Time Machine

Question

Time Machine

Im having problems with my Time Machine hope someone can help

My Laptop is 500GB

My Hard drive is 500GB

However when im connecting to Time Machine to back up i get a message that says ...

This backup is too large for the backup disk. The backup requires 518.06 GB

Im confused why there is 518.06 GB on my laptop of 500GB and when i look ive actually got 52.38GB available on the internal disk!?

Anyone experiencing this problem or is there just an easy fix!?

Any help or advise would be much appreciated

Thanks

samba

Posted on Jul 4, 2014 2:03 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 4, 2014 7:10 AM in response to sambawithchris

Time Machine requires about 20% of overhead space for a backup. So, if you want to backup 500 GB of data, you need about 600 GB of space on the hard drive.

A good general rule of thumb for Time Machine is that the hard drive should have 2-3 times the space of the data that you intend to backup to allow for a good history of future backups.

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Answer 2

Jul 9, 2014 7:09 AM in response to Bob Timmons

Thank you for your help with this Bob

My question now would be why it has worked fine up to now?

This is the first time i have encountered this problem with this harddrive on Time Machine!

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Answer 3

Jul 9, 2014 7:12 AM in response to sambawithchris

Thank you Bob appreciate your help

My question would be why is this the first time it has happened as i have used this harddrive from day one to Time Machine this laptop?

Is it due to the harddrive on the laptop becoming fuller?

Thank you

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Answer 4

Jul 9, 2014 7:17 AM in response to sambawithchris

Is it due to the harddrive on the laptop becoming fuller?

Yes, as well as the drive on the Time Capsule filling up.

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Answer 5

Jul 9, 2014 7:20 AM in response to sambawithchris

I suspect that the external HDD is full. It is working all the while because it has never hit the max capacity. And now you reach the max. How did you configure the TM backup? Did you instruct it to overwrite the earliest backup? Did you exclude file on your internal HDD that are not necessary to backup (e.g. download folder)?

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