How to Stop Time Machine before Disk is Full

In the System Preferences, Time Machine will keep weekly backups "until your backup disk is full". I also use the backup disk for other storage purposes, so is there a way to stop Time Machine perhaps when the disk is 90% full or has 10 gigs left?
Does anyone know a command line trick or option to adjust this setting to backup "until your backup disk is nearly full"? I'd prefer a way to limit Time Machine from taking over the entire disk.

OK then - Create a file A on the disk that represents 10% of the disk space. When the disk fills you can then remove the file A and deal with disk full conditions as you wish.
You can create a file easily in terminal.app. Use the mkfile command.
Let's say you disk with Volume name "Big" is 300 GB in size.
In Terminal enter
cd /Volumes/Big
mkfile 30g TempFile
This will create a 30 GB file with a pathname of /Volumes/Big/TempFile
This is somewhat of a kludge but it's simple.

Similar Messages

How to stop Time Machine from backing up Temp Files?

Hi folks!
I am trying to find out how to stop Time Machine from constantly backing up 'useless' temporary files accumulated from web browsing? Although I don't change or add large files to my HD, Time Machine backs up hundreds of MBs every hour. Those file amounts make sense when I consider that I browse a lot to YouTube, SoundCloud, etc to watch videos or listen to music - I just don't want them to be backed up.
Under Time Machine Options I already excluded the following items from backups:
~/Library/Caches
/Library/Caches
~/Downloads
But even though I did this weeks ago, Time Machine stills finds large files to be backed up every hour and my only guess is that I am still missing a location where either Safari or Firefox - the two web browsers I use - store temporary files.
Can you help?
Thanks a lot in advance!

oas2103 wrote:
they come from my anti-virus software
Are you sure you need that? There are no viruses that run on OSX. None. Zip. Zero.
If you're running Windoze on your Mac, that's the same as running it on a PC, so it needs all the same anti-everything stuff you'd use on a PC.
There is some "malware," such as Trojans, for Macs, though. But (unlike viruses that can get onto your system without your knowledge), you must approve their installation (via your Admin password) and/or operation (via the "This application was downloaded from the internet ..." prompt).
Appropriately enough, some of these Trojans are included in pirated versions of Apple software, such as iWork!
For the gory details, see Thomas Reed's [Mac Virus Guide|http://www.reedcorner.net/thomas/guides/macvirus].
Thanks a lot again!
You're quite welcome, and thanks for posting back.

How to use Time Machine before and after installing a new hard drive

So basically I'm buying a new hard drive for my Macbook pro and I have a lot of files on my computer that I would like to save. I have never used Time Machine before so I need help on how to set it up before AND after installing the harddrive so my files get transferred onto the new hard drive. Thanks in advance

wjosten wrote:
Me, I would never use Time Machine to do this. What I'd suggest you do is get an exterior enclosure for your new drive. Then use either Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to clone your existing drive to your new drive. Once done, verify your clone is bootable & all of your data present. Then swap drives & use your old drive for Time Machine backups(after erasing it). Then get another drive & exterior enclosure to regularly clone your new drive to.
Unless he was swapping for a lower capacity HDD or to a lower capacity SSD, then the old drive would make a lousy Time Machine disk. However, whenever I swap out a disk I do exactly what you do. CCC to get the ol drive onto a new one. Test by starting up to the new (but still external drive). Then replace the internal drive.
I usually just sell the old drive on eBay. My Time Machine backup is always 2X the size of the internal drive, which I believe is a bit above recommendations, but works for me. The price of large external drives is almost the same as smaller internal ones.

