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Time Machine could not back up the disk “Macintosh HD - Data” because a snapshot of the disk could not be created.

I have a 123GB available. The whole point of the external drive is to store the backups there not where I'm using the space, so, hopefully the answer is not "not enough room on the local drive".

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Sep 7, 2021 7:19 AM

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6 replies

Sep 7, 2021 8:44 AM in response to donujm

donujm wrote:

I have a 123GB available. The whole point of the external drive is to store the backups there not where I'm using the space, so, hopefully the answer is not "not enough room on the local drive".



See if there is anything here:


Time Machine snapshot could not be created for the disk "%@"

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252056020

Sep 7, 2021 9:01 AM in response to leroydouglas

Yeah, no dice. When I run that it says it can't find any snapshots. Also, I've done every upgrade as they have been released, so I didn't skip Catalina. I lost all my data on the 4TB Seagate drive that is tailored for specific use with Mac. Reformatted as Seagate suggests for BigSur. I was using Backup Scheduler app but removed it in case it was causing the issue:


The default interactive shell is now zsh.

To update your account to use zsh, please run `chsh -s /bin/zsh`.

For more details, please visit https://support.apple.com/kb/HT208050.

Donalds-iMac:~ ****$ sudo rm -r /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots

Password:

rm: /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots: No such file or directory

Donalds-iMac:~ ****$


Donalds-iMac:~ ****$ sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots /

No local snapshots found for '/'




[Personal Information Edited by Moderator]

Sep 7, 2021 2:52 PM in response to donujm

hopefully the answer is not "not enough room on the local drive".

That is where it is trying to create the snapshot.

Is that the drive with 123GB available or was that amount for the backup drive?


Though the error message is usually different, do you have a "Macintosh HD - Data" appearing anywhere in Finder (like Go > Computer)?

Sep 7, 2021 3:30 PM in response to donujm

1243gb of 1TB on the iMac's main drive. The external disk is 4TB.

Should be plenty to make a snapshot (as they are almost nothing).

As a crude summary, it creates a snapshot, copies the snapshot to the backup, determines the differences and stores the changes. There is a ton of information at The Electric Light Co., but I didn't see a reference to the snapshot issue. There are certainly several posts about it, but I don't remember anyone having that much free space when the error occurred. I didn't hit all the links on that page.

Time Machine could not back up the disk “Macintosh HD - Data” because a snapshot of the disk could not be created.

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