Cleanup old backups

I have several people in our office backing up to a Time Capsule. We're near capacity on the hard disk which is fine, but the process of deleting old files ends up causing backups to take a long time for everyone. Is there a way to schedule this type of backup cleaning during off hours in order to create space for the next day's backups?
Message was edited by: mickey13

mickey13 wrote:
Thanks for your reply. Is there any user configuration at all? For instance, I don't need to restore a backup from 8 months ago, so is there a way to say, only keep up to 1 month, instead of every month until the disk is full?
No. That's been requested many times, but hasn't happened.
But it wouldn't help your situation -- the old backups still have to be deleted.
In your opinion, what would be the reasonable maximum number of clients?
I've seen a "rule of thumb" that 6 or so is a practical limit, but of course that depends on how much traffic there is, etc.
I'm thinking this backup strategy just doesn't work for me at all. And creating hard disk room during non-peak time just seems like an obvious, practical way to handle Time Machine backups on a disk that's close to capacity.
By all means, tell Apple: http://www.apple.com/feedback/timemachine.html
In theory, you might be able to write an Applescript to interrogate the status of each Mac's backups, and delete the oldest one, but that would be rather tricky. That's kept in a hidden XML file in a hidden folder: /private/db/.TimeMachine.Results.plist. If you ran it until they were all only a month old, then you could run it once a week after that, as after 30 days, TM automatically thins to one per week.
That, alone, won't gain any space, but new backups will use the freed space before the sparse bundle grows any more. But if you can get that much to work, you might as well compact the sparse bundle, too. See the yellow box in #12 of [Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/FAQ.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum) for the UNIX command.

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