Timeline for How to thin your local Time Machine Snapshots on macOS High Sierra
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
21 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 23 at 13:49 | comment | added | gidds | “…thinned automatically, especially when additional space is required…” That may work reasonably when the only updates are to small files. But if you're frequently transferring or editing multi-GB files (such as VMs, videos, or disk images), then old versions can mount up pretty fast! And even if some Apple apps can pre-emptively clear space, that doesn't seem to apply to many Unix-based and/or third-party apps. | |
| Oct 27 at 16:16 | comment | added | rspeed |
You can use shorthand for the purge_amount value. For example, rather than "1000000000" you can type "1G". This shorthand seems to be consistent across Apple's CLI utilities.
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| Oct 27 at 16:14 | comment | added | rspeed |
What's odd is that the default urgency doesn't seem to be 1-4. Based on my brief testing: If you request an amount of space less than the true free space on the drive, it will only remove snapshots if you provide an urgency value.
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| Dec 7, 2022 at 16:55 | comment | added | Joshua Pinter | @orkoden Thanks for corroborating. I've updated the answer to reflect this assumption now. | |
| Dec 7, 2022 at 16:54 | history | edited | Joshua Pinter | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Added @orkoden reference and reversed urgency assumption.
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| Dec 6, 2022 at 18:23 | comment | added | orkoden |
For me 4 seemed to be high priority as well. With 2 nothing happened, but with 4 the computer was under heavy load for a few minutes and there was considerable thinning.
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| Feb 11, 2021 at 16:54 | history | edited | Joshua Pinter | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Feb 11, 2021 at 16:52 | comment | added | Joshua Pinter | @Clete2 Nice! Okay, good to know. I'll add a little note to the answer. | |
| Feb 11, 2021 at 1:58 | comment | added | Clete2 |
When I used 1 for urgency, it did nothing. I tried 4 and it purged everything (with the 100GB option). I think 4 is high?
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| Dec 29, 2019 at 0:55 | history | edited | Joshua Pinter | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
deleted 4 characters in body
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| Jan 16, 2019 at 16:13 | history | edited | Joshua Pinter | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jan 3, 2019 at 19:11 | comment | added | Joshua Pinter | @andrew Thanks, Andrew! I didn't find anything else out there either so I thought I'd step through it and bring you along for the ride. :) | |
| Jan 3, 2019 at 18:58 | comment | added | andrew | Great post! Couldn’t find anything else on the internet that actually let me reclaim space. I really like how you experimented to figure out what the options mean, then documented it. | |
| Aug 14, 2018 at 14:27 | history | edited | Joshua Pinter | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Remove empty bash lines.
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| Jun 27, 2018 at 16:37 | comment | added | Tetsujin | Sorry, too many snapshot questions open at once ;) I meant to put this under apple.stackexchange.com/q/314038/85275 | |
| Jun 27, 2018 at 15:50 | comment | added | Joshua Pinter | No idea. Not sure what you mean by "delete function" either. | |
| Jun 27, 2018 at 12:07 | comment | added | Tetsujin | I've been trying to get various snapshot functions to work recently. Have you noticed, or is it just me... that snapshots have an am or pm suffix now, which seems to break the delete function? | |
| Mar 18, 2018 at 0:58 | vote | accept | Joshua Pinter | ||
| Feb 11, 2018 at 17:36 | history | edited | Joshua Pinter | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Dec 15, 2017 at 21:25 | history | edited | Joshua Pinter | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Dec 15, 2017 at 20:59 | history | answered | Joshua Pinter | CC BY-SA 3.0 |