Time Machine backups

The external hard drive I use for time machine backups is full. The Apple Support page says it is best to start a new external hard drive for future backups. Is there a reason to keep my old backups or old external hard drive?

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Oct 3, 2021 1:04 PM

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All Time Machine backups take too long 2018 Mac mini running macOS 12.6.1. I have an 8TB USB drive connected to the machine with two volumes on APFS. One volume I use to Time Machine backup my laptop over the network, and that seems to work just fine. The other volume is a local Time Machine volume for the mini. This is a fairly new disk and it was all working fine for a couple of weeks, but now the local backup takes forever and seems to find hundreds of thousands of files to backup. It takes over 24 hours to complete. Then the next time Time Machine starts, it all happens again, hundreds of thousands of changes found and it runs for 24+ hours. It's almost like the mini doesn't recognize that it only has to do an incremental backup. I know for sure there aren't all that many changes between each backup run. I've double checked the Excludes From Backup options and that all looks reasonable (it excludes both the local and remote TM volumes, iCloud, OneDrive, and Dropbox folders). I can't find anything else that would include so much changes. It estimates the size of a full backup at 1.68TB which appears to be the entire Macintosh HD (303.64GB available of 2TB). I can't find any other settings that would cause TM to do a full backup every single time and I've rebooted the machine at least once to see if that fixes the problem, to no avail. I can't upgrade this machine to Ventura yet due to compatibility issues. Any ideas what's going on or what to look for?
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2 replies

ku4hx

Level 7

23,700 points

Oct 4, 2021 9:24 AM in response to Emi1y.123

Depends on your backup strategy. I maintain history outside TimeMachine and/or CCC so I have no need to keep very old TM drives. My strategy is all backups and clones are snapshots in time of the latest setup and current files. Archived data is not maintained on any active computer. It's kept on a couple of archival quality hard disk drives and BluRay discs in a safe and maybe once a year I verify the integrity of them all.

rkaufmann87

Level 10

148,624 points

Oct 3, 2021 1:05 PM in response to Emi1y.123

Only if you want to. That decision is 100% yours.

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Time Machine backups