external hard drive time machine recover erased files

Use the timeline on the right of the screen or the arrows to navigate to the backup date you want to delete. You can do this using by searching for “Time Machine” in Launchpad, Spotlight, or the Applications folder in Finderģ.

Connect your external backup drive to your MacĢ. Following this method, you can choose to either delete backups from a certain date or delete backups of a certain file across all dates.įollow these steps to use Time Machine to delete backups:ġ. The safest (and easiest) way to delete backups is using the Time Machine app. How to remove old backups in the Time Machine app If you do need to manually delete old backups from Time Machine, you can do so using Finder or the Time Machine app.įurther reading: How to check Mac storage space. Other times, Time Machine might tell you there isn’t enough space to create a particularly large backup, refusing to delete the old backups to make space. However, there are rare occasions where you still need to take matters into your own hands.įor instance, you might need to manually delete Time Machine backups if you want to create space on your external drive for non-backup files. You don’t need to do anything to make this happen, Time Machine just deletes old backups in the background whenever it needs to. This is because Apple designed Time Machine to automatically delete old backups whenever it runs out of storage. Most of the time you don’t need to do anything to manage your Time Machine backups. Time Machine usually deletes old backups automatically Luckily, there are a few different ways to delete old Time Machine backups from your Mac or external drive. The downside to these incremental backups is that they can end up using a lot of storage. An incremental backup means that Time Machine stores multiple versions of your files, making it easy to undo changes or even restore deleted files and folders. Time Machine is the best backup software to use with your Mac because it automatically creates incremental backups.

External hard drive time machine recover erased files