Comments on: Removing backups from Apple’s Time Machine

By: Hoo-har

Hoo-har — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:53:02 +0000

@Mark – the article is about Time Capsule, not using Time Machine with an external disk.

…well there comments and then there are COMMENTS…

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 00:44:55 +0000

Thanks for this, but I cannot find any folders in my Time Machine disk with the word “sparsebundle”. I only have one mac backed up on my TM drive.

…well there blogs and then there are BLOGS…

By: Pablo

Pablo — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 05:20:50 +0000

thanks for posting this…has saved me a ton of headaches
one thing you could add to make it even easier is that you can simply type

sudo hdiutil compact

then go to your time capsule file (xxx.sparsebundle) and simply drag it into the Terminal window…this will copy the full path and file name in your Terminal..
less likely to forget a space or an escape character.

thanks again

By: KAM

KAM — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 16:47:35 +0000

THANKS!!!! so hard to find this info explained well. this did the trick!!

By: Wordman

Wordman — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 01:49:40 +0000

Any thoughts on how you delete the backups of a machine you no longer have? I can’t “run Time Machine and in the Finder window should be a disk mounted named ‘Backup of’ followed by your computer name” for a machine that no longer exists, yet I still want to clean out its backups.

By: weave

weave — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 17:38:10 +0000

If you have any spaces in your file name (most likely) you have to either escape them (put a \ in front of each one) or surround the entire name in a single quote. Or just copy and paste the file name as I did above and it should be specified correctly.

By: Meg

Meg — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:05:47 +0000

Hello! This was exactly what I was looking for! Thanks so much.

I entered the command and got prompted for a password, but then got the following response:

hdiutil: compact: Only one input file can be specified.

Any clues? Thanks!

By: thantas

thantas — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:46:25 +0000

thanx for your help

By: weave

weave — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 11:16:38 +0000

Took ages for me as well. Doubt there’s a way to speed it up.

By: Danny Aston

Danny Aston — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 11:01:17 +0000

For some reason it seems to ages to delete a 500GB file (Well over two hours) Is there anyway of speeding this up?

Danny