Time Machine Fails Not Enough Space

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Time Machine Fails Not Enough Space

I have Mac Mini (A) running El Capitan with an internal 240GB SSD boot drive and an internal 1TB file storage drive. I'm trying to back it up via Time Machine to my Mac Mini (B) running OS X El Capitan Server with an external 2TB drive connected. To be clear, I'm trying to back up both internal drives on Mac Mini A to the external drive on Mac Mini B. All total, the file space of both drives on Mac Mini A equals 997GB. The 2TB drive on the server is being shared and is accessible. No backup size limits have been set on the server. When Mac Mini A attempts to backup it fails with an error that says the backup drive only has 497GB available and 997GB is needed.

Mac mini, OS X El Capitan (10.11.2)

Posted on Dec 26, 2015 10:30 PM

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Answer 1

John Galt

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Dec 28, 2015 12:20 AM in response to MovingLines

How much available space does Disk Utility report?

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Answer 2

MovingLines Author

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Dec 28, 2015 5:54 AM in response to John Galt

Hi John...Thanks for the reply!

I kept meaning to repost but just haven't yet. I solved the problem thanks to an older post on another forum. It seems that if you don't check the box to set the limit on the Time Machine backups in OS X Server it automatically constrains them to 500GB. I, and many others, assume that if the box is unchecked and no limit is set then Time Machine will continue to add files until the disk is full. At which point older backups start to get deleted to make room for new ones. This turns out to not be the case.

Multiple harddrive reformats and share point resets later, the evil checkbox was once again the culprit.

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Answer 3

John Galt

Level 10

155,696 points

Dec 28, 2015 9:04 AM in response to MovingLines

Thanks for the update.

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Answer 4

Mar 14, 2016 5:55 PM in response to MovingLines

This is insane. I just wasted a whole day on this. Once a backup has started it is not enough to just change the value. There seems to be some delay or the value is stored somewhere. I had to remove the files on the target drive and also recreate the back up disk.

Such a BAD UI!!!!! If the box is unchecked it should have no limit, not some unstated value that is smaller than most hard drives today!

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