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Timemachine full

"The machine could not complete the backup....requires XXXGb....but only YYYYGb are available."


Background:


Have a MBP with 1Tb SSD. It was time machines to auto backup to a 2Tb USB drive and a 2Tb Disk caddy drive. Never filled up, I assume the old backups were deleted when the new backups were ready.


Now:


Have iMac with 2Tb SSD. TimeMachine has 3 x 2Tb and 1 x 3Tb Caddy drives (ie. 9Tb backup space).


Now my understanding was that Timemachine should remove older backups for each new backup. Yet I am continually getting the 2 Tb drives failing because of a lack of disk space. This is annoying, frustrating and dangerous if auto backups are not being carries out.




Of course I understand if 400Gb is required and 300Gb is available then the backup will fail, why doesn't the system get rid of old files.


I can only think the actual full backup plus any incremental backup is greater than 2Tb. If this is the case it implies that only a single full backup can be carried out on the system. This 'may' be because one VM (PVM File) is 350Gb and Timemachine backs up the complete VM.


So what am I doing wrong and/or how can I correct this behaviour?


Thanks

Kevin

Posted on Jun 9, 2020 6:04 PM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jun 9, 2020 6:20 PM

You may need to reformat (erase) your Time Machine drive and it will begin backing up and it should remove older backups. However it may be wise to simply buy a higher capacity External Hard Disk, you can then transfer your old drive's backups to the new External Hard Disk by following Transfer Time Machine backups from one backup disk to another - Apple Support

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2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jun 9, 2020 6:20 PM in response to KevinX3

You may need to reformat (erase) your Time Machine drive and it will begin backing up and it should remove older backups. However it may be wise to simply buy a higher capacity External Hard Disk, you can then transfer your old drive's backups to the new External Hard Disk by following Transfer Time Machine backups from one backup disk to another - Apple Support

Timemachine full

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