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Time machine filling drive on first back up.

I recently got a new MacBook Pro and migrated over from my old MacBook Pro. I am running Big Sur 11.5.2 and am trying to setup time machine again.


I select the external disk that has 1Tb of space on it and is empty. I select the disk in Time Machine and enable encryption, it formats the disk is set to APFS. When running the backup, it says there is 1TB available and that the amount of data it is backing up is 205.87GB. It runs for hours then eventually stops and says that it failed to complete as there is no space. I check in Disk Utility and sure enough the 1TB disk is completely full. How is that even possible? I have run through this a number of times and used different external drives and same issue. I am trying again now without encryption to see if that somehow is causing the issue but seriously how can it take 205Gb of data and fill a 1TB drive?

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 11.5

Posted on Sep 16, 2021 3:52 PM

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Posted on Sep 21, 2021 1:14 PM

I finally figured out what the space thief was. It was dropbox. So I don't sync my dropbox to my Mac well at least it is selective sync, if I look at how much space Dropbox is taking on my Mac it is 32Gb but in the TimeMachine backup it is reflecting Dropbox as 1.2Tb so something funky is going on here. I will just exclude Dropbox from my Time Machine backup. See screenshot here comparing the size from TimeMachine to local dropbox directory in ~

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Sep 21, 2021 1:14 PM in response to Old Toad

I finally figured out what the space thief was. It was dropbox. So I don't sync my dropbox to my Mac well at least it is selective sync, if I look at how much space Dropbox is taking on my Mac it is 32Gb but in the TimeMachine backup it is reflecting Dropbox as 1.2Tb so something funky is going on here. I will just exclude Dropbox from my Time Machine backup. See screenshot here comparing the size from TimeMachine to local dropbox directory in ~

Sep 18, 2021 1:21 PM in response to kungfooflea

Since millions are using Time Machine successfully under Big Sur, it appears that what you have encountered is most likely due to something previously installed that was migrated over, or perhaps something newly installed.


A more successful migration over to a new system might result from a fresh erase/reinstall of a plain vanilla Big Sur and then just migrating over Mac accounts and files, but no settings, no software, nor anything else. Then test for recurrence of the problem, I expect it will not occur. Then you can reinstall your unique items a few at a time and retest to make sure the problem is not introduced. This may sounds like some work but I would do it in your shoes because what you are seeing with Time Machine is probably a symptom of a much bigger issue that will not go away but will only get worse.


I saw a "windows backup" in one of your partitions. Do you have a virtual machine running? If so, those virtual machines can generate large "updated" files on the fly and if that happened while Time Machine is running it will dutifully try to back up the "changed" file as it proceeds, and if this happens repeatedly it can use up massive storage on the Time Machine drive. In that case, simply excluding the virtual machine files or volumes from the Time Machine backup might solve the problem. If this is indeed what was happening, exclude all virtual machine files from the backups and instead, back them up separately and manually to a separate backup volume (not on the Time Machine drive). You can do that manual backup every week or few weeks.


If there is no explanation like the above virtual machine possibility, then I think the clean plain vanilla reinstall and then cautious migration only of files but of no software, settings, etc. is the path to follow.

Sep 17, 2021 10:14 PM in response to steve626

The Seagate drive is a 5TB drive and as the picture show above the Time machine partition is 1Tb.


I had the same issue with the non encrypted backup. In the OP you can see that time machine clearly states 205Gb and the back up disk has 762GBs free. This drive was formated before running this BTW so that 237Gb was the supposed 84GB it had backed up already. Now below you can see that the drive is full and only been running this back up. As you can see, the drive I am backing up is not 1TB of data!?! So how is it filling this.


> By the way, Apple (in its documentation) recommends using a separate physical drive for the Time Machine backup, not sharing it with other volumes or containers, possibly to avoid interference from other storage on the physical drive.


Yep I tried another 500TB drive first that is exclusively for Time Machine and it was the same issue there too.





Sep 21, 2021 10:50 AM in response to steve626

Ok so I appreciate my setup is not necessarily the normal end user setup. I do have bootcamp setup but no VMs, even still if it did include the bootcamp partition the total space of my MacBook Pro SSD is 1TB.


Just for testing I formatted my 5TB disk and had just a single APFS partition for time machine to use. It did finally finish the backup and took 1.55TB of space! This is insanity, my MacBook Pro's SSD is not even that big. I'm looking through the backup now to try figure out why is it so huge. I made sure that there were no other drives plugged in and that the bootcamp partition was excluded. When I click into the backup in finder I can see it is only the Macintosh HD that was backed up, which is what I expect.


Unfortunately I don't have the time to start from a clean slate, but to me something seems seriously wrong when it takes a backup of 220ish GB of data and somehow turns that into 1.55TB of data.

Sep 16, 2021 9:17 PM in response to kungfooflea

What is the physical total space on the Seagate drive?


What about those other two backup volumes there -- how much space are they taking up? What is the space used and available on all those individual containers and volumes on the external drive? Are they all APFS?


By the way, Apple (in its documentation) recommends using a separate physical drive for the Time Machine backup, not sharing it with other volumes or containers, possibly to avoid interference from other storage on the physical drive.

Time machine filling drive on first back up.

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