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End of Year Time Machine Cleanup

Posted on December 31, 2010

During the Holiday break I decided to do a little computer file cleanup. I noticed that the size of my Time Machine backup had grown quite large (Approx 850 GB). That’s right, 850 GB. I decided I didn’t that many backups and proceeded to delete nearly all of the backup files save a few key ones. I then noticed that the .sparsebundle that is my backup was still reporting a file size of 850 GB. After doing a little google searching I found that this is common. I also found a way to manually compact the sparsebundle to reclaim some of that unused space. The trick was to use The Terminal.

Helpful Links:

  • http://hintsforums.macworld.com/archive/index.php/t-84284.html
  • http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-783907.html

Here is what I did since my backup has spaces in the filename.

  • Launch Terminal
  • cd /Volumes
  • sudo -s
  • ls (to view the Volumes)
  • cd “Time Capsule Disk” (I had to include the quotes)
  • hdiutil compact *.sparsebundle

If all goes according to plan, you should see the following messages:

Starting to compact…
Reclaiming free space
……………………………………
Finishing compaction…
Reclaimed xxx.x GB out of xxx.x GB possible

I reclaimed 507.5 GB!!! Your results may vary.

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