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David Das Author

Level 1

83 points

Out of space on Time Machine backup, but...

I have several drives connected to my Mac (totaling about 17TB). I have a 14TB Time Machine backup drive.

At first, I excluded one of my large 8TB drives from TM. I figured I would back up everything except that. That worked fine.

Then, I realized that many of my drives aren't full, so once taking into account empty space, maybe I could get all the drives backed up to the 14TB TM backup drive.

I tried this, but I did get a "not enough space" error. Fair enough.

So I went into the Time Machine prefs, and re-excluded that 8TB drive from TM.

But now, when I start up TM backups, it keeps telling me "there isn't enough space."

The only explanation for this is: it did start to try to back up that 8TB drive, but now that I've removed that 8TB drive from the TM backup, it may not be smart enough to remove that data from the TM backup, which now means that TM can't continue to do regular backups.

What do I do? Do I have to wipe the entire TM backup and start from scratch again? (I hope not, because it's a lot of data to have to transfer again!)

MacBook Pro

Posted on Dec 12, 2022 5:59 PM

Top-ranking reply

allen_31

Level 2

325 points

Posted on Dec 12, 2022 10:57 PM

There might be chances that your drive is in HFS+ format, that’s why it is unable to transfer data to a time machine backup drive and showing issue like "there is not enough space on time machine backup" and may also ask you to erase or reformat the drive in order to create time machine.

Further, here are few DIY fixes to resolve the time machine backup failure issues:

1. Check external hard drive’s file system.

2. Check free disk space on external hard drive.

3. Check for junk files or other unwanted data as it might be causing problem.

4. Check if the Mac software is updated.

5. Try restarting your Mac.

6. Check if the mac and the backup drive connected to the same network.

By checking the above issues, you might resolve the issue.

Hope it helps!

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Out of space on Time Machine backup, but...

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