Comments on: Leopard Time Machine: Delete Files or Folders from Backup

By: Momur

Momur — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:30:33 +0000

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.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 02:33:10 +0000

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.

By: rafi

rafi — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:52:04 +0000

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!

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 10:30:29 +0000

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. :)

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:43:21 +0000

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.

By: Klaus Huber

Klaus Huber — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:24:56 +0000

Thanks, now it`s all working perfect.

Greatings from Germany.

By: qdideas

qdideas — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:12:02 +0000

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.

By: Klaus Huber

Klaus Huber — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 03:01:58 +0000

I can`t see the gears, what is wrong?

Greatings from Germany K. H.

By: zahadum

zahadum — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 05:27:59 +0000

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.

By: d2

d2 — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:29:58 +0000

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?