How to delete Time Machine backups on Mac

Local snapshots and backups: what’s the difference

• Local snapshots are kept on your Mac’s startup disk. Time Machine saves one about every hour and keeps it for 24 hours, plus a snapshot of your last successful backup and one before each macOS update.
• Backups are kept on the backup disk: hourly ones for the past 24 hours, daily ones for the past month and weekly ones for all earlier months.

Your Mac counts the space used by local snapshots as available, and Time Machine deletes them as they age or when the space is needed for something else. That’s why they rarely need deleting by hand.

How to delete Time Machine local snapshots

This is Apple’s way. It deletes all local snapshots and leaves the backups on your backup disk alone:

1. Choose Apple menu › System Settings, click General in the sidebar, then click Time Machine.

2. Click Options, choose Manually from the Backup Frequency pop-up menu, then click Done.
3. Wait a few minutes while the local snapshots are deleted.
4. Click Options again, set Backup Frequency back to what it was and click Done.

Delete local snapshots in Terminal

To see the local snapshots of the startup disk, run:

Each name ends with a date like 2026-10-08-093015. To delete the snapshots of one date, run tmutil deletelocalsnapshots followed by that date, for example tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2026-10-08-093015. A deleted snapshot is gone: until the next backup, you can restore only from what is on the backup disk.

If Terminal says the operation isn’t permitted, give it Full Disk Access in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Full Disk Access and run the command again.

Delete old backups on the backup disk

When the backup disk fills up, Time Machine deletes older backups to make room for new ones, so usually there is nothing to do. If you keep running out of space, Apple recommends connecting a new backup disk.

To delete one particular backup, use tmutil. It needs your administrator password and Full Disk Access for Terminal, and it deletes the backup permanently:

1. Connect the backup disk and note its name in the Finder sidebar, for example Backups.
2. List its backups: run sudo tmutil listbackups -d /Volumes/Backups -t, with your disk’s name in place of Backups.
3. Delete the one you don’t need: run sudo tmutil delete -d /Volumes/Backups -t followed by its date from the list.

Don’t delete backup folders on the backup disk in Finder or with other commands: you may damage the remaining backups. To start over with an empty disk, remove it from the backup disks in Time Machine settings, then erase it in Disk Utility — every backup on it will be lost.