Anyone paying as little interest in this post should already be familiar with Time Machine, Apple’s latest automated backup feature introduced in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard.

I’ve been using this feature with my external drive since November 2007 and have been pretty satisfied with it. However from time to time I keep an eye on the size of the files between incremental backups and I noticed that slight changes in filesystem structure (moving directories) can lead to enormous amounts of files being copied over and over again (which was predictable anyway :D) making storage space quite valuable.

When space on your backup drive is not enough for your other files, you start thinking about ways to get rid of older files and … backups.

Cutting to the chase there is a very easy way to do get rid of old backups: fire up Time Machine, navigate to the backup instance you want to delete, press the Gear icon in the toolbar and choose… ‘Delete Backup’. Confirm your action, enter your password and… wait :)

By the time I’ve been writing this post, I’ve already saved about 30 Gb so it’s worth deleting backups (if you are sure you have not misplaced any files, of course :P). But there is a downside to all of this: I’ve been waiting for more than an hour for this operation to finish, and it seems it still has a lot to go…