How to stop Time Machine from trying to resize a sparse bundle

With 10.8, I'm backing up wirelessly from my MacBook Pro to a sparse bundle on a Drobo connected to a Mac mini on the same network. I used Drobo's Time Tamer to create the sparse bundle. The sparsebundle is a set size and cannot be resized (this is intentional to avoid filling the Drobo which is mostly used to store non-backed up non-critical data.
Every step of the backup process works, but Time Machine spends a good 20-30 minutes during each backup "resizing" the disk image. It doesn't actually suceed in resizing the disk image, but it displays "Looking for Backup Disk" in the Time Machine menu while Console reveals that it's resizing the disk image ("Resizing backup disk image from 17.59 TB to 17.59 TB"). It doesn't cause any errors, but it does turn the backup time from a few minutes
Does anyone know of a workaround to disable this resizing step or to make it fail quickly and proceed with the rest of the backup normally?
I wasn't using Time Machine before upgrading to 10.8 from 10.7, so I don't know if this is a new issue with Mountain Lion. I suspect that this would happen in earlier OS versions too.

I'm experiencing it on a Synology NAS. Time Machine always starts by "Resizing backup disk image from 1.07 TB to 1.07 TB." In the status bar, it just displays "looking for backup disk."
I don't have any solutions yet. Would definitely be interested to hear. I think it might have to do with the fact that I increased the user's disk quota (on the NAS) after doing the initial time machine backup. While Time Machine correctly identified the extra space as available, it somehow can't get over the fact that it changed once.
Things I have done:
Manually ran hdiutil resize -size 1000g *.sparseimage. This did change the reported disk size in the disk's Info.plist, but the next backup still did the resize step.

How to stop Time Machine from polling disks

I have shut off Time Machine in system preferences but it continuously asks if I want to use it with a disk that is attached.
The questions is simple - how can I stop this from happening?
I have already tried:
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup -bool YES
It still continues to harass me daily. Any suggestions appreciated!

I may have spoke to soon. I think I finally squashed the prompts with the terminal command I noted above.
Essentially what you are saying is let TM set up a preference file then shut it off - that would probably work. Thanks for the suggestion - if I get the prompt again from TM I will try your idea.

How to stop Time Machine backing up on a specific external hard drive?

I work on a iMac 2.66 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, with Mac OS X 10.6.8. I use two external hard drives that are the exact same model, 2 TB WD My Book 1110 Media: one is intended for back-up, the other for storing video editing files. They're both connected through USB 2.0.
I set the "back-up" hard drive as back-up disk for Time Machine, through the Time Machine preferences. Now, everytime I connect the "video" hard drive, Time Machine recognizes it as a back-up disk, and starts backing up on it. I could delete the "Backups.backupdb" file that Time Machine had created by connecting the "video" hard drive to another Mac and moving it to the Trash, but as soon as I reconnect the "video" hard drive to my iMac, Time Machine backs up on it again.
Is there a way to "de-select" a hard drive from Time Machine's list of back-up disks?
Note: I should mention another thing that might indicate a conflict. When both hard drives "back-up" and "video" are connected to my iMac, if I open Final Cut Pro X, I can only see my "back-up" hard drive. To access the files I am working on, I need to eject the "back-up" hard drive, and suddenly the "video" drive appears.
If you have any idea of how to solve this conflict... I am a bit lost.
Thank you!

Welcome to Apple Support Communities.
Give them unique volume names using Disk Utility.
Then set Time Machine back up to that unique volume name.
For example, I regularly use 4 external drives (though they're not all the same model).
The descriptions quickly tell me which drives I have connected to my MacBook when open Finder:
My Time Machine backup volume is named 'Time Machine 1TB'.
My iPhoto backup volume is named 'iPhoto Backup 320GB'
My iTunes backup volume is named 'iTunes Backup 120GB'
and the last is 'Windows 7 Backup 250Gb' but since it's a Windows volume, it is formatted NTFS.
This likely means that you will have to erase and repartition one of your drives to name it.
You MIGHT be able to rename it using Finder, right-clicking on the volume, and selecting Rename (current volume name).
WARNING: I can't be certain of what just renaming it that way could screw up in the way of permissions and file links.
Within Disk Utility, it seems it is absolutely not possible to change a volume name without clicking the Partition tab, and that involves erasing.
Given the choice, I'd probably choose to rename (erase and repartition) the Time Machine drive. A current backup or two on Time Machine, and I'm good. I don't really need to go 'way back' to recover files, because I really don't ever erase anything. I just keep buying bigger drives!
And I still burn the 'absolutely critical, priceless, can't ever be without this stuff' files to DVD or CD at least monthly or quarterly, in case one of my TM or backup drives fails at the same time as my primary hard drive. Call me paranoid, but I worked in Information Technology for many years: Murphy was an optimist!
Message was edited by: kostby

