I just purchased my 2nd MacBook Pro. I was using Time Machine on old laptop. I would like to backup the new computer to the same external drive as the old laptop. I'm receiving "Backup Failed There is not enough space on . . . ". How do I begin to backup the new laptop on the old external drive that holds my Time Machine?
MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.3)
What are the sizes of the disk drives in each of the MBP and the external disk drive used to store the Time Machine backups?
How much free space is left on the external disk drive?
From the sounds the message you received, it sounds like the external disk drive is too small to backup both of them.
Please forgive my ignorance. I will try my best to answer.
New laptop is about 1/2 full (250 GB). Migrated from old laptop. I no longer need to backup the old laptop.
External drive is 2TB divided into 1TB for Time Machine & 1TB for my files. Time Machine has files from 1st laptop dating back to 2014 (I do not need them that old).
Free space available: 24.8 GB.
Seeing as how you no longer need the old backups, I would reformat the external disk drive which will free up all the disk space for the new MBP.
Can I just delete the older files with reformatting? Would that solve it?
Yes, you could but the reformat is much faster. It will basically write a new directory for the disk and it is finished instead of having to find everything that needs to be deleted.
What do you see as a problem to reformatting?
Your best option would be to get another external drive. Use one for your files and one for Time Machine. Deleting files from a Time Machine backup can damage the backup.
Im scared I would delete the 6 years of images on the other storage side of the 2TB drive. I think I "partitioned" it.
How many backups should be kept? I'm thinking 1TB full of backups is to many.
Prior to the new purchase, Time Machine was backing up and deleting older files in order to complete a new backup.
I guess that is all I really want to do. Just delete the oldest to make room for a new one?
I concur with Eric that your best path forward is an external disk drive for photos and another for backup.
Have both your data and backups on the same drive is a false economy. If you lose the drive, which is the most likely cause of trouble, you lost everything.
Time Machine Backup
