How do I clear out space on a Time Machine volume?

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Level 2

453 points

How do I clear out space on a Time Machine volume?

I have a Mac (OS 26.2) that is backing up via Time Machine to a volume on a local NAS. The volume has ~10x the storage capacity of the Mac but has filled up. Rather than just auto-deleting the oldest backups, Time Machine now refuses to back up to that volume because it has insufficient space available. How can I force delete some of the older content in order to resume backups? (Note: if possible, I'd prefer to keep *some* recent backups and just delete really old ones, but if I have to start over from scratch so be it.)

Thanks!

Mac Studio (2022)

Posted on Jan 1, 2026 11:36 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

iamshivam

Level 2

188 points

Jan 1, 2026 11:27 PM in response to Mike G.

I get what’s going on here, and this isn’t a Time Machine mystery so much as a NAS behavior biting you. What’s really happening is that Time Machine is trying to prune old backups inside those sparsebundles, but your NAS recycle bin feature is intercepting every delete and quietly shoving terabytes into #recycle, so from macOS’s point of view the disk never actually frees space and TM eventually gives up.

That’s why Finder shows the volume as full even though the sparsebundles look reasonable. It’s safe to delete #recycle, but you should do it from the NAS admin interface, not from macOS, because SMB intentionally hides those system folders and you won’t get consistent results trying to force it from the Mac.

After clearing it, the important fix is to either completely disable the recycle bin on that shared folder or explicitly exclude the Time Machine share from recycling, otherwise this will happen again the next time TM tries to thin backups. Once space is genuinely freed, Time Machine should resume normally and you won’t need to erase the whole backup set unless the sparsebundles themselves are already corrupted.

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Answer 2

Jan 1, 2026 11:41 AM in response to Mike G.

There is no way to cull the backups to create space on the TM backup drive.

All you can do is erase the drive and start a fresh backup set.

Before you do that though, you might check the free space on your startup drive, the drive getting backed up. Often it is that drive that has a shortage of free space and trips up the TM backup process.

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Answer 3

Mike G. Author

Level 2

453 points

Jan 1, 2026 12:22 PM in response to D.I. Johnson

Thanks. I have plenty of space on my startup drive.

Looking more closely at the backup volume, I've found something strange. I have several different computers backing up (via Time Machine) to this volume (with quotas set for each in that computer's time machine settings). When I mounted the Time Machine volume, I found 7 items in it: 6 are sparsebundles named for different computers that are backing up (or have backed up in the past), and the seventh is a folder called "#snapshot". What's strange is the file sizes. The volume is a 20TB volume, the sparsebundles total ~900GB, and the #snapshot folder is about 4.5TB (though this appears to be 5 copies of links to the sparsebundles rather than "real" disk usage).... and Finder believes 20TB have been used on the volume, with zero bytes available. I went into the NAS's administration tool, and found that there is also a folder called #recycle which is apparently taking up ~17TB. It seems like Time Machine has been attempting to backup, failing, but leaving partially completed backups in the recycle bin... filling up the disk... and causing more backup failures...

I cannot see the "#recycle folder when I mount the volume on my Mac (via SMB) -- even if I do "ls -a" in the terminal. I have tried emptying my recycle bin while this volume is mounted but that does not empty the "#recycle" folder on my backup volume. So I'm wondering:

Is it safe to just manually delete the #recycle folder?
Um, how do I do this given that it's hidden? I can delete the whole #recycle folder in my NAS administration tool, but I cannot just delete its contents (as it has ~12,000 items in it, and I must manually select items to delete them, and it will only display so many selectable files per screen...)
How can I prevent this from happening in the future?

Thanks!

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