Not enough room for Time Machine backup

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Level 1

16 points

Not enough room for Time Machine backup

Hello friends

I have received the message that Time Machine does not have enough room to complete a back up. I suspect it has to do with the snapshot on my Mac HD rather than empty space on my backup drive because the backup drive has 3.5 *TB* free while my Mac HD has 1.6 *GB*. The only snapshot I see on the HD is "APFS Startup Snapshot". I keep very few files on my HD; they are all on external drives.

if the issue is the space on the Mac HD, how do I free up space on it?

Posted on May 10, 2024 1:36 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

6x6

Level 6

19,905 points

May 11, 2024 7:26 AM in response to Johnnyjomp69

You are correct: your internal drive is saturated and can’t store a new Time Machine snapshot. See the section “Delete an APFS snapshot“ in this article to delete older snapshots: View APFS snapshots in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support.

You may also consider freeing more storage on your internal drive (your own files, not the snapshots) as your Mac doesn’t have enough free storage to work optimally (you only have 101 MB free according to your screenshot.)

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Answer 2

Johnnyjomp69 Author

Level 1

16 points

May 22, 2024 1:28 PM in response to Johnnyjomp69

Hello everyone. As I had this issue more than once, and have seen several posts from others who have had this issue, I would like to share my very simple solution. My 2nd internal drive showed 3GB free. I restarted my computer and it showed 340GB free. Temp files clog up your drives, resulting in TM not having enough room to do its thing on any one of your drives.

solution: restart your computer at least once per week.

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Answer 3

Johnnyjomp69 Author

Level 1

16 points

May 12, 2024 10:28 AM in response to 6x6

Hi 6x6

I thought I had checked all the partitions, but I obviously missed the Data partition. Yes, I see 24 Snapshots, 75 - 112 MB each. Is it safe to delete them? All, or only the ones from yesterday?

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Answer 4

6x6

Level 6

19,905 points

May 12, 2024 10:43 AM in response to Johnnyjomp69

Hey there, delete them all. The snapshots are just a convenient copy of the Time Machine backups that you can use without your backup drive. The backup drive contains all the backups, including the snapshots on your internal drive.

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