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ilizzzyyy Author

Level 1

4 points

Time machine backups

I have recently bought a brand new 2TB portable hard drive to backup my computer and it wont back up because of insufficient space.

My macbook pro is only 121GB

MacBook, macOS 10.12

Posted on Jun 9, 2021 6:13 PM

Top-ranking reply

Allan Jones

Level 9

72,380 points

Posted on Jun 10, 2021 8:30 AM

It is your internal drive, not the new external, that is the problem. That advisory indicates TM needs to write a file to your internal drive ("source drive") before making the backup, and there is not enough room on the internal drive to allow that.

You'll need to offload several GB of files to a thumb drive or other non-Time Machine device before continuing.

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Time machine backups

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