How to stop time machine from backing up encrypted lion partition

I am using 10.6.8 but I created a Lion partition on the same disk. I am trying out Lion and I do not want Time Machine to back it up. I was able to exclude the Lion volume until I encrypted the Lion partition using Filevault 2. Now when I'm using Snow Leopard, there doesn't seem to be a way of preventing Time Machine from backing up the Lion partition. Am I missing something?

The FAQ says Snow Leopard can't read the Filevault 2 disk which seems to imply I won't be able to keep Time Machine from backing up the Lion partition. That seems wrong. How can Snow Leopard's Time Machine see the disk to back it up, but can't see it to exclude from backup?

How to stop Time Machine from deleting historical backups

So for the first time I encountered what happens when Time Machine runs out of room - IT DELETES THE OLDEST BACKUPS UNTIL IT HAS ENOUGH ROOM!!!
That's terrible if you rely on those backups. We've been using it like an archive and it's been spectacular. Work on a project and delete it when I'm done because I know Time Machine has a copy.
Well, I no longer have copies of my work from Arpil until July because Time Machine deleted those AUTOMATICALLY to make room. I had always thought that it would warn me it was going to delete older backups and I could just decline. Then I'd go out and get a new drive. This make Time Machine unusable for my purposes.
Is there a was to make Time Machine just stop backing up or warn you before it erases old backups? Some way where it cannot erase them on it's own? Perhaps some Terminal command or anything?
Thanks!

Landon White wrote:
So for the first time I encountered what happens when Time Machine runs out of room - IT DELETES THE OLDEST BACKUPS UNTIL IT HAS ENOUGH ROOM!!!
That's terrible if you rely on those backups. We've been using it like an archive and it's been spectacular. Work on a project and delete it when I'm done because I know Time Machine has a copy.
Well, I no longer have copies of my work from Arpil until July because Time Machine deleted those AUTOMATICALLY to make room. I had always thought that it would warn me it was going to delete older backups and I could just decline.
in system preferences->Time machine->options there is a check box "warn when old backups are deleted". if this box is checked TM is supposed to warn you when it first starts deleting old backups. However, that particular feature is quite buggy and TM is well known not to do that on occasion. there are also other situations when it might decide to delete old backups without warning. Therefore you should NOT use TM as an archiving utility. apart from the above issues it also thins old backups and THAT is always done without warning. TM is a backup tool not an archiving one and you shouldn't use it as such.
Message was edited by: V.K.

How to stop time machine from filling up trash

I've been using time machine to backup my mac and I've noticed that whenever it deletes old backups to make room for the new ones it leaves my trash bin with about 30,000 files. This takes up a lot a space and is very time consuming to empty. Does anybody know how to prevent it from sending the old files to the trash or have any suggestions period? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Fox 8991 wrote:
I've been using time machine to backup my mac and I've noticed that whenever it deletes old backups to make room for the new ones it leaves my trash bin with about 30,000 files. This takes up a lot a space and is very time consuming to empty. Does anybody know how to prevent it from sending the old files to the trash or have any suggestions period? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
That's not how it should work, and something I've never seen on this forum. We do see this when people delete backups manually, via the Finder (which can cause all sorts of troubles).
How large is your internal HD, and how much data is on it?
Where does TM put your backups (external drive, Time Capsule)?
Click here to download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window.
Navigate to a backup where this happened, copy and post the messages here, please.

How to stop Time Machine from constantly asking do I want to use it.

Every time I use my SuperDuper app to backup to my external drives I get the pesky "do you want to use Time Machine to backup to that drive?" I say "Don't Use," but it never "remembers" and asks everytime I do a backup. Is there any way to convince it I really don't want to use it!

