Time Machine: rinse and repeat

Time Machine is full — bring a new one.

For reasons I don’t quite understand, Time Machine refuses or fails to do what it’s supposed to — push out older archives/versions when space runs out — and so it occasionally tells me “can’t do it” and stops backing up.

Possibly because the destination is not a real Apple Time Machine device, but a specially configured (following some googled instructions) folder on Synology…

In the past I’d just wipe the folder and start fresh, but this time I figured — there’s extra space on Tesseract — so let’s not throw it away just yet, we’ll toss it later.

Archive the Time Machine#

$ time tar czvf /volume4/garbage/TimeMachineMaxbooka.2025-05-17.tgz /volume1/TimeMachineMaxbooka/

...
real    3753m26.940s
user    3641m48.425s
sys     149m32.053s

Move the archive to the neighboring server#

ansible@boxtree:/volume1$ time rsync --progress /volume4/garbage/TimeMachineMaxbooka.2025-05-17.tgz /volume1/tess/inbox-volume3/
TimeMachineMaxbooka.2025-05-17.tgz
2,617,104,238,550 100%  108.64MB/s    6:22:53 (total: 100%) (xfr#1, to-chk=0/1)

real    382m57.072s
user    272m56.536s
sys     157m33.856s

Wipe the folder#

time rsync -aP  --delete ./empty/ /volume1/TimeMachineMaxbooka/maxbooka.purgeable/
...
real    2m31.497s
user    0m0.212s
sys     0m12.455s

Run the backup#

Off it goes.