Time Machine Full After Restore

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Time Machine Full After Restore

I have a Mac Book Pro (MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014)) with 1TB hard drive and am currently using about 750gb of space. I have never had an issue with my Time Machine but yesterday I got duped into thinking a Flash update was needed and instead got the yahoo search engine hijack. I figured a restore from two weeks ago was easier than trying to fix it as I didn't add anything important since then.

All is well and I now have my computer up and running, virus free just like it was two weeks ago, but now my Time Machine backup says it's out of space. It's a 1TB drive but it's showing the disk as being about 750gb full and it says the remaining 250 is insufficient. Clearly the old backups are what's taking up the space but I don't want to delete them.

It's as if the Time Machine wants to create another whole backup instead of just adding to the existing one. How do I fix this?

MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.14

Posted on Jul 10, 2019 7:37 PM

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Answer 1

SoldOnMac

Level 1

119 points

Jul 11, 2019 7:58 AM in response to SRPumps

Not helpful to your situation, but I have noticed that after either a restore or a spontaneous reboot (panic), Time Machine will think it has to do a complete backup. It never actually HAS made a complete backup in this situation for me (at least), but it takes it about an hour to come to that conclusion, then do a normal backup. So my GUESS is that since it thinks it is going to have to do a full backup, it is making sure that you will have enough room (which you wouldn't).

As a note for the future, I recommend having a backup drive that is at LEAST twice as large as the drive you are backing up. Personally, I make sure that my backup drives are at least four times as large.

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Time Machine Full After Restore

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