DISQUS

A User · 1 year ago

Thanks that's really helpful.
I was trying to right-click.

Resuna · 1 year ago

Any way of getting this without going into the damn starfield view?

Fred · 1 year ago

Finally someone who can actually explain me how to do it! Puff, thanks a lot man!

John · 1 year ago

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 · 1 year ago

Thank you so much for that tip.

You are my hero :-)

micros · 1 year ago

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 · 11 months ago

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 · 11 months ago

I forgot the word "delete", i.e. I tried to delete my back ups...

Jim · 11 months ago

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 · 10 months ago

I can't enter my password either. Guess it's time to wipe the drive and start over. <sigh>

Diane Bechtler · 7 months ago

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 · 6 months ago

Thanks a ton. That is the fastest tech answer I have found in some time!

d2 · 6 months ago

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?

zahadum · 6 months ago

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.

Eric · 5 months ago

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.

danidr · 4 months ago

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. :)

Klaus Huber · 6 months ago

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

Greatings from Germany K. H.

qdideas · 6 months ago

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 · 6 months ago

Thanks, now it`s all working perfect.

Greatings from Germany.

rafi · 2 months ago

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 · 2 months ago

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.

Momur · 1 month ago

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.

julianbugge · 2 weeks ago

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?