Can't delete folders from backups?!

[SkweeBop]

Are you telling me APFS prevents deletion of folders from backups now?

My drive has plenty of space, but says there isn't enough. I don't need portions of an old backup, so I go to delete like any normal human being would and then..."cannot be modified"?! Surely there's a Terminal override?

 

[gilby101]

Are you telling me APFS prevents deletion of folders from backups now?

Yes. That is the only downside of APFS for backup. To my mind, the advantages outlay that one loss of functionality.

You can delete any snapshot using Disk Utility or a tmutil Terminal command.

My drive has plenty of space, but says there isn't enough.

So that is really your problem. Can you say what says that? And describe the current sizes and free space of your TM disk and of the disks/volumes being backed up.

Disk Utility can show you the sizes of each snapshot if you enable View > Show APFS Snapshots. The will show you the "private size" of each snapshot (which is the size of files only in that snapshot). the "size" column shows you how much you would recover if your deleted a snapshot and all the older ones.

Time Machine would normally delete old backups until there is enough space. It should only fail to backup if there isn't enough space after all but the latest previous backup would have been removed.

 

[SkweeBop]

Thanks for the quick response: I was most of the way through a backup, with 75 gigs left on the drive. The remainder of data left looked much less than that, based on what was being backed up. I also would have thought that the process would determine whether or not it was possible to fit everything before trying to fit it. At any rate, it turns out I was able to delete an older backup in its entirety from the finder.

I did a little reading up in the meantime, and now understand better how the "snapshot" model is working compared to the previous Journaled style. But I'm afraid I don't like what this means for users. Might just avoid Time Machine in future, unless I want to spring for a backup drive that is used exclusively for backups and not my instrument libraries.

What can you do with Time Machine backups on APFS?

When Time Machine makes its backups to APFS storage, just what can and can’t you do? How can you prevent large temporary files from stealing space on storage?

eclecticlight.co

 

[gilby101]

I also would have thought that the process would determine whether or not it was possible to fit everything before trying to fit it

I too would have expected that. (Howard Oakley is also my source of wisdom)