Time Machine "looking for space" on backup disk

Is this a note of encouragement - or is the current disk out of space?

The machine's an M1 MBP running Monterey. The device is Time Capsule.

Thanks, Tom

Posted on Jan 15, 2022 8:26 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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My Mac indicates I don't have enough space to update to macOS Monterey I'm trying to update my computer to Mac OS Monterey, but every time I go to update it it says I don't have enough space on my disk even though I've got about 50GB. [Re-Titled by Moderator]
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2 replies

lllaass

Level 10

210,799 points

Jan 16, 2022 12:58 AM in response to Tom Meade1

Time Machine will automatically delete the oldest backups when it runs out of space for new backups. It might take a little time to find and delete the oldest backups.

Tom Meade1 Author

Level 2

365 points

Jan 17, 2022 11:07 AM in response to lllaass

Correct IIIaass - the b.u. completed normally.

Thank you very much! Tom

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Time Machine "looking for space" on backup disk

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