How to make more room on Time Machine drive?

I'm starting to get messages that my backup failed because there's not enough space on my drive... how can I increase space? I know I can't delete individual Time Machine files but I also tried deleting several files on my actual drive so hopefully TM would delete them from the back drive but that didn't work either.
How can I get files OFF my TM drive?

See the pink box in #C4 of [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).

Similar Messages

How to share more than one Time Machine folder

Hi,
With Snow Leo Server I found how to find how to share more than one Time Machine Folder but I can't see how to do the same with Lion Server, could you help me with that ?
The goal of that is to offer one TM folder per user which is located on a dedicated partition in order to limit the size of TM backups per user (150Gig).
In Lion, in can only share one TM folder for everybody and I didn'tfind if I can set a limit size per user...
Thank you in advance,

I have figured out a way to enable multiple backup targets.
However, it's one of these things I wouldn't want to describe to anyone except true programmer types, because everyone else has a 90%+ chance of messing up their system if they do something wrong.
It involves turning off file sharing, and then editing the plist files in /private/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/sharepoints/
The gist of it is this:
a) first create all the share points you later want to use for TimeMachine, and set them up for afp-only file sharing, also create one TM target, which you can either use later, or have there so the system has one entry it knows how to handle. I just made a bogus one that I'm not actively using.
b) turn off file sharing in Server.app
c) turn off TimeMachine in Server.app
d) now you can edit the files, the easiest is with Xcode, so you may want to install that first
e) for each sharpoint you made in a) there will be a corresponding .plist file in the location indicated, these are the files that need to be edited.
f) for each of these files
     1) the item0 string property in the timeMachineBackup array must be switched from 0 to 1
     2) a new key of type array with the name timeMachineBackupUUID must be created
     3) in the newly created array an item of type string must be placed with the value of a UUID, which can be created with the shell command uuidgen
g) make sure all the edited plist files are saved
h) turn on TimeMachine in the Server.app again
If all went well, you now should be able to go to one of your networked client computers and see all the time machine share points just created as options for being a time machine target.
Anyway, if you go that route: be careful, don't blame me if you muck things up...

More than one Time Machine drive

I'm about to upgrade to a Mac Book Pro at work, which will be my first use of Leopard on a work computer. (My Aluminum Powerbook at work sits at 10.4.11 right now.) I do have a Mac mini running Leopard at home, so I'm familiar with Time Machine. With my work computer, currently I maintain two Retrospect incremental back-up files and toggle between them. I started doing that after a Retrospect back-up file got corrupted and I no longer had any file history. With the new system, I'd like to set up two time machine drives. One would stay in my office and would be the main time machine drive. The other would be portable, and would help me keep my work backed up when I am on extended travel. I would also like to back up to the second drive at some regular interval (say weekly) when I am not traveling to keep it fairly current. Will Time Machine handle such toggling of backup drive gracefully? When I switch back to the main Time Machine drive after backing up the the portable drive, will incremental backups resume on the main drive, or will it start a full backup again?
thanks!

Nope. I do not use TM as I find it to be very unreliable and poorly suited to anything other than basic backup for inexperienced users. I use other backup applications that do scheduled backups to my backup drives. I would never try to have multiple backups on a single drive as it is unsafe. If the drive were to fail or become corrupted then both backups are lost. It's not a good backup strategy in my opinion. For backup I recommend:
Backup Software Recommendations
My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk (Backup, Standard, or Pro)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. Carbon Copy Cloner (Donationware)
6. SuperDuper! (Commercial)
7. Intego Personal Backup (Commercial)
8. Data Backup (Commercial)
The following utilities can also be used for backup, but cannot create bootable clones:
1. Backup (requires a .Mac account with Apple both to get the software and to use it.)
2. Toast
3. Impression
4. arRSync
Apple's Backup is a full backup tool capable of also backing up across multiple media such as CD/DVD. However, it cannot create bootable backups. It is primarily an "archiving" utility as are the other two.
Impression and Toast are disk image based backups, only. Particularly useful if you need to backup to CD/DVD across multiple media.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.

I ran out of photo storage space while traveling, so I don't have my laptop. How to make more room (besides deletion)?

There's no more room on my iphone, and I won't have a laptop for another month. I thought turning on icloud on my phone would do the trick, but nothing is happening. I don't want to delete my summer-long trip photos! Any solutions are appreciated.

i use dropbox when on the go. you can upload straight from your iPhone.

How do I (fully, absolutely) erase time machine drive?!

I have looked and looked, BUT I cannot find the frickin' answer to this question. I was running Mavericks from an external USB 3.0 SSD which seemed to work great (MUCH faster OS and app loading than the 1TB HD in my Mini) UNITL it just refused to boot...grey logo screen, wheel turning, but no boot. I tried all the recommended steps but it is not working. So, I decided to just give up on the external boot thing and go back to booting from my built in HD. However, I need to redo my backup (right?) since it is from a different OSX install (the external boot drive). But the **** external backup drive will not erase! I formatted it in disk utility but when I go into Time Machine it shows only a fraction of the available GB (424GB out of 1TB) which means it is *still* hanging on to the old backup. How do I format this disk so that it is as if it is fresh from the factory? This is insane...why doesn't disk utility do this? I am about to give up on Mac altogether over this &%#@. As usual, the answer is probably easy but obscured by Apple's reluctance to allow the user the power they need. Thanks for any help.

Over the years I have gotten tired of using TM a couple of time and reformatted the drives to use for other things.
1. Connect the External HD and open Disk Utility in your Utilities Folder.
2. Highlight the HDs first icon in the list of drives and select the Partition tab.
3. Under Volume Scheme select 1 Partition and click on the Options... button.
4. Select GUID Partition Table in the drop down window and click OK.
5. Set the Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), name it and click the Apply button.
6. Once that is done, then you can use the empty drive for CCC or SuperDuper.

How to make more room on my computer

my computer says i have a capacity of 152.55 GB
i have 38.24 GB available
and i used 114.3 GB
my problem is that i don't see how i used 114.3 GB
my music folder is 35.61 GB
and my photo folder is 10.01 GB
ive done through and deleted as much as i could
i dont now why it says i have used 114 GB when i can only find 45 GB any solutions?

Nice gui to see where space is used. shareware but you don't need to buy, and can still open folders and file in Finder.
A lot of times things end up in "/Volumes" - data, when a drive didn't mount properly and end up with "mydrive" and "mydrive1" in there instead.
http://www.omnigroup.com/omnidisksweeper
If this isn't a boot drive though that is unlikely. No P2P that dumped 40GB into hidden folder...

How can I make more room on external drive for Time Machine?

I now have Time Machine installed and in use on my external drive, which also still has my previous backup on it which used a different system (Dejavu). The external drive's capacity is 74 GB; 58.22GB are used, my iMac hard drive (backed up with TIme Machine) has 38.12 GB used, which by my calculation means about 20GB of the 58 on the external drive are the prior backup. Is there a way I can erase this prior backup, which now duplicates Time Machine, thereby making more room for Time Machine in the future? For instance, if need be, can I erase the whole thing and reinstall Time Machine on it? Thanks!

James, if you open your TM drive, I'm guessing you see the usual System, Library, Users, and Applications folder along with a folder labeled something like Backup.bkup. (I'm away from a TM backup and I can't exactly recall the name of the TM backup folder.)
The DejaVu backup is just a standard file backup using 'rsync' so you can delete whatever you want by simply dragging it to the trash and emptying the trash. If the drive is bootable, you may not want to lose that ability. But assuming there's nothing in your user folder on that backup that isn't also on your computer, you can delete just about everything in your User folder on that drive. You can delete selected applications too. And if you don't mind losing the ability to boot, you can drag everything but the TM backup folder.

How can I make more room in my hd?

how can i make more room in my hard drive? I was thinking about using itunes match. Will this release some HH space?

3 GB out of what? How large is your hard drive? Rule of thumb: You should never let your hard drive get to where you have only 10-15% of space left.
Seven ways to free up drive space
Where did my Disk Space go?
Slimming your hard drive
Seven ways to free up drive space

How to do a backup with time machine?

Hi Communitieee,
I dont know how to make a backup with time machine. Can anybody help me?
And i have another question.. whats wrong with library? when i start my mac the message is popping up but i dont know what it means..
Thanks
KR

Ok thanks mende1.
Whats with time machine? I already take a look to the link but i could not find the answer of my problem. Can you please take a look of this screenshot?!
I dont have an extern hard drive. i just want to save my pics and the other data of my mac.

Using iCloud Drive as a Time Machine drive?

Hi,
do you know if there is a way to use iCloud drive as a Time Machine drive. I mean, we can have more than one time machine drive, using iCloud Drive would be a nice option for off site backup no?
I Currently use Crashplan for that, but using iCloud drive would be better, as I'd have access to my stuff more easily than with crashplan's UI.
MAybe a third party services offers that?
What do you think guys?

Manusnake wrote:
Well I thought the same, but actually I did a new Time Machine backup a month ago via wifi (starting from scratch). About 700 GB of data. It was slower than Ethernet of course, but it worked without any issue.
You must have top-of-the-line WiFi hardware. How long did it take? I don't even remember how long it took for the initial Ethernet backup before my Time Capsule died. It was at least a day.
However I see your point for online backup. That'd require TM to be more gentle. To do one backup per day for example could be a solution (instead of one every hour).
Time Machine works best in small increments. I always advise against hacking the backup frequency. People who complain about Time Machine tend to have hacked it up. People who don't tend to have left it alone. Just sayin'.

My time machine says it need more room to complete back up, how do i make more room? up

My time machine says it need more room to complete back up, how do i make more room?

Delete the old backups..
There is a reason though for this to happen. Tell us what model Time Capsule you are using and what size disk it has .. how much free space is available and how much is now required. If you upgraded to Mavericks it probably needs to do a whole new backup and simply doesn't have the space .. nor can it delete the old backup.
Please read Pondini FAQ for details of these issues.. deleting backups for example Q12
http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
There is also info on how much space is required for backups.
eg Q9

How do I create more space on Time Machine backup disk?

How do I create more space on Time Machine backup disk?

since time machine in Snow Leopard stops backing up when there's no more space on the disk,
That is has not been my experience, and does not appear to be agree with this Time Machine documentation:
Backup drive fills up
As your backup drive begins to fill up to its capacity, Time Machine intelligently deletes the oldest backups to make room for newer ones (and will alert you if the "Notify after old backups are deleted" option is selected in Time Machine preferences).
from : Mac 101: Time Machine

How to make a Time Machine drive writable?

Hello,
I had an iMac (1TB) and backed it up on a external HD using Time Machine (running Mavericks) Now i want to make changes to the Time Machine HD (I don have the iMac anymore) I have a 500GB MBP, so i cannot restore the backup.
Is there anyway i can make the Time Machine HD writable as i want to delete / move a couple of folders/files from it.
If i can boot from the TM HD also i am ok. Any suggestions would help.
TIA..
Yo

Time Machine deals with something called "snapshots" - and you can delete these snapshots if you are trying to find room on the Time Machine backup disk or make the space of what it consumes smaller.
But not sure what you're trying to do - so just to make it more clear, are you trying to get the size of all the Time Machine backups small enough so that you can do a restore to your new MacBook Pro or are you trying to make room on the Time Machine disk in order to backup the MacBook Pro to the Time Machine disk you now have?
So which scenario are you trying to accomplish?
In any event I would not start removing files on your own from the Time Machine backups - you risk corrupting the whole Time Machine backup database.

How to make more than one partition on Airport Time Capsule?

how to make more than one partition on Airport Time Capsule?

Only for the very brave......
Open up the Time Capsule (voids the warranty)
Pull the hard drive
Place the hard drive in a separate enclosure
Connect the enclosure directly to your Mac
Use Disk Utility to partition the hard drive
Reinstall the hard drive back in the Time Capsule
For the rest of us.....
The next best thing might be to set up one or more disk images on the Time Capsule, which will allow you reserve a given amount of space for each disk image.
Open up Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility
Click on the New Image tab
Navigate to the Time Capsule
Set up the disk image by naming it and specifying how much space you want to reserve

The bookmarks toolbar is there but has no item buttons on it. How do I get the items back for this toolbar? Also would like to know if the toolbars can be put on the same line to make more room on the page (drag & drop) ??

The bookmarks toolbar is there but has no item buttons on it. How do I get the items back for this toolbar?
Also would like to know if the toolbar can be put on the same line to make more room on the page (drag & drop) ?? Like the menu & bookmarks toolbar could/should fit on same line. This would add more page view...
Floyd Perry
Thanks

Check that you still have the "Bookmarks Toolbar items" placed on the Bookmarks Toolbar
* Make sure that you have the "Bookmarks Toolbar" visible: "View > Toolbars"
* Check in "View > Toolbars > Customize" that the "Bookmarks Toolbar items" is on the Bookmarks Toolbar
* If the "Bookmarks Toolbar items" is not on the Bookmarks Toolbar then drag it back from the Customize window onto the Bookmarks Toolbar
* If you do not see the "Bookmarks Toolbar items" then click the "Restore Default Set" button
You can only move the content from a toolbar onto other toolbars if all toolbars support that feature. You need to check that in the options of each toolbar.

How to make more room on Time Machine drive?

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for