Time Machine only saving previous 24 hours

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Level 1

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Time Machine only saving previous 24 hours

I have a new iMac 24 running Ventura 13.3.1. My old backup disk was old so I have replaced it with a new WD Passport for Mac (5TB). I've formatted it to use APFS (rightly or wrongly). There's very little on the new Mac yet so Time Machine is only occupying around 300GB out of the large total available. For some reason it will only back up 'yesterday' and 'today'. There's nothing shown before that, so presumably it is deleting older backups as it goes along.

It's clearly not fit for purpose at the moment. Can anyone suggest a fix for this please? I'm in no way computer savvy so I would appreciate any help in fairly simple terms. Thank You. Andy

iMac 24″, macOS 13.3

Posted on May 1, 2023 8:14 AM

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Answer 1

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Tesserax

Level 10

160,802 points

May 1, 2023 8:33 AM in response to Jonners596

Since this WD drive is a HDD, and not a SSD, I suggest you reformat it for HFS+, not APFS ... with the latter designed to work best with SSDs.

You can then start a new TM backup to see if it performs properly going forward.

One question for you: Do you leave this drive attached "permanently" to your iMac? If not, you should for the purpose of using it for TM.

TM's "removing older backups" process is designed to only do so when the available space on the backup drive is significantly low enough. (Of course, I'm assuming that you are dedicating the entire drive for TM ... correct?

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Answer 2

Jonners596 Author

Level 1

5 points

May 1, 2023 8:39 AM in response to Tesserax

Thank you.I will try reformatting as you suggest. I do have it attached permanently and the whole drive is dedicated to it. There is clearly loads of free space on it at the moment. I will let you know how I get on.

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