It is commonly seen that a trash folder in macOS is a hidden set of directories that have a user trash folder stored at the root of the local file system and directory trash folder. The folder you want to restore will return to your home directory when the time Machine activates. But this isn’t easy to do as when you open trash and invoke Time Machine. Storing items in the trash is not suggested, but fortunately, as long as Time Machine backed up the system when items were in the trash, the backup possibility exists. Try to use Quick Look to help with this procedure. In the Time Machine, you can also go to use spotlight searching to locate the deleted file. If you clean the trash and now recover a document, it is not easy to locate it using Time Machine. Whenever it happens, it isn’t easy to know where the items were on the disk. In macOS, trash is used to place the deleted items items are deleted temporarily, not permanently, so people leave them in the trash bin without restoring them. You can restore the items before deleting them from the trash bin. But you can restore it from the place where you send the file in the trash. I exclude them from my TM backup, and use Chronosync to backup just the current version of the folders.No, Time Machine does not back up trash. TM has never been a good fit for this and TMA's lack of folder delete makes it worse. I have many large folders for which I want a backup, but don't need lots of history. You can delete whole snapshots.įor a more in-depth discussion of TMA, have a read of the many blogs posts from Howard Oakley, starting with Time Machine: 1 How it works, or fails to. But the downside is that you can no longer delete individual files or folders. TMA uses an APFS snapshot for each backup.

These hard links were the main cause of corruption or inconsistencies with TMH backup. TMH used hard linked folders to avoid storing the same folder and its files many times. TMA is very different to the old TMH (TM to HFS+). And using the command line tmutil does not help.īig Sur uses the new Time Machine to APFS (TMA). You can't delete individual files or folders from Big Sur's Time Machine. I don't like losing this much control over my files. It seems to work initially but then the backup comes back. It seems like there's some bugs here, because I have a 'Move to Trash' option if I control-click one of my backups. Also, I contacted Apple support about deleting entire snapshots (slightly different goal than the one here in this question). I should mention I'm using APFS for my Time Machine volume. Not sure if this is just a Big Sur thing or if that's always the case.) (I'd take a screenshot, but the key shortcuts for screenshots don't work in Time Machine. How do I delete a file from Time Machine backups? There used to be a way to do this.

There is no option to delete it - either the action menu in the toolbar, or the control-click context menu. Now I want to delete it so it doesn't exist and take up space in backups. Then I see the view with the stack of windows. I go to the Time Machine menu and select 'Enter Time Machine'. I'd like to delete a file from my Time Machine backups, but there seems to be no option to do so in the Big Sur version of Time Machine.

Mac trash folder time machine