Does time machine write over old backups?

I use time machine on 2 external drives. I have a 500gb drive in my macbook and I am trying to back up to a 1tb external drive that is partitioned into 2. The backup fails because I only have 85gb left on my Time Machine partition which totals 532 GB and Time machine needs 400 and something gb for the backup.
Doesn't Time machine just write over older backups to accommodate the latest?
Do I have to erase the time machine partition to make a new backup?
Thanks!

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Why does Time machine not delete old backups

I dont understand Why time machine is not deleting old backups. As it worked first time with the same size backup drive as the drive its backing up, I assumed it would just delete the old backup as needed. Do I need a bigger backup drive?

Roglee wrote:
I just want it to delete the old backup & replace it so i just have a copy. I guess i could just re format the drive each time but that just seems a waste of my time when TM should do this for me!
If this is all you want to do, turn off Time Machine, download SuperDuper! and use it for free. This will clone whatever drive you want and the free trial will erase your back up drive each time. I can't remember if it will let you choose what to back up or if it wants the entire drive. Also, I'm not sure if the Scheduler works with the free trial. Below are some verbiage for SuperDuper!. Looks like if you want Scheduling you will have to purchase a license.
Download Now!
You can download SuperDuper! v2.7.1 right now and back up and clone your drives for free— forever!
Buy Now!
Buy now to unlock scheduling, Smart Update (which saves a lot of time), Sandboxes, scripting and more!
Time Machine will keep making back ups and when it determines it needs space, it will delete older back ups. But it doesn't delete older ones each time it backs up.

Time Machine deleted my old backups and crapped out midstream

I had just gotten my failing hard drive replaced, and restored from Time Machine backup. So far so good.
So a week later, I wanted to upgrade to Mountain Lion, but figured I should be responsible and run Time Machine backup again before doing the upgrade just in case something goes wrong.
The Mac has a 4TB drive, which has 2TB free. The backup drive is a 4TB external drive, which has (or had) Time Machine backups going back two years or so. It still had over a TB of space left. I clicked on Backup Now and let it run overnight. I noticed it said "Deleting old backup to make room" or something like that, which I thought was normal.
I woke up in the morning to find that Time Machine had crapped out in the middle, and said that it couldn't complete. I realized that it had deleted all my old backups. It didn't need to do that, since the only files that had changed would have been less than a GB, and it had over a TB of space to work with.
It must have thought that everything on the drive had changed since the last backup, and it wanted to backup the entire drive. As such it tried deleting all my old backups! But it failed, and stopped in the middle.
Now I have a drive that still says there is only 1.2 TB of space on the drive, but I can't see the files! Even with Tinkertool, I can't see anything beyond the one most recent backup.
Can these files be recovered? I am totally ticked that there isn't some kind of confirmation like "Are you sure you want to delete X?"
I actually need to have some of these older backups, as they include files that had been deleted before the latest backup that I may need to retrieve. Any hard drive experts out there? Any terminal commands that can make these files accessible, even if I have to retrieve them manually?

To clarify, this all happened under Snow Leopard as I had said. My profile lists Tiger, since I haven't cared to update my personal profile since using that OS, and in fact I still use Tiger among other versions. I manage a lot of users. And I never got to upgrade to Mountain Lion on this system, as explained in the post above. So I don't see the confusion.
I don't think the model of Mac makes a difference for this type of problem, but in case it does, the incident was on a 2010 Intel iMac with a 4TB hard drive and 8GB of RAM. I would have mentioned that if this was a problem with hardware specific to the model of Mac. But this is more of a universal issue.
But to stay on topic, I'm guessing my old backups are toast. But if anybody has any experience with recovering from Time Machine deleting their old backups, I would be happy to hear from them. In the meantime, I am going to try to do some old fashioned file recovery, and see what I can salvage.

Time Machine is Deleting Old backups

Disconnected my MacBook Pro from its hard drives for two days. Re-connected, and ran Time Machine. It backuped up as normal. I walked away, seeing "49.8GB free of 499GB" on that external hard drive. I come back and Time Machine is "Deleting Old Backups ... " - and now 135GB free, and still deleting.
I realize that TM auto-deletes ... but does this sound "normal" to start its own deletions when there was 49GB remaining on a 500GB drive?
It's still deleting ...
Clint Bradford

If I said I connnected two disks, I apologize. One 500GB external hard drive is dedicated to just being a Time Machine backup for my 17" MacBook Pro.
Not sure what has happened ... but Time Machine cleared up space, and is now performing a 110GB backup ... kinda like it doesn't know it's the same computer attached to it.
This is NOT a critical problem ... I have full backup elsewhere. Just a little weirdness today ...
Clint Bradford

PLEASE HELP! How do I get Time Machine to remove old backups?

