My time machine backup files are taking up 1.6 TB of space on my 4 TB NAS. There are 3 files in the folder, but only 1 is relevant. I tried to delete the 2 files but was unable to.
Can someone provide some insight on how I can get rid of the 2 backups I no longer need?
Time Machine on a NAS doesn’t store “files” the way Finder makes it look, those big items are usually sparsebundle disk images, and macOS treats them as active backup volumes with ownership + ACL protections, so Finder deletion often fails even if they look unused, the practical way to remove them is to first make sure Time Machine is not currently using that NAS (turn it off in settings), then mount the NAS share and delete the unwanted sparsebundle via Terminal with sudo rm -rf (because Finder respects permissions that Terminal can override), but before doing that, double-check the bundle name matches the old Mac or hostname you no longer need, also, if deletion still fails, it usually means the bundle is marked “in use” due to stale locks, in which case restarting both your Mac and the NAS clears it; bottom line: this isn’t a storage bug, it’s macOS protecting backup integrity, so you have to step outside Finder to remove those safely
Hi Ellinor,
Thank you very much for the detailed response. How would I use terminal to delete the file?
Time Machine backups on a NAS are usually stored as .sparsebundle files, which is why you may only see a few large files instead of normal folders. If there are three backup files and only one is still needed, the other two are most likely older backups. These files sometimes cannot be deleted directly because Time Machine or NAS permissions still treat them as active. A simple way to remove them is to connect to the NAS from the Mac that created the backup, turn off Time Machine for a moment, and then delete the unwanted .sparsebundle files from the backup folder. If the system still blocks the deletion, log in to the NAS admin panel and delete them using the file manager. After that, turn Time Machine back on and continue using the remaining backup.
