Time Machine backups only saving a few weeks

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Level 1

30 points

Time Machine backups only saving a few weeks

My iMac running macOS Sierra (10.12.3) makes Time Machine backups to a 3 TB Time Capsule along with another Mac. Just recently, it seems to have gone from having nearly a years worth of backups to only a few weeks worth. So far I havent been able to pinpoint what would cause it to remove so much of the older backups in a short span of time. Its technically still working but it seems a bit unusual. Has anyone else run in to this situation or noticed this happen with their backups before?

iMac, macOS Sierra (10.12.3), 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 with 8 GB RAM

Posted on Feb 8, 2017 9:20 AM

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Answer 1

Bob Timmons

Level 10

187,304 points

Feb 8, 2017 10:20 AM in response to Erik Cronin

Then, the Time Capsule is full and Time Machine is not able to delete enough old backups to make room for the new backups. This happens all the time.

You have 3 options.....listed in order of most expensive on down:

Add another Time Capsule and start backups going there
Add a USB drive to your current Time Capsule and start backups going there
Erase the Time Capsule hard drive and start over again with a new backup

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Answer 2

Erik Cronin Author

Level 1

30 points

Feb 8, 2017 10:14 AM in response to Bob Timmons

I might have seen something like that in the past but not all that recently. I have seen the typical pop up saying the backup disk is full and it would remove some older backups to make space. Usually that just freed up some space on the drive and it didnt see the pop up again for quite a while afterwards.

I should note that my iMac has a 2 TB drive with 1.35 TB available and it also says that 40 GB is "purgeable"as well when checking from Finder.

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Answer 3

Bob Timmons

Level 10

187,304 points

Feb 8, 2017 9:44 AM in response to Erik Cronin

Do you recall seeing a message like this a few weeks ago, and a few weeks before that, etc.?

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