It is my understanding that Time Machine will never fill up the drive it's on because it will remove old backups to make room for new ones. It's not doing that for me. The drive Time Macine is backing up to has filled up & will not allow any more to be written to it, so I can't do backups. I don't see anywhere that I can change a setting to fix this problem. It would be VERY helpful if someone would walk me though how to fix this problem. I've had to turn Time Machine off because it's locking up my system trying to write to the drive.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR HELP!!

Thank you. I've gone there & read what's at the link. I've tried going into Time Machine & for some reason I can only see backups (in Time Machine) that go back to earlier today. However, if I actually look on the disc that I'm backing up to, I see database files that go back to April of this year. I looked earlier today & I saw files that went all the way back to October of LAST year, but I just did a big installation & that must of put things over the edge.
Anyway, I'd like to say that I saw an answer to my problem at Pondini's site, but I've been there looking around since before I wrote this thread asking for help & I just don't see anything that looks like it will specifically help me on this situation.
I'm still stuck.

OS X 10.7 Time Machine not deleting old backups to make space

after upgrading to 10.7, Time Machine no longer deletes old (over a year old) backups to make space when needed. Drive now full. Cannot manually delete and Time Machine does not seem to have a function to perform a deletion.

See C18 in the first linked article. Also, your backup drive should be 2-4 times your hard drive capacity.
Time Machine Troubleshooting
Time Machine Troubleshooting Problems

Does Time Machine still do incremental backups after a restore?

Hi --
We have a 500GB external iomega drive that just died and I have been working to restore it's files from Time Machine onto a new 500 GB drive. I formatted the new drive and gave it the same name as the old one, and it looks like Time Machine was smart enough to do the right thing and restore the files to their original locations.
However, this morning -- within 24 hours of completing the restore -- we see an error message from TM saying it is out of space and it cannot perform a backup. It claims that about 450 GB are needed, which is about the same size of all the files we restored. Is it possible that once backup files are restored they are not longer considered backed up, and thus Time Machine immediately tries to back up all the files it just restored? I assumed it would still do incremental backups but recognize that restored files do not need to be backed up again unless / until they are edited...
Thanks,
Ram on

felciano wrote:
Hi --
We have a 500GB external iomega drive that just died and I have been working to restore it's files from Time Machine onto a new 500 GB drive. I formatted the new drive and gave it the same name as the old one, and it looks like Time Machine was smart enough to do the right thing and restore the files to their original locations.
That's quite unusual. Normally it does a full backup immediately: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1338
See #C4 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

Time Machine lost all old backups

I have an iMac 24" with a 750GB drive that only has about 200GB full. I have been using Time Machine to do backups onto a 400GB hard drive, and it has been working fine for a few weeks. Last week I copied 250GB of material onto my Mac's HD (as a backup of an external drive), but set that folder NOT to be backed up in TM (this worked fine). Then yesterday I renamed that folder... and Time Machine tried to include it in the next backup... and that backup failed, of course, since there is now more that 400GB of material to backup. Ooops... I have put that renamed folder onto the exclude list.
BUT, in the process of failing to backup, Time Machine appears to have deleted all of the previous backups from the 400GB Time Machine drive. The weeks of backups are gone. THAT was very disappointing. I thought Time Machine wasn't supposed to delete old backups without warning me (I have that option checked). Why did it do that??
(Happily, I have also been making backups manually onto other drives, and my main drive is still happy, so no files were lost... but I want to understand what happened before I trust my backups to Time Machine. I realize that I accidentally asked Time Machine to do an impossible thing by suddenly dropping that extra 250GB folder into its world, but why did it fail so ungracefully and delete all my old backups? This could be very bad if it happed to someone who was counting on Time Machine.)

This is TRULY a serious software design bug IMO and should be reported to Apple via their Feedback procedure. I also have seen this bug and I've reported it to Apple. You should also to add more weight to the bug report and to hopefully have Apple resolve this soon for all of us.
TM does fail to alert the user with a request that to free up backup space some older backups will need removing. Not only this but it silently removes the oldest backups trying to free up space only to find there's still insufficient space. This is clearly a very serious problem as you've discovered.

