Time Machine insufficient free space on the backup disk

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Level 1

5 points

Time Machine insufficient free space on the backup disk

Hi,

I have strange problem with my Time Machine backups. For some reason my 2 TB backup disk keeps filling up in about every month and Time Machine is not able to create new backups anymore.

When I open the backup disk in Finder, it shows only the latest backup, which suggest to me that Time Machine did ran out of space and has deleted all of the older backups to try to free up space. Couple of days ago I could still see about dozen different backups.

To me it seems that old backups are not actually deleted and they keep filling up the disk, until I have to disable Time Machine and reformat the disk again. I am only backing up my 1 TB internal disk, I don't have any external disks connected, other than the 2 TB backup disk.

What could cause this? Do I have any settings wrong, or why deleting old backups doesn't free up space in backup disk?

ville@villes-mbp ~$ tmutil listbackups
2022-06-10-082131.backup

Here is ls of SanDiskTM volume in Terminal, to me it seems strange that there are so many old .previous folders:

ville@villes-mbp /Volumes/SanDiskTM$ ls
2022-05-13-193232.previous    2022-05-20-081710.previous    2022-06-02-075338.previous
2022-05-13-203611.previous    2022-05-23-082821.previous    2022-06-03-085243.previous
2022-05-14-185436.previous    2022-05-23-101235.previous    2022-06-06-092714.previous
2022-05-14-211551.previous    2022-05-23-110553.previous    2022-06-06-120347.previous
2022-05-16-080359.previous    2022-05-23-115114.previous    2022-06-07-082412.previous
2022-05-17-085626.previous    2022-05-23-125242.previous    2022-06-07-122948.previous
2022-05-18-083147.previous    2022-05-24-075802.previous    2022-06-08-081450.previous
2022-05-18-091341.previous    2022-05-27-080631.previous    2022-06-09-003158.previous
2022-05-18-100727.previous    2022-05-30-081326.previous    2022-06-09-081438.previous
2022-05-18-110551.previous    2022-05-30-095613.previous    2022-06-10-082131.previous
2022-05-18-120716.previous    2022-05-30-105406.previous    2022-06-10-090858.previous
2022-05-18-130952.previous    2022-05-30-115707.previous    2022-06-10-121447.previous
2022-05-19-080437.previous    2022-05-30-125627.previous    2022-06-13-080020.interrupted
2022-05-19-094338.previous    2022-05-31-083007.previous    2022-06-13-101907.interrupted
2022-05-19-100054.previous    2022-05-31-113902.previous    2022-06-13-103100.interrupted
2022-05-19-110043.previous    2022-05-31-122151.previous    2022-06-13-110050.inprogress
2022-05-19-120041.previous    2022-06-01-080010.previous    backup_manifest.plist
2022-05-19-125959.previous    2022-06-01-083627.previous

Posted on Jun 13, 2022 1:36 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

ku4hx

Level 7

23,694 points

Jun 13, 2022 5:55 AM in response to vinski_

Doing anything in Time Machine with Finder is risky business. TM is not designed to be accessed that way.

My suggestion is to erase the TM drive and start afresh. if your machine is operating properly, the risk of no backup while recreating TM is minimal.

If history is a concern, get a smaller external HDD and use it for a while and see if it too fills up.

I've always felt it better to have two smaller HDDs as backups rather than one huge one. All eggs in one basket sort of risk avoidance.

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Answer 2

vinski_ Author

Level 1

5 points

Jun 13, 2022 6:11 AM in response to ku4hx

I'll try to reformat (again) if nobody has any better suggestions. I'm just perplexed what could be filling the external drive, when according to Time Machine there is only one backup and its quarter of the drive size. Something else is using almost 1.5 TB and filling up the rest of the space.

Could this some sort of TRIM issue where the SSD empty space doesn't get free'd properly?

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