Why does time machine say my wireless hard drive doesn't have enough space when it clearly does?

I have a 2 TB western digital hard drive connected via USB to my airport extreme (Y2012) that i've been using the past 2 years to connect to wirelessly. The hard drive has 2 partitions, ~1 TB each. 1 partition for backing up, the other for storing media. Recently I deleted my macbook pro backup. My macbook pro has a 500GB hard drive, of which about 120 GB is free.
Since I deleted the old time machine backup disk image and told time machine to start a new backup, I am now receiving an error. It's telling me there isn't enough room on the drive, when the 1TB partition i'm trying to use (as i've sucessfully done in the past) has nothing on it. 1 full TB free, and my macbook pro can't backup a 500 GB hard drive, which isn't even full itself.
PLEASE HELP!! I have a macbook pro early 2011, and I never know when the board is going to go koput again and I don't currently have a backup of my stuff while this problem persists.
Thanks!

Start with Section C in the 1st linked article.
Time Machine Troubleshooting
Time Machine Troubleshooting Problems

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Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive
1. See Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks' Storage Display.
2. You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.
3. Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.
4. Also see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.
5. See Where did my Disk Space go?.
6. See The Storage Display.
You must Empty the Trash in order to recover the space they occupied on the hard drive.
You should consider replacing the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.
Try using OmniDiskSweeper 1.8 or GrandPerspective to search your drive for large files and where they are located.
I recommend that you also make a backup before proceeding. Just quit the installer.

HT3275 Time Machine says my external hard drive does not have enough

Time Machine says my external hard drive does not have enough space for the current backup. It needs 34 G out of a 250G hard drive. All that is on the drive is earlier backups. I recently added memory, which may confuse Time Machine into thinking it is a new computer. How can I erase old backups and complete this one?

Walter Goodman wrote:
Time Machine says my external hard drive does not have enough space for the current backup. It needs 34 G out of a 250G hard drive. All that is on the drive is earlier backups.
See #C4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
If that doesn't clear it up, how much data is on your Mac? If TM is only trying to back-up 34 GB, it should be able to delete old backups to do that (assuming you're running Lion).
It sounds like your backups may be corrupted. Try to repair them, per #A5 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
I recently added memory, which may confuse Time Machine into thinking it is a new computer.
If that's all you did, no.
How can I erase old backups and complete this one?
Just erase the drive per #1 or #2 of Using Disk Utility.

HT1557 HOW DO I MOVE THINGS TO EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE SO I HAVE ENOUGH SPACE TO DO UPDATE?

HOW DO I MOVE THINGS FROM MY MACBOOK PRO TO A EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE TO CREATE ROOM FOR MY UPDATE?

BJCOCKRELL wrote:
HOW DO I MOVE THINGS FROM MY MACBOOK PRO TO A EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE TO CREATE ROOM FOR MY UPDATE?
You connect the drive, and if it's not already prepared for use with a Mac, partition it with a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format and a GUID Partition Table (click the Options button for that). Once that's done, just drag whatever files you want to move to the external and then delete them from the internal.

Why is Time machine saying backup disk disconnected? Using MBP 17" Lion 10.7

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Do you have an external drive connected?
If you do has it gone into sleep mode? There is a setting in the OS to put drives to sleep if they aren't being used. Energy Saver "Put the hard disk to sleep when possible".
Also most external drives have a built in sleep function that if they aren't being accessed for a period of time they go to sleep by themselves.

Does the new airport extreme support backing up via time machine to an external hard drive pluged into the usb port

Does the new airport extreme support backing up via time machine to an external hard drive pluged into the usb port

Yes, but you might want to note that the port on the AirPort Extreme is only USB 2.0, and that it runs at about half the speed of the USB 2.0 port on a computer, so things are going to be quite SLOW as far as backups are concerned, or anything else for that matter.

Does Time Machine backup other external hard drives?

I am using a Seagate 500 GB to backup my data. Will Time Machine backup another external hard drive on which I store my iMovie projects? If so, how do I access them in the Time Machine mode? Thanks in advance.

nachdenki wrote:
strange, my external HDs were added to the exception list automatically. maybe because they wouldn't fit on the time machine volume.
It seems to depend on when the drives were connected. When you first turn Time Machine on, it only excludes the TM drive itself, and any drives not formatted HFS+.
If you connect a drive later on, that drive will be excluded automatically.

Time machine not seeing external hard drive in time line

can anyone help
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thanks for reply
when i open time machine the time line on right side of page
has date ranging from 2014 back to 2010 but only highlight date from 2014 back to 2013
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Using Time machine with an external hard drive and AEBS???have a

I have a 500GB external hard drive that I have connected to my AEBS by USB. Recently upgraded to Leopard but cannot get time machine to see my hard drive.
The base station is 802.11n.
Is this possible?
Have read a few other threads and can't seem to get to the bottom of it.
Thanks,
T

In addition, when you get Time Machine to be able to see your external drive connected to AEBS, in TM prefs exclude all but one small folder from your hard drive (say, /User/Library) and allow TM to do its initial backup. This will create the sparsebundle (resizable disk image) that TM uses to back up to a network drive.
Then turn off Time Machine, unmount the USB drive and reconnect it directly to your Mac, mount it, set TM prefs to use the sparsebundle that newly-mounted drive, remove previously excluded items from TM's exclusion list, and turn TM back on. TM will then back up everything much more quickly than if connected wirelessly.
After that, you can return the USB drive to the AEBS. Incremental backups take much less time, so the slower connection won't matter as much.

When I tried to back up my computer, Time Machine says 'an error occurred while creating the backup folder.' When I check the side of the partition where I manually saved old files, the folders are there, but NONE of the files are.

I haven't backed up my computer in over a year. When I tried to back it up today, Time Machine says 'an error occurred while creating the backup folder.' When I check the side of the partition where I manually saved old photos and documents (including all the pictures from the year I studied abroad/traveled a bunch), the folders are there, but NONE of the files are.
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So you were doing a time machine backup to another partition on the same hard drive? Just trying to gather some information so i can provide a helpful response.

How do I move data on time machine from one external hard drive to another

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Although the documentation says you can copy Time Machine backups in the Finder, it's very slow and sometimes doesn't work at all.
Launch Disk Utility, open the built-in help, and search for the term "Duplicate." Follow the instructions. Turn Time Machine OFF in its preference pane while copying the volume.

Is it possible to have two encrypted time machines on one partitioned hard drive?

I am trying to use encrypted time machines for two macbooks (15" and 11") with only one USB hard drive. The problem is that after creating one encrypted time machine for my 15" in a separate partition, the hard drive does not work when plugging it into my 11".
What happens is that I am prompted to enter in my encryption password for the 15" time machine on my 11". I enter in the correct password but it does not work (i.e., password fail). The interesting part is that when I plug the hard drive into my 15", I am asked the same thing, but the password entry works.
This is my current setup for my 1tb usb hard drive:
1) 400gb for data
2) 400gb newly encrypted time machine for my 15"
3) 200gb unencrypted time machine (with old 11" time machine backups) for my 11"
The hard drive is formated/partitioned in RAID format.
All I want is to be able to have two encrypted time machines for each macbook on one single hard drive. Previously I was able to maintain two separate time machines (unencrypted) on this hard drive. I decided to try and encrypt both but seems like I am getting something wrong.

I am prompted to enter in my encryption password for the 15" time machine on my 11".
If I understand correctly, you want to mount the other partition. Are you prompted to do that? Does the password include any characters other than plain letters and digits? Are you using the same keyboard layout on both machines?

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I have been using a Mac Mini running 10.6.8 for years as a media server. I have always been very careful to maintain backups of everything, and the inevitable did happen - the hard drive containing all my media did fail.
To clarify my set up, my Mac Mini internal hard drive is insufficient to store all my media, so I have been using an external 2TB drive to store it. I then set up Time Machine to back up both the Mac Mini and the 2TB external drive to a second 3TB external drive. Now that the 2TB drive with my media has failed, I seem to be having problems restoring all the media from 3TB drive. This is because the Time Capsule interface is designed to display finder windows at various points in time so you can go back to when your missing files existed and restore them. The problem is that I need the entire contents of the dead 2TB drive restored to a new drive, but I can't open a Time Capsule window that shows the contents of the old drive. I have tried opening /Volumes in a finder window, then invoking Time Machine, but my dead hard drive does not show up in the list of volumes. When I open the 3TB drive in a Finder window I can clearly see that it has backups of the 2TB drive, but they are spread out among 83 different snapshots of various dates.
How can I use Time Machine to easily restore the entire contents of the dead 2TB external drive to a new external drive?

This web site might answer all of your Time machine questions:
http://pondini.org/OSX/Home.html
Ciao.

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This is another one of those questions that I've searched the web for answers, and have gotten tricky answers back. So now I'm trying to introduce a clean slate to the mix.
Thank you for your time!

Well, what you mentioning is possible. However, I don't know whether it's supported (as in, "easy to set up."). Time Machine officially supports backing up to a locally attached drive, to a machine running a Time Machine server (i.e. running OS X Server software), and to a Time Capsule. I don't know that it officially supports a drive attached to an AirPort or to a Time Capsule. Though I know some people have gotten it to work.
Best I can say is to try it. Plug the drive into the Time Capsule, ensure it's shared on the network, and then try and set it as a backup target from a machine in the Time Machine backup panel (you'll need to ensure it's mounted first). If it works, you're all set.

HT1553 DO I HAVE TO HAVE THE ORIGINAL INSTALLATION DISCS IF MY HARD DRIVE IS REPLACED BUT I MADE A BACK UP WITH TIME MACHINE TO AN EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE ?

I have an imac from late 2009 and received an email saying the seagate hard drive may fail and apple is going to replace it free of charge. I will back up using time machine to an external hard drive but do I absolutely have to have the original installation CD's or is there a way around this to restore the computer once they replace the hard drive??

Yes, you can partition your 2TB drive that way. In fact, I have an external hard drive with 3 partitions: one for a SuperDuper! clone of my Snow Leopard partition, one to clone my Lion partition, and one larger partition for Time Machine (which only backs up the Lion partition).
I would expect the authorized reseller to have a complete set of OS X disks.

Why does time machine say my wireless hard drive doesn't have enough space when it clearly does?

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