Backup disk is full ... Time Machine not deleting old backups

In my Time Machine preferences it says "The older backups are deleted when your disk becomes full." Well ... my disk is full but Time Machine is not deleting its old backups to make more room.
So now TM is failing to backup.
Any suggestions for freeing up some disk space and getting back to getting backed up?
Thanks.
Ramone

ramonekalsaw wrote:
In my Time Machine preferences it says "The older backups are deleted when your disk becomes full." Well ... my disk is full but Time Machine is not deleting its old backups to make more room.
So now TM is failing to backup.
What message does it send? See #C2 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
It will show you how to locate the message(s) that describe the problem, then help you fix it. If that doesn't help, post back with details, including all the messages, your setup (especially the destination for the backups), what you've done, and the results.
Any suggestions for freeing up some disk space and getting back to getting backed up?
Do you have other data on the disk, in the same partition? If so, that's not a good idea, and may be the source of the problem. See #3 in [Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/FAQ.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

Does Time Machine Keep My Old Emails?

If I ran a backup of my MacBook Pro (full backup onto a Time Capsule) two months ago and now run a backup again, will it overwrite all my old Mail messages? Ie. say I ran the backup last December 6, will all the emails of Dec.6 (inbox, Sent, all my accounts) and before still be there after I run a new backup today? My computer crashed about a month ago and I had to have it repaired, but I had to recreate all my old Mail accounts and start over with empty Inbox, Sent etc. -- and I could never figure out how to get my Mail emails off Time Capsule and onto my repaired MacBook).
The reason is that I would kind of like to still have all those emails, but I do want to run a backup. Can I just exclude Mail from the new backup? That way, all my Dec. 6th emails would still be on the Time Capsule, where maybe one day I will figure out how to retrieve them (it's devilishly difficult) and I would still have all my post-Dec. 6 emails on this computer.
Sorry, I hope this makes sense.
Thanks in advance!
Nick

If I ran a backup of my MacBook Pro (full backup onto a Time Capsule) two months ago and now run a backup again, will it overwrite all my old Mail messages?
It shouldn't unless the drive runs out of space.
If you want to recover the old e-mails, in Finder hold down the option/alt key while selecting the Go menu item. Select Library/Mail. Enter Time Machine and go to the old backup.
If you want to make your user library permanently visible, run the below command in Applications/Utilities/Terminal.
chflags nohidden ~/Library/
You will need to do that after any updates.

Time machine not deleting old backups of recovery partition

I have a Mac Mini running Lion Server. I have an external disk partitioned with a space for network backups and a smaller partition for backing up the server itself. The server has a 160GB disk, it is only using 29.27GB, the partition for backing up the server is 152GB (it's what was left over after creating the partition for the network backups). I figured since I'm only using about 30GB, 152GB should be plenty of space. However after 3 months of use I get the error "the backup is too large for the backup disk". In the past I have formatted the partition and restarted the backups, however it always fills up after 3 months. This time I decided to dig into it a bit more. I looked to see what was available in my backup, it only has one previous restore point. I browsed the disk and opened the backups.backupdb folder, checked the size of the folder with the computer name, it is only 9.44GB. I was wondering where all of the space went so I enabled hidden files, I found the .RecoverySets folder and found it was taking up 141.95GB. I looked at the recovery sets, there are 295 copies of com.apple.recovery.boot which all seem to contain the following files:
.disk_label                         749b
BaseSystem.chunklist       2KB
BaseSystem.dmg              454.6MB
boot.efi                              864KB
com.apple.Boot.plist          431b
kernelcache                       24.1MB
PlatformSupport.plist         2KB
SystemVersion.plist           478b
Of those files, the only file not dated Aug 11, Oct 6 or 12, 2011 is com.apple.Boot.plist which has a date that corresponds to when the backup was performed. These backups go all the way back to Jan 30, the last time I formatted the partition, but the user data backups only go back to the 27th and it hasn't been able to complete a backup since.
I thought Time Machine was supposed to only backup data that had changed since the last backup, and delete old revisions when space is running low, it seems that it is copying more than just the data that changed since the last backup and only deleting old revisions of user data, not system data. Is there a way to fix this permanently?

