Need help backing up to external drive

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Need help backing up to external drive

Hi folks. I have an OWC Mercury Elite external hard drive with a capacity of 500GB. I use it to manually back up my iMac by copying my "home user" folder into the external drive, and I also set up TM to put backups.backupdb there. This has been working fine for about five years now, but today Finder is telling me I don't have enough space to manually back up my home user folder. Things don't seem to be adding up, because the total file/folder sizes I'm currently storing on the external drive are smaller than before.

Finder shows there's only 137 GB available on the external drive, and the home user folder currently contains 139 GB. I deleted a secondary backup folder on the external hard drive, but Finder still reports that only 137 GB is available. I only have three folders on the external drive: (1) 5.3 MB (2) 137.72 GB (the backed up copy of the home user folder); and (3) the backups.backupdb file from TM. I have no idea what the size of the backups.backupdb is. When I select "get info" for it, the hard drive just whirrs away forever, while the display reads "calculating size." It never finishes calculating the size, or at least it doesn't finish within an hour or so.

I've emptied the trash and run "verify disk" and "repair disk" for the external drive, but Disk Utility is reporting that all is OK.

Is this problem caused by my external drive, my operating system, or operator error? Many thanks in advance for any help you can give.

Regards,

John

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on May 30, 2015 7:02 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Averythomas

Level 4

1,524 points

May 30, 2015 7:06 AM in response to pushprogress

You may need to reformat the whole hard drive within disk utility.

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Answer 2

Eric Root

Level 10

684,069 points

May 30, 2015 8:20 AM in response to pushprogress

You need a larger hard drive. While you can store data and a Time Machine backup on the same drive, it isn't generally recommended because Time Machine will eventually take up the entire drive. I would get a second, larger external and use that for Time Machine. Use the existing external for data. You can attempt a Finder copy of the existing backup to a new drive, but it doesn't always work.

Time Machine – Transfer Backup to a New Drive

Time Machine – Transfer Backup to a New Drive (2)

Try using Disk Utility/Restore to copy the backup to a new location. Please note that this will reformat the destination partition. Then delete that data from the new external.

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Answer 3

pushprogress Author

Level 1

0 points

May 31, 2015 6:49 PM in response to pushprogress

Thanks guys. Not sure which, if either, was a technically correct answer, so I rated both as "helped." Seems like if Avery is suggesting to reformat the external hard drive rather than the iMac drive, I'd want to buy another hard drive to store the stuff that's on it (or maybe only the manually backed-up stuff, and let the TM files get erased). And if Eric's right, I might as well just buy another external hard drive, leave the TM files on the old one, and keep the manually-backed-up files on the new one. Either solution requires a new hard drive. Another solution--trashing the backups.backupdb file--seems like much more trouble than it's worth. Crazy stuff, this TM.

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