what to do when external drive is full

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dsun2000 Author

Level 1

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what to do when external drive is full

My IMac is almost full. It has 240 out of 250Gb being used.

My external hard drive has two partitions:

1st partition (810 out of 831GB are being used) for Timemachine backups

2nd partition (80 out of 100GB are being used) as Bootdisk

Since both partitions on external drive is almost full, whenever I backup with TimeMachine, it says it deleted

an older version to make room for latest backup.

Question: If I buy another external harddrive, say a 2GB, do I :

-Copy files from current external drive to new one, and if so how do I go about doing that?

-Just put current external drive on shelf and just start using the new external drive? And if so, will

Time Machine get confused if, in the future, I try to reconnect the older external drive to recover a file?

-Other options?

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Dec 22, 2012 11:21 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

baltwo

Level 9

62,362 points

Dec 22, 2012 1:28 PM in response to dsun2000

For the TM stuff, see Pondini's TM FAQs. Once you sort out that stuff, consider moving a lot of data off your smallish int HD to the ext HD. If I had to do it, I'd repartition the ext HD into two pieces. One at 300 GB to hold a clone of your internal HD and the other to hold the TM portion. That necessitates starting over, but might solve all you issues.

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