When you decline a prompt from Time Machine to use a volume as a backup destination, an invisible, empty marker file named ".com.apple.timemachine.donotpresent" is written to the top level of the volume. If that file is deleted (for example, because the volume has been erased or cleaned up somehow) or if it can't be written at all (for example, because the volume is in Windows NTFS format), then you'll be prompted again the next time the volume is mounted.
If you can't determine why the marker file is being deleted or you can't do anything about it, you have the option of disabling all automatic prompts to adopt a backup volume.
Back up all data before proceeding.
These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
Please triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup -bool YES
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.
Launch the built-in Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
Paste into the Terminal window by pressing the key combination command-V. I've tested these instructions only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, you may have to press the return key after pasting. You'll be prompted for your login password. Nothing will be displayed when you type it. Type carefully and then press return. If you don’t have a login password, you’ll need to set one before you can run the command. You may get a one-time warning to be careful. Confirm. You don't need to post the warning.
If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator. Log in as one and start over.
Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign ($) to appear below what you entered. You can then quit Terminal. The change will take effect the next time you restart the computer.
To revert the change, enter the following command in the same way:
sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup

How to stop Time Machine from creating entirely new backup of external drive?

I've included an external drive to be backed up into Time Machine. For a few days, the drive was disconnected, however, so only Macintosh HD was getting backed up. I recently re-added the external drive. However, now it appears that since the external wasn't included in the most recent backups, it's decided to re-backup the entire drive.
Is there any way to prevent it from backing up the entire external drive and instead just backup the changes made, or is that not possible because there is a gap in the backups made for the external?

First, the amount that TM says it's going to back up is not necessarily the amount it will back up. You'll only know that when the backup finishes.
I haven't tried this myself, but it may be that after you exclude a volume, TM loses continuity with the previous snapshot. In that case, future backups should be incremental, as long as you don't exclude the volume again.

How do I stop Time Machine from backing up Aperture thumbnails?

Hi,
My 2TB backup drive recently became full, and I became curious as to what was filling it up. I wrote a perl script to analyze the Time Machine backups, and I noticed that over 50% of my backup was filled with AP.Thumbnails and AP.Minis from the Aperture project directory. In particular, the AP.Thumbnails files in the backup consumed 737 GB of disk space!
The problem with the thumbnails files is that they are a single file that contains all of the thumbnails for all of the 40,000 photos I have in Aperture and it is now 20gb in size. Every time I add a new file to Aperture, the thumbnail file changes, and I get a new 20gb of data added to my backup. I add photos often which means that most of my backups have 20gb of Aperture files (which are easy to rebuild and don't need to be backed up).
I decided to try and stop Time Machine from backing up these files, and there seems to be no way of doing so (without telling Time Machine to skip backing up my entire Aperture project which I don't want to do). In Finder, you can do a "show package contents", but the Time Machine GUI doesn't allow this.
I tried to tell Time Machine to exclude the files via the GUI, but Time Machine sees the Aperture Library as a single package and won't let me exclude individual files from within the package.
I googled around, and found the attribute that Time Machine puts on files to exclude them from the backup. I used xattr to set the attributes:
xattr -w com.apple.metadata:comapple_backupexcludeItem com.apple.backupd <filename>
I also used this command on the iPhoto thumbnail files.
I used spotlight to find all of the files with this attribute using this command:
sudo mdfind "comapple_backupexcludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"
This command returned the iPhoto files, but did not return the Aperture files.
However, if I run "xattr" on the Aperture files, the attribute does exist!
During my next time machine backup, the iPhoto files were skipped as I wanted them to be, but the Aperture thumbnails were backed up again
I thought that maybe time machine was looking at the aperture package as an atomic unit, but iPhoto is stored as a package as well, and the attributes worked there on files inside the package.
Does anyone have any idea why time machine is still backing up these files? Is there any way I can get around this?
It seems to me to be an incredible oversight on Apple's part since both tools are Apple. The thumbnails files are very expensive to backup, and they are not necessary for backup since the are easy to rebuild from the original photos which are also backed up.
Thanks,
Ron

Shadow99999 wrote:
Hi,
My 2TB backup drive recently became full, and I became curious as to what was filling it up. I wrote a perl script to analyze the Time Machine backups,
No need to write your own script for that. there are a couple of already made nice GUI tools for this - TimeTracker http://www.charlessoft.com/ and BackupLoupe http://soma-zone.com/BackupLoupe/
and I noticed that over 50% of my backup was filled with AP.Thumbnails and AP.Minis from the Aperture project directory. In particular, the AP.Thumbnails files in the backup consumed 737 GB of disk space!
The problem with the thumbnails files is that they are a single file that contains all of the thumbnails for all of the 40,000 photos I have in Aperture and it is now 20gb in size. Every time I add a new file to Aperture, the thumbnail file changes, and I get a new 20gb of data added to my backup. I add photos often which means that most of my backups have 20gb of Aperture files (which are easy to rebuild and don't need to be backed up).
I decided to try and stop Time Machine from backing up these files, and there seems to be no way of doing so (without telling Time Machine to skip backing up my entire Aperture project which I don't want to do). In Finder, you can do a "show package contents", but the Time Machine GUI doesn't allow this.
I tried to tell Time Machine to exclude the files via the GUI, but Time Machine sees the Aperture Library as a single package and won't let me exclude individual files from within the package.
I don't have aperture but I think most people exclude the whole thing from TM backups and back it up separately. but if you want to exclude a subfolder in a package that's easy too. just select the package in finder, control-click on it and select "show package contents". in the resulting finder window drill to the folder you want to exclude and drag it to the TM exclusion list in TM system preferences->options.
I googled around, and found the attribute that Time Machine puts on files to exclude them from the backup. I used xattr to set the attributes:
xattr -w com.apple.metadata:comapple_backupexcludeItem com.apple.backupd <filename>
I was not aware of this method for excluding stuff from TM backups. could you provide a link to where you found this?
I also used this command on the iPhoto thumbnail files.
I used spotlight to find all of the files with this attribute using this command:
sudo mdfind "comapple_backupexcludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"
This command returned the iPhoto files, but did not return the Aperture files.
that's because Spotlight never looks inside packages unless you start a search inside a package directly. iphoto seems to be the only exception. I don't know how it's done.

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 do I get back iphone app information from a DELETED Time Machine Backup disk

Hi People,
here is what happened:
I have been using an iPhone App (Audio Memos Free - The Voice Recorder) to record song ideas (I am a songwriter). I have been using it for years.
I backed up my iphone to itunes, and backed up my mac on Time Machine. After a month or so I did a fresh OSX install on my mac, copied all of my files back from Time Machine into my mac, and tried to set up Time Machine. I was not able to do so, so I had to format the Time Machine Backup disk and doing a "fresh" mac Time Machine Backup.
After a week or so, my iphone asks me something like "you do not possess the rights for one or more applications". do not know what i did, but after 1 minute my iPhone was wiped out of all my apps and app contents. I had also the icloud app sync, so i did not worry, recovered from icloud notes, contacts, and all other things. so i did another backup to itunes.
Now i discover icloud did not recover or save the "Audio Memos Free" app content. I know the data are hidden into the Time machine Backup HD, but i do not know where to search for the itunes backup in it.
I know it is in library, but library won't show up.
Any help would be much appreciated.
PS there is a chance that, even without a data recovery, my latest itunes backup was containing these songs, but i do not know how to fish that out of the Time machine drive.
Thank you in advance.

I would email iTunes Customer Service:
http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/store/browser/
CG

I had to change my Hard Drive, now I want to work on files in iWeb, but can't access Time Machine before yesterday. The dates are there on the right hand side but are greyed out before yesterday when I changed my HD. How do I access anything from before.

I had to change my Hard Drive, now I want to work on files in iWeb, but can't access Time Machine before yesterday. The dates are there on the right hand side but are greyed out before yesterday when I changed my HD. How do I access anything from before?

Start with B5/6 in the 1st linked article.
Time Machine Troubleshooting
Time Machine Troubleshooting Problems

How to Stop Time Machine before Disk is Full

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