My time machine is leaving > 300 Gb empty on the time machine drive but is deleting old backups. Why won't it fill up the disk and only delete when it runs out of room? USB external TM disk (2 Gb) and OS 10.6.8
Are you sure it's deleting old backups? It routinely "thins" backups down to one per day after 24 hours, then one per week after a month.
Are you getting a message?
Is the age of the oldest backup shown on the TM Preferences panel changing?
Well, here's the log from my latest backup:
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine USB/Backups.backupdb
No pre-backup thinning needed: 108.4 MB requested (including padding), 328.04 GB available
Copied 4534 files (12.0 MB) from volume Internal SSD.
Copied 4539 files (12.0 MB) from volume ScratchDisk2.
No pre-backup thinning needed: 100.0 MB requested (including padding), 328.03 GB available
Copied 1048 files (93 bytes) from volume Internal SSD.
Copied 1053 files (93 bytes) from volume ScratchDisk2.
Starting post-backup thinning
Deleted backup /Volumes/Time Machine USB/Backups.backupdb/ML Home Desktop Mac/2013-09-03-040943: 328.38 GB now available
so it looks like it's thinning, but also "deletec backup", and over 300 Gb available - why delete anything when that much empty space remains??
Michael Levin wrote:
. . .
Starting post-backup thinning
Deleted backup /Volumes/Time Machine USB/Backups.backupdb/ML Home Desktop Mac/2013-09-03-040943: 328.38 GB now available
so it looks like it's thinning, but also "deletec backup",
Yes, the "thinning" reduces the number of backups to one per day after 24 hours, and one per week after a month. The one it deleted was from 4 am local time yesterday, just as promised:
So there's no point to having a bigger TM drive - it will continue to delete and perpetually leave the empty space instead of allowing more versions kept, or will it eventually fill the whole thing with weekly backups?
Michael Levin wrote:
. . .
will it eventually fill the whole thing with weekly backups?
Yes, exactly. 🙂
That seems like the best compromise.
Something is still very weird because I checked and it only has backups back to June 2013. I had this (big) disk and the same system for several years now - what happened to all the stuff from before June - why wouldn't it keep it if there's space on the drive?
Did something unusual happen about the time of the now-oldest backup? Hardware repairs, erase and restore or reinstall?
Any huge backups, intentional or not?
Major re-organisation, such as moving andor renaming folders with lots of data in files and sub-folders?
Is the oldest date in the TimeLine the same as the oldest date on the TM Preferences window?
> Hardware repairs, erase and restore or reinstall?
nope.
> Any huge backups, intentional or not?
> Major re-organisation, such as moving andor renaming folders with lots of data in files and sub-folders?
quite possibly, although nothing that would have come close to using up the space on that drive.
> Is the oldest date in the TimeLine the same as the oldest date on the TM Preferences window?
yep.
Hard to tell at this point - - all deletions are documented in the logs, but they're only kept for a week or so.
At some time, TM must have needed (or thought it needed) to do a very large backup, and deleted a bunch of old ones to make room. There should have been a message like this afterwards (less wordy on Snow Leopard), if you have the Notify after old backups are deleted box checked in TM Prefs > Options:
why is time machine not using whole disk?
