Time Machine Still Not Deleting Old Backups and Hence Running Out of Space

... and this with a 1TB external drive there just for this purpose.
You'd have thought they'd have fixed this by now as it's an old issue.

Hi Richard, thanks for the messages. How much disk space is used up on your MacintoshHD? I ask because if you for example have around 850GB of MacintoshHD used, TM would only be able to keep one full backup on the 1TB external drive. All of the other backups will be smaller, incremental backups. When TM needs more space, it can only delete the oldest incremental backups, as the full backup is needed in case of a complete restore. If, at some time in the past, another couple of hundred GB were needing to be incrementally backed up, then the 1TB external drive will not have the space, and your messages seem to bear out this scenario. Since the first occurrence of the failure, the amount of data requiring backup would be increasing by a small amount each week.
Even if the very first full backup on the TM drive was of a small MacintoshHD (say, from just after installation), you might have hundreds of GB of music or pics or movies etc. These files would have been part of a later incremental backup, but, if they never change again, they're never backed up again. This also means that, there being only one copy of these files on the TM drive, they will never be deleted to make space for more backups. This could be an explanation of why, in your log messages, you see so little data actually deleted when it tries to make space; you may not have many files that change often.
By way of comparison, my full backup is only 27GB As all my data, music, etc are stored on a network drive, and my incremental backups are of the order of hundreds of KB rather than hundreds of GB. Because my network drives are fault tolerant, I only need to use TM to backup my MacintoshHD and the TM drive is therefore set at only 256GB.
It seems the only two solutions would be:
1. Move movies, music etc. to another drive or, more sensibly,
2. Get at least a 2 TB external drive for TM to use. I seem to remember that there is advice out there to have a TM drive of at least double the size of your total data size that needs to be backed up. Mine is overkill at a ratio of ten times the size, but you get the idea.
if, on the other hand, you only have 50GB of disk space used up on MacintoshHD, then there must be more than one full backup of it on the TM drive. In this case, if you are prepared to, you can start the TM drive from scratch by deleting its files or reformatting it. This would make TM take a full backup of the MacintoshHD as it currently stands and then the 1 TB drive will have plenty of room for incremental backups again. The down side is that you would lose any past versions of changed files; this point in time is the furthest back you can go to from then on.
I hope this helps and I'd love to know the outcome.

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    Madhurjya wrote:
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