Old/new Timemachine

[denetoet]

Hello all,

I bought a new MacBook Air. I used the time machine (an external disk) that I previously used with my old MacBook Pro (that died some time ago) to transfer the setup and all data (succesfully) to the MB Air

I wanted to connect that (old) time machine to the MBA. The reaction was that there was not enough space. Which I can understand because its first backup of the new setup would be huge of course. The automatic freeing of space of the TM does not work. So I thought that it would help to remove many old updates from the TM like they appear in Backups.backupdb in the form of maps with titles like 2020-01-24-[6 numbers]. But then I realized that all these old backups cohere.

So what is possible?
A) Is there a way to free space manually on a part of that old disk and use it again?. If so, Oldest or most recent backups?

B) Or should I just totally erase that TM and use it for the new MBA? In fact the first backup would then (only) contain the situation on my old MBP just before it died. That would then be the 'oldest backup'. And it is then impossible to look further back in time (if I would like to).

C) Of course I could buy a new disk.

Tell me what you would do, please. And thank you in advance.

Dirk

 

[TonyAguila]

Hello all,

I bought a new MacBook Air. I used the time machine (an external disk) that I previously used with my old MacBook Pro (that died some time ago) to transfer the setup and all data (succesfully) to the MB Air

I wanted to connect that (old) time machine to the MBA. The reaction was that there was not enough space. Which I can understand because its first backup of the new setup would be huge of course. The automatic freeing of space of the TM does not work. So I thought that it would help to remove many old updates from the TM like they appear in Backups.backupdb in the form of maps with titles like 2020-01-24-[6 numbers]. But then I realized that all these old backups cohere.

So what is possible?
A) Is there a way to free space manually on a part of that old disk and use it again?. If so, Oldest or most recent backups?

B) Or should I just totally erase that TM and use it for the new MBA? In fact the first backup would then (only) contain the situation on my old MBP just before it died. That would then be the 'oldest backup'. And it is then impossible to look further back in time (if I would like to).

C) Of course I could buy a new disk.

Tell me what you would do, please. And thank you in advance.

Dirk

In your position I would simply buy another external disk for Time Machine. You may later realize that there was data on the old one that you could have restored if you were to reformat the drive.

If you do decide to get another drive for Time Machine, make sure you format it as APFS.