Time Machine automatically deletes old backups when it’s getting full, but if you also use the backup disk for other purposes, you might want to clear some space manually.<\/p>\n
There is a built-in command line utility that comes with macOS which you can use for this – Specifically, the sub-command you want is You can list existing backups with To find the backup mount point, you can use So in this case, the value for the You can extract this with As for the For example:<\/p>\n Now we know what values to pass to But we can go one better than this… Say you want to delete all the backups from Jan-Mar in 2023, you can use this one-liner:<\/p>\n Of course you could filter in other ways, e.g. Time Machine automatically deletes old backups when it’s getting full, but if you also use the backup disk for other purposes, you might want to clear some space manually. There is a built-in command line utility that comes with macOS … Continue reading tmutil<\/code>.<\/p>\ntmutil delete<\/code>, here is an extract from the man page:<\/p>\n\n
delete [-d backup_mount_point -t timestamp] [-p path]\n Deletes the backups with the specified timestamp from the backup volume mounted at the specified\n mountpoint. The -t option followed by a timestamp can be used multiple times to specify multiple backups\n to delete. For HFS backup disks, a specific path to delete can also be specified using the -p option.\n This verb can delete items from backups that were not made by, or are not claimed by, the current\n machine. Requires root and Full Disk Access privileges.\n<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n
tmutil listbackups<\/code> but the path that’s printed is not<\/strong> the path you need to provide to tmutil delete<\/code>. In fact, you actually need to provide the -d<\/code> and -t<\/code> flags, not -p<\/code>.<\/p>\ntmutil destinationinfo<\/code>. Here is an example output:<\/p>\n\n
~ $ tmutil destinationinfo \n====================================================\nName : Time Machine\nKind : Local\nMount Point : \/Volumes\/Time Machine\nID : F0CBBC01-DEAD-CA1F-BEEF-0000AAAABBBB\n<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n
-d<\/code> flag is \"\/Volumes\/Time Machine\"<\/code>.<\/p>\nawk<\/code> or another utility, for example:<\/p>\n\n
~ $ tmutil destinationinfo | awk -F ' : ' '\/Mount Point\/{print $2}' \n\/Volumes\/Time Machine\n<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n-t<\/code> (timestamp) flag, this is obvious from the tmutil listbackups<\/code> output, but you can even specify -t<\/code> in the listbackups<\/code> sub-command which prints only the value needed in the correct format.<\/p>\n\n
~ $ tmutil listbackups -t\n2022-02-05-094839\n2022-02-12-091416\n2022-02-19-093000\n2022-02-26-092448\n...\n<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Bringing it all together<\/h2>\n
tmutil delete<\/code>, the final command might look like this:<\/p>\n\n
sudo tmutil delete -d \"\/Volumes\/Time Machine\" -t 2022-02-05-094839<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n
tmutil listbackups -t | \\
egrep '2023-0[123]' | \\
xargs -L 1 sudo tmutil delete \\
-d \"$(tmutil destinationinfo | awk -F ' : ' '\/Mount Point\/{print $2}')\" -t<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\nhead -n 20<\/code> to delete the oldest 20 backups (careful though, this will delete the most recent as well if there are only 20 or fewer in total)<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"