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:
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.