I recently migrated to Sonoma and with that, started a new APFS-formatted Time Machine disk — all my previous TM disks were HFS+.
Yesterday I read a post on the OWC blog about “what to do when your TM backup disk is full” which said your only option is to start a new disk. This surprised me as with my older MacOS versions using HFS+ disks, when your backup volume filled up TM would start deleting the oldest backups until it had recovered enough space and then notify you it was full and the backup range had been shortened.
Now, as far as I can tell, it just stops. It no longer deletes old backups?
Also, the previous ability to completely delete a file/folder or an entire specific backup session seems to be MIA too? This was useful for things like discovering you had forgotten to exclude a huge file such as a Parallels VM disk image or something which for privacy reasons you didn’t want to be backed up.
I’ve seen no documentation of this feature removal.
My experience (and my Time Machine drive has always been HFS+) is that the Time Machine folder corrupts itself before the drive fills. So I’ve never seen it delete old backups. Starting a new drive would be an improvement.
(I’ve used Time Machine since it was introduced, and in case you haven’t guessed, I don’t trust it as any more than a secondary backup.)
Supposedly one can delete backups using tmutil in Terminal. That might be useful for deleting a backup that contains that huge file you didn’t want backed up. I can’t recommend it for routine thinning, though.
Howard Oakley seems to believe that Time Machine still deletes old backups automatically. Of course that doesn’t help if it’s not.
Totally agree. Life is too short to spend anymore time trying to hunt down Time Machine problems. It is so convenient yet completely unreliable.
I run it automatically on a NAS at home and on USB drive at work. As soon as the usb has problems (corrupts or runs out of space because it won’t delete backups) I simply stick it in a drawer and buy a new one. When the NAS chokes I just start over.
Having said that, I recently did a full system restore for the first time after an Apple repair incident, and I was shocked that it worked. I did it from the usb drive I just replaced a few weeks ago after the previous one got corrupted. They tend to last 1-2 years before TM says no more.
Because I can still access the files. So I can’t from restore it, but I still have the archive.
EDIT: Actually, I might be able to restore from it, who knows? I can’t rely on that and I can’t continue to back up to it, but I have those files/older versions.
There was a time when I set up time machine for a number of our managers. Sometimes it did delete old backups, frequently it did not. But I run TM as one of my local backups, and reformat the drive if/when it screws up.
That makes sense. It’s so rare that I’ve needed to go back and get old versions of files from old backups (I’m not sure I’ve ever done it) that I didn’t think of that as a major concern.