See C18 in the first linked article. Also, your backup drive should be 2-4 times your hard drive capacity.
Time Machine Troubleshooting
Time Machine Troubleshooting Problems

Time Machine incorrectly deleting old backups

Hi
I have a Macbook Air with a 128Gb SSD and I am using Time Machine to back up to an external 500Gb USB2.0 drive connected to my Airport Extreme.
The drive is formatted as Mac OS extended Journaled and is dedicated to Time Machine backups only. The problem is that Time Machine reports that the disk has run out of space and has deleted old backups. This can't be true as the Sparsebundle file is only about 70Gb and the drive has over 400Gb of capacity.
I have tried reformatting the disk and starting over but the problem keeps returning. When I enter time machine it has deleted all the old back ups and I can only go back in time a few days.
Any help appreciated!

Thanks for the reponse.
I checked and there are no other sparsebundles on the drive and there have been no changes made to the hardware.
Time machine seems to be working correctly as it successfully makes and completes teh back ups at regular intervals throughout the day. The message that there is no space available comes around every couple of weeks, which I'm guessing is based on the fact it keeps deleting all the recent backups except the last one and then the cycle repeats.
My own 'limited' opinion is that TM is having difficulty resizing the sparsebundle in some way and therefore can only maintain the backup within the initial size of the first backup. (e.g. the Macbook AIR SSD reports approx 113Gb of space and I am currently using 82.07Gb. The sparsebundle is currently sized at 75.66Gb on Disk (81.16Gb)
I checked the permissions of the sparse file and they are set to R&W for everyone so there shouldn't be an access problem.
I have only recently moved to the Mac environment and the Macbook air is my first apple computer so I am not very familiar with the environment, but this is an extremely annoying problem and renders TM vitually useless.

Does Time Machine require add'l backup space?

I have two 2TB external hard drives which are pretty much full.
I want to partition a 4TB drive into two 2TB sectors and backup my two drives.
I don't need additional "archived" backups, those previous changes that Time Machine stores when additional space permits. I just need an exact backup of the drives in their current state and that's all.
If one of my current hard drives is full to 99% capacity (say 1.98 TB) and my backup drive has 2TB capacity, will Time Machine let me backup? Or does it require additional space?
I ask because I've been reading other posts that talk about "recommending" an additional 20-50% in size for saving previous changes. I understand the suggestion, but I only have these two 2TB partitions and I don't believe I need those previous backups.
Is that "additional" space mandatory or optional?

Thanks for the reply, ds store.
I wonder if you (or anyone else) can still answer a question or two for me.
Are there any free options for making mirror backups of my drive? I don't need the thing to be bootable. It's all media files that don't change, but do get added to from time to time.
I would settle for a click-and-drag copy of the drive, but the occasional addition of a new file makes it a hassle to remember what I need to add to the backup drive.
Sure would like a *free* solution to the problem of needing to backup a mostly full 2TB hard drive to another 2TB drive (ie, not much "work space") and not needing archived time machine-style backups ... just a system for knowing to add that occasional addition to my files.
Seems like time machine should do something like that ... simply pass on additional archived files ... just copy the disc at hand, but I get the idea it doesn't. It insists on creating those additional archived files AND requiring me to allocate substantial extra space for "work space".
I don't want to buy another drive. I want to back up my 2TB to another 2TB and make updates from time to time - without the wasted space of archived backups.
Any free solutions to that? Possibly something already in my Mac that I'm not aware of?

Logic Board replaced, Time Machine wont recognize old backups

I just got my Logic Board replaced and obviously having the problem with Time Machine recognizing old backups. I looked at old forums and found the macosxhints page (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080128003716101) on how to fix the problem but when I try to enter cd /Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb into terminal it gives me a message saying "no such file or directory" i dont know where to go from here any help would be appreciated thanks for your time

instead of Time Machine in that command you should enter "name of your TM drive" (put the name of your TM drive there and KEEP THE QUOTES). However, as you seem to be unfamiliar with terminal you will very likely have further problems following that hint. Try this one instead
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20081216145458979&query=%2Bfsaclctl

Get time machine to see old backups

Hi all,
recently i had a problem that resulted in having to restore from a time machine backup. Since then i have been unable to see my previous backups within time machine
The sparse bundle is still intact, i have not allowed it to backup knowing that it will more than likely nuke my old backups.
So far i have tried:
- removing and reselecting the time capsule
- removing com.apple.timemachine.plist
- inheriting the existing sparsebundle.
any help on this would be much appreciated.
Cheers

While in Time Machine, press the key combination shift-command-C. The front window will show all mounted volumes. All snapshots should now be accessible. Select the one you want and navigate to the files you want to restore.

Does time machine write over old backups?

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