Time Machine: Delete Files or Folders from Backup
Posted by David Kirk in Apple Mac
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. 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. In all versions of Time Machine, you can use this technique to delete a particular file or folder from all Time Machine backups.
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 Time Machine Jedi.
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November 06, 2008 at 6:45 pm, A User said:
Thanks that’s really helpful.
I was trying to right-click.
November 17, 2008 at 8:49 pm, Peter da Silva said:
Any way of getting this without going into the damn starfield view?
November 05, 2010 at 11:30 pm, Jan Steinman said:
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.
November 26, 2008 at 4:36 pm, Fred said:
Finally someone who can actually explain me how to do it! Puff, thanks a lot man!
November 29, 2008 at 4:47 am, John said:
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.
December 04, 2008 at 11:10 pm, Franky said:
Thank you so much for that tip.
You are my hero
December 21, 2008 at 11:24 am, micros said:
So after doing that, does it still have a backup of the most recent state of this folder, or is that one also removed?
January 12, 2009 at 5:23 pm, TM Newbie said:
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?
January 12, 2009 at 5:24 pm, TM Newbie said:
I forgot the word “delete”, i.e. I tried to delete my back ups…
January 27, 2009 at 2:31 am, Jim said:
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
February 01, 2009 at 10:27 pm, Diane said:
I can’t enter my password either. Guess it’s time to wipe the drive and start over.
May 09, 2009 at 10:07 pm, Diane Bechtler said:
it takes a longish time depending on what is being deleted and how big the files are. Previous system in my case. 10 copies
June 11, 2009 at 1:39 am, CSims said:
Thanks a ton. That is the fastest tech answer I have found in some time!
June 11, 2009 at 5:29 pm, d2 said:
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?
June 13, 2009 at 7:27 am, Anonymous said:
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.
July 24, 2009 at 2:43 pm, Eric said:
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.
August 15, 2009 at 12:30 pm, Anonymous said:
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.
June 24, 2009 at 5:01 am, Klaus Huber said:
I can`t see the gears, what is wrong?
Greatings from Germany K. H.
June 24, 2009 at 11:12 am, Anonymous said:
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.
June 24, 2009 at 8:24 pm, Klaus Huber said:
Thanks, now it`s all working perfect.
Greatings from Germany.
September 30, 2009 at 10:52 pm, rafi said:
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!
October 11, 2009 at 4:33 am, Joshua said:
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.
November 08, 2009 at 8:30 pm, Anonymous said:
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.
December 09, 2009 at 5:34 pm, Anonymous said:
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?
January 05, 2010 at 10:56 pm, T said:
Thank you. These were great instructions.
January 11, 2010 at 1:16 pm, Anonymous said:
mmm….useful info
January 24, 2010 at 12:10 am, Anonymous said:
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?
March 22, 2010 at 7:57 pm, Bruce Greene said:
I tried to delete Time Machine files and nothing happened after following instructions
July 01, 2010 at 4:28 am, Godzilla68 said:
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!
October 04, 2010 at 11:52 pm, Josh said:
In Snow Leopard (10.6) you can right/control click. No need for the gears.
October 28, 2010 at 6:24 pm, Abc_c_b said:
woooowwww…. you are mi herooo
thank you soo muuch…
don’t have any more problems =)
December 14, 2010 at 10:17 am, Thierrydemontblanc said:
Right click on mac: select the item then depress “control” and, maintaining the pressure on ” control” just click normally : there you are!
January 18, 2011 at 11:39 pm, Michael said:
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.
January 24, 2011 at 4:50 pm, nnua said:
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?
May 02, 2012 at 2:51 pm, spencer said:
I dragged the folders in the backup folder on the drive to the trash. When I try to delete the folders in the trash I get an ‘unexpected error’ message and the folders won’t delete. I tryed putting them back into the backup folder and it won’t let me because the backup folder ‘can’t be modified’.
I essentially am trying to free up some space on the backup drive and am having a difficult time doing that.
May 05, 2012 at 2:35 pm, Joyce said:
I really need some advice. I lost a picture and thought I would use time machine to go back and get it in a recent file of iphoto. I did not catch the date was not current for iphoto (ie 2010 instead of 2012) and when I updated l lost over 5,000 photos I really need. Unfortunately thats when I saw that all of my recent backups of iphoto where dated 2010?
I had no problem with time machine and have had no need for it since switching to snow leopard? (about 2010 it was installed) Is that my problem ? and is there any way to get my photos back?
very frustrated photographer
May 05, 2012 at 3:51 pm, David Kirk said:
If you have not backed up since 2010 and you restored your system back to 2010… sadly, I think you’ve lost those 2 years. Ideally, you would have just grabbed that single photo from TM and not reverted your entire iPhone library back to 2010. I am so very, very sorry for your loss. The loss of 2 years worth of photos is incredibly painful. If you had continued to use TM, you could have just restored your library to it’s most recent backup.