Unable to backup :Not enough space on Airport

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Unable to backup :Not enough space on Airport

Friends,

Hope all is well.

I recently purchased a MacBook Air, and using my TIme-Machine (AirportExtreme), was successfully able to transfer all my old data which i had on my earlier MacBook Pro onto the new computer.

The issue is, on my Time Machine, i have backups from my Mac Pro 5,1.

I am unable to back up from the MacBook Air, as i keep getting an error, telling me that there is not enough space, on the TIme Machine.

I need to delete the backup' from the MacBook Pro, while keeping the backups from the MacPro.

The Airport utility manager, gives me an option of erasing the entire backup...which is something, that i cannot do, as i need the previous backups from my MacPro.

Is there a way to selectively erase only the backups from the macbook pro?

regards

dinesh

MacBook Air, macOS Sierra (10.12.6)

Posted on Nov 11, 2017 10:35 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Bob Timmons

Community+ 2024

Level 10

159,266 points

Nov 12, 2017 9:25 AM in response to d_veliath

using my TIme-Machine (AirportExtreme)......

Sorry, not sure what you mean here. Time Machine is software on your Mac, used to back up the Mac to another hard drive.

A Time Capsule is a wireless router with a built in hard drive that can be used to store backups made using Time Machine software.

Can you clarify.......

Are you telling us that you have a Time Capsule?

or

Are you telling us that you have an AirPort Extreme with an attached USB hard drive?

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Answer 2

Nov 12, 2017 9:25 AM in response to d_veliath

The answer is no.. you cannot selectively delete backups with any hope of them still working.

What you can do is plug a USB drive into the TC and use that as the target.. or even better.. archive the TC to the USB drive and then erase the TC and use it as your new TM target.

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Answer 3

Tesserax

Level 10

148,435 points

Nov 12, 2017 9:44 AM in response to d_veliath

I would suggest that the backup drive be 2-3x the capacity of the drive that you are backing up.

For example, if Time Machine is only backing up the internal startup drive, and that drive is 1 TB, the backup drive should be 2 or 3 TB.

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Answer 4

Nov 12, 2017 12:01 PM in response to d_veliath

How much free space is showing on your TC? How old and what model with what size hard drive??

If it is filled with Time Machine backups can you identify something that was in the original Backup that really should have been excluded.

For example.. you were running bootcamp and TM was saving the windows virtual disk on every backup.. that will quickly fill up the drive. And you could certainly delete that out of the backup directly from Time Machine note.. without causing any issues to the rest of the backup.

Parallels the same.. cache for cloud storage same. Any very large single file that changes by a few KB each day.. will cause massive backups of useless files.

Backup one copy of the virtual disk/cache if you need.. but it is more important to backup say windows from inside windows.. so you can actually restore files.

I don't know how you are going to cope inside a 128GB SSD.. IMHO Apple should not even sell computers with disks that size.. if you are going to plug another hard disk in.. then backup both to the TC you wil certainly need a lot more space.

For USB drives you plug in, where you simply want bulk storage.. self powered mechanical drives are great.. and the best value size is 2TB.. I would hardly even bother with smaller ones. The difference in manufacturing cost between 1TB and 2TB simply makes the 2TB that much cheaper per GB.

You can then partition it if you wish and keep using TM to the second partition but use a different backup like Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone of your computer.

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