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Time Machine hand-holding: How do you say goodbye to data?

by Erica Sadun Jul 23rd 2011 at 10:00AM

I've been good this past year. Very good. I have rigorously adhered to the TiNo philosophy, which states that so long as your TiVo, EyeTV, or other recording device has captured a program, it is your prerogative to delete that program whenever you feel like it. Whether you watched it or not.

It's truly liberating. If there's something I'm supposed to watch, I go ahead and record it. Bits are cheap. Time is not.

And then, a week or a month later, I allow myself to say: "I really don't plan on watching this." I delete it from my recordings folder.

My karma and my TV backlog are cleansed.

It was working great until today.

Today, I decided to free up some space off my secondary Time Machine drive. I suddenly noticed that even though I had let go of many dozens of recordings, that my Time Machine backup had not.

A simple command line request showed me recording after recording after recording that my EyeTV had meticulously backed up for me and that Time Machine had lovingly saved even as I deleted them from my media drive. Thank you, Time Machine?

Backup files are stored in Time Machine in the Backups.backupdb folder using the same folder structure as the drive it's saving. Here's the command I used to open up my recording folders. The wildcard * matches each of the backup dates.

% open /Volumes/Backed/Backups.backupdb/Banana/*/TV

Suddenly, there was "V" again, and Glee, and Rubicon, and the Gates for crying out loud. Remember the Gates? It's the one with the cat from Chloe and the jock from Wolf. It was like going out walking and finding silver dollar after silver dollar on the ground.

How am I supposed to get work done with all this old TV waiting to be watched?

In the end, I'm postponing that drive cleanup. I'm giving myself a week. I haven't watched this stuff in months, in years. If a week goes by and I can still live without watching it all, it's getting re-TiNo'ed for good.

It's hard to say goodbye to data, but it's liberating all the same.



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I've been good this past year. Very good. I have rigorously adhered to the TiNo philosophy, which states that so long as your TiVo,...
 

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16 Comments

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anon

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20071101005330768

July 29 2011 at 2:26 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
skwidspawn

Don't worry, Time Machine will purge them when the hard drive gets full :D
(This is what happens when you spend too much time digging around in Terminal! They don't call it "Terminal" for nothing!

July 23 2011 at 12:38 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Kevin

Time Machine will disappoint you. It disappointed me in a major, data losing way. Don't rely on it! I lost most of my iTunes library when my hard drive crashed and was replaced. I wasn't worried because Time Machine had backed it all up. But of course, it wouldn't recognize my computer anymore, not with the new hard drive in it. So no data restore for you! Avoid Apple apps if you need reliability.

July 23 2011 at 12:36 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to Kevin's comment
spadeaceman13

Unfortunately you must have done something severely wrong during the restore process. Time Machine is designed for you to set up a new machine by restoring it from a previous Time Machine backup, regardless of whether you've replaced the hard drive or even the entire machine.

When my mom bought a new iMac to replace her iBook, we set up the iMac by "restoring" it from her last Time Machine backup, which worked perfectly - no data loss, no problem dealing with the completely new computer & hard drive at all. It just worked.

I understand emotions can run high when data loss occurs, but in your case, I'm afraid that whatever you did, Apple was not to blame.

July 23 2011 at 4:05 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to spadeaceman13's comment
icerabbit

I wouldn't be so quick to blame Kevin. He may have inadvertently made some restoration mistake but as you know, it is pretty plug and play with Apple. History and time will tell you that backups do fail. Data corruption happens and can persist throughout the life of a system and the backup drive until you get to that point where you need to restore from the backup and suddenly you get any type of file system errors. That's why I advise anyone to not solely depend on any automated system and have manual copies of their critical files and files they deem important.

July 24 2011 at 3:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down
Fofer

The comment "But of course, it wouldn't recognize my computer anymore, not with the new hard drive in it." makes no sense. That's precisely the scenario for which Time Machine was DESIGNED. All you had to do was use Migration Assistant, which would walk you restoring from a backup, or just click the option key while clicking on the Time Machine menulet icon in the OS X menu bar, and choose "Browse Other Backup Disks."

July 24 2011 at 7:12 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Rami Serhan

I bought my first Mac this week (new air 13'). I got an external iomega hard drive i like to use for time machine backups. MBA can read the contents of my drive with no problems. However, to use it for time machine it wants to reformat drive due to file system issues. Obviously I cannot do that since I have 300 gb worth of data on this drive. Is there a way around it.
Thanks,

July 23 2011 at 11:44 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to Rami Serhan's comment
Ron D.

There's no real way around it if you want to use Time Machine. The drive is probably formatted as FAT. The reason why it needs to format is that it requires the drive to be formatted as HFS+ (Mac OS Extended). If you don't want to do that, but still wish to make a backup, you can try using Carbon Copy Cloner (free, but donations accepted).

July 23 2011 at 12:09 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
skwidspawn

Ron D. is right. You'll have to reformat the drive (to HFS+ Journaled) and then you'll want to partition the drive because Time Machine will expand to fill all available space on a volume, and then begin purging old backups when the drive gets full.
Honestly you should really consider getting a dedicated Time Machine drive. The backup drive will then last longer (activated only once per hour for usually less than a minute) and there is less chance that something will go wrong with it. Cheap external drives are easy to find these days.

July 23 2011 at 12:42 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
MyLightyear

Cool story, Erica.

July 23 2011 at 11:01 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Exit56

the aol way, ladies and gentlemen...

July 23 2011 at 10:55 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mikehild

I'm not sure I understand this post. Are you asking us how to remove a backup of a folder from Time Machine as the title implies? If so, it's really easy. Just launch the TM GUI, browse to one of the backups and select the folder, right-click on it and select "Delete all backups of...."

July 23 2011 at 10:22 AM Report abuse +1 rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to mikehild's comment
Terry Price

Wow, miss the point much? If you read the whole post, the writer clearly knows how to delete content. The question is how does one say goodbye to the content without later regretting having deleted it?

July 23 2011 at 10:57 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Terry Price's comment
skwidspawn

I believe Mikehild answered that question quite well. You say goodbye to old deprecated data by right-clicking on it and selecting "Delete all backups"

July 23 2011 at 12:43 PM Report abuse rate up rate down
aviator1492

It is for this reason that I exclude my EyeTV recordings folder from my Time Machine backup. That, and I don't think I'd have enough space for anything more than a week of backups on my external disk :-D

July 23 2011 at 10:11 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to aviator1492's comment
cookingscience

... and would have taken less time than looking for the backups or writing this article.

July 23 2011 at 10:40 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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