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Prune Your Time Machine Backups Selectively
via TidBITS: Mac News for the Rest of Us by matt@tidbits.com (Matt Neuburg) on April 30, 2008
Time Machine users, rejoice! Pierce T. Wetter III has released a modified version of the open-source GrandPerspective utility (see "GrandPerspective and WhatSize Identify Disk Pigs," 2007-10-12) - a version that understands the use of file and folder hard links peculiar to a Time Machine backup.
You can use this modified GrandPerspective to scan your entire Time Machine backup folder. For one thing, this tells you immediately how big your Time Machine backup really is (something that's surprisingly hard to find out otherwise). But, even more important, you can now look for large files that are either (1) one-time entries you didn't really need backed up, or (2) repeated backups of some large, occasionally changing file. For example, in this screen shot, the large file selected, artsyPhotos.ivc, is unnecessarily backed up three times (it's the same as the large green file in the center and at the top-center of the picture).
You can then recover some space by entering Time Machine and deleting one or all of the unnecessary backups of the troublesome file, as you see me doing here. (See where the Action menu says "Delete Backup" and "Delete All Backups Of...? The former deletes just this instance of the file, the latter all copies of the file, from the backups folder.)
If the presence of large unnecessary backups is diagnostic of some flaw in your backup strategy, you might also like to modify your Time Machine preferences to exclude, explicitly, the troublesome file(s).
I recovered about 10 GB of backup drive space instantly by discovering large files that I had unnecessarily and inadvertently backed up.
Also this is a great way simply to find out what the heck is in your backups folder!
Copyright © 2008 Matt Neuburg. TidBITS is copyright © 2008 TidBITS Publishing Inc. If you're reading this article on a Web site other than TidBITS.com, please let us know, because if it was republished without attribution, by a commercial site, or in modified form, it violates our Creative Commons License.
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