. NOT on my mac (desktop, documents etc). Anyway, after deleting the folder by mistake, i didnt even have to ‘empty trash’, it just got lost!!! HOW DO I GET IT BACK? I am going crazy over this!
Joshua said on October 11, 2009
Rafi,
I hate to say that you’re screwed. When I first purchased my Mac last year, Time Machine has been great – deleting files not so much. I transferred my old 60 gigish of software from the past 3 years deleted by doing the same “delete backup” method as stated above. It absolutely pissed me off, but at least it wasn’t as precious as pictures or immensely important e-mails/documents, etc.
When I utilize “Delete Backup”, it deletes THE ENTIRE BACKUP INSTANCE, meaning – anything that was backed up during that time period will be gone as soon as you enter your administrative password.
I’m currently thinking of scrapping Time Machine and saving all my truly important files and switching to NTFS. Backing up is great, but some of this is really half-baked.
Anonymous said on November 8, 2009
OK, I deleted things but my back-up hard drive is still full. The menu shows only about 30G so I should have over 30 left. Why is my hard drive not getting cleaned up? Thoughts.
Anonymous said on December 9, 2009
i’ve used time machine for 2 years now… and love it. but same problem, it’s taking up to much space on my ekstra harddisk. if i go back a year and delete things, will i then delete the backup from 2 months ago? if i delete my photo folder from januar 2008, how much of it will be lost?
T said on January 5, 2010
Thank you. These were great instructions.
Anonymous said on January 11, 2010
mmm….useful info
Anonymous said on January 24, 2010
I am trying to delete unnecessary reoccurring back ups. I have viewed the forums but I do not have the “gear” icon in the time machine window. I have tried to add that via the “finder” but it does not accept this. What next?
Bruce Greene said on March 22, 2010
I tried to delete Time Machine files and nothing happened after following instructions
Godzilla68 said on July 1, 2010
Worked for me, went into TM, selected the file or files I didn’t want and an option was to delete ALL back ups of those particular files. Worked great thanks!
Josh said on October 4, 2010
In Snow Leopard (10.6) you can right/control click. No need for the gears.
Abc_c_b said on October 28, 2010
woooowwww…. you are mi herooo
thank you soo muuch…
don’t have any more problems =)
Jan Steinman said on November 5, 2010
You can drag folders from within /Volumes/Backup/Backups.bacukpdb to the trash and then empty the trash. But this will only delete an instance of a backup of a folder — not all the backups for eternity.
There doesn’t seem to be any way to do it from Terminal, because of extended attributes and hard-linked directories, I’d guess.
Thierrydemontblanc said on December 14, 2010
Right click on mac: select the item then depress “control” and, maintaining the pressure on ” control” just click normally : there you are!
Michael said on January 18, 2011
I tried this in Leopard 10.5.8, but it doesn’t seem to work. I select the folders and click the option in the gear menu, it asks me to confirm. But there is no change in the Time Machine history. When I exit Time Machine (press Cancel or Esc key), there is no prompt for my username/password or anything. The backups are still there.
nnua said on January 24, 2011
OMG. I make monthly backups of my TM, and I want to get rid of certain months and preserve others. I selected the specific date file which I want to delete using the gears method. TM deleted ALL my backups from my external HD, every single month!!
What went wrong, anybody has any ideas?