How to delete old backups

[Top Cat]

Having just bought a new Mac, I decided to free up space on the external drive I use for Time Machine. This worked, except that all the backup folders got moved into my trash - 47 of them at over 5Gb each. These are old backups I will never need, but it takes hours to delete even one. Is there anyway I can just clear them out of my trash and free up 235 Gb of space?

Thanks

 

[0128672]

Yes, drag all the files back to the external drive, and use Disk Utility to erase and reformat the drive.

Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac

In Disk Utility on your Mac, erase and reformat a storage device to use with a Mac.

support.apple.com

 

[Novius89]

I only have an 300 gb partition for backup for my MacBook. Every now and then Time Machine doesn’t delete old backups when the storage is getting full. Even though I have the setting on. I just format the backup partition and start over.

Now that I think about this, it’s going good for almost a month now!

 

[Top Cat]

Thanks Wildsky - however, I do not want to clear the whole drive, only the older backups. While Time Machine works fine backing up the new machine, I cannot access the older stuff that way. However, you can manually find older files in backups, something that has been invaluable in rescuing some images which Lightroom had lost track of in the transfer of data. So I'm keeping some recent backups for now.

 

[Fishrrman]

Just erase the backup drive ... then start over.