"Start Disk" out of space Following Backup..

I have a 250 GB HD on my MacBook which is running Snow Leopard. I had 80 GB's free prior to this situation.
I use Time Machine and SuperDuper, saving both backups to separate external HD's.
I was trying to schedule a second SuperDuper backup on another external HD that I use for miscellaneous files. The job ran, but eventually gave an error message that there was not enough space on the external HD to complete the backup.
I exited SuperDuper and navigated to the external HD via FINDER. I highlighted the ??? .sparcebundle ???? file created by SuperDuper and selected Move To Trach. This file was approximately 150 GB's in size.
THAT'S WHEN THINGS WENT SOUTH
I suddenly began receiving pop up messages that my starter disk ( I believe that is what it said ) was full. I selected TRASH and attempted to empty it. After a reboot the machine would not come up...it would get past the grey Apple logo screen but then it would hang on a blue screen.
I was able to boot into single user mode and found that I only had 2 ( two ) GB's of available disk space. I deleted 50 GB's of "stuff" and deleted the Trash. I was then able to reboot. I ran a disk inventory program that shows where files are residing on the HD as well as their size.
I can't find this mysterious "chunk" of data that is taking up the remainder of my hard drive disk space.
I have tried doing a Time Machine restore but every time it begins it asks for my Admin password. Once I enter it, nothing happens.
I am also unable to do a restore from SuperDuper. When I select the original source to be used as the backup I can select the .sparcebunle from my external HD but when I go to select the destination ( my Macbook HD ) that selection is greyed out.
Can anyone shed light on what may have happened, how I can find this mysterious chunk of data and delete it, or how / if I can get Time Machine to do a successful full restore.
I'm a stickler for backing up my machine but the very first time I need to be able to do a restore I can't. Errrrgggggg.....
Thanks !
Chuck :- )

ChuckLD wrote:
Thank you x1000 V.K. I didn't know any of that and REALLY appreciate you explaining it. I still have a question if you have a moment...
I have the Snow Leopard Upgrade disk that I purchased a while back... the one that cost $29.99 or $39.99 ( can't recall ). Is this the disk you were referring to when you said to reboot, hold "C" etc?
yes.
About SuperDuper.... what settings should I use in the future... I'm not very familiar with the program and must have just selected the "sparsebundle" without really understanding the various options.
superduper has a very straightforward interface. when you start it there are two buttons to choose the source drive and the destination drive. so you choose the drives that you want. that's it. just don't choose to back up to a disk image.
Again.. THANKS !!!
Chuck :- )

Similar Messages

Time Machine Backup Disk "Out of Space"

When doing Time Machine Backups, my disk says that it is out of space and there's just no way this is possible. I have deleted all old backups, but it still says my disk only has ~14GB of space. What am I doing wrong? PLEASE HELP ME! Thank you.

Hi K.wood,
I had the same issue awhile ago and i couldn't explain it either. I ended up forgetting the time capsule storage drive and then re-adding it and it seemed to do the trick. Hope that helps, if not let me know.
-crazy

Time Capsule out of space for backups - how best to proceed?

I have a 500GB 802.11n (2nd Generation) Time Capsule which I use for Time Machine backups from my late-2008 Aluminium Unibody 250GB MacBook. My problem arose because I have used 229.33 GB of my hard disk on my MacBook, so I have less than 20 GB of free space on my MacBook. My iPhoto Library is 103 GB and yesterday I dragged it to an External Hard Drive (1TB). However, I have not deleted the iPhoto Library from my hard drive yet because I wanted to 'test' whether Time Machine would back up the new location of my iPhoto library to my Time