Wanted to mention two things that might be of use to other people who come across this page:

1. In my experience, deleting multiple backups at once seems to take much much longer than deleting them serially. I haven't timed this, so it may just be an illusion, but for what it's worth, I do them one at a time. Which is a pain, because it means going into the Time Machine interface once per deletion, but I do think it's faster than deleting several at once.

2. Re Kim's problem: you can navigate backups belonging to other computers by first mounting the sparsebundle, then Control-clicking the Time Machine icon in the Dock, then selecting Browse Other Time Machine Disks. There are some odd things about the interface if you do that, but mostly it seems to work about the same as browsing the current computer's backups.

I am sorry to hear about the trouble you've been having. There is nothing worse than having your computer stolen. A few years ago, I had my laptop stolen out of my bag. While I was lucky enough to get it back, I still had to go through the process of changing all of my passwords, cancel credit cards and notify friends/family that I lost their contact information. It was not fun.

While I personally haven't done much experimenting with it, there might be a way that you can prune your backup image. A Time Machine backup image is nothing more than a sparsebundle, which means that you should be able to mount it in the finder and navigate it like any other hard drive.

After you mount the sparse bundle, you will see a folder called Backups.backupdb. That folder holds all of the backups for your computer. They will be organized in folders according to date. You *should* just be able to delete the ones you don't want. Once that's finished, you can reclaim the space by following the directions in the article above.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers,

Rob

I'm not technically minded so i hope this makes sense to you. Many thanks, Kym

To conclude, as you mention, I think that Apple does its job right when it comes to ease of use. If their strategy allows it, their next version should include various options (for advanced users) like simple copy of certain directories, depth of backup (numbers of days of history, which reclaims hard disk space when backup is full, with a priority on old deleted files from the mac). I doubt very much about it: they might consider that it is cheaper for users to purchase large hard disk drives units then to spend time understanding, configuring time machine... and debugging their configuration... to finally loose some data because they are not skilled or because their setup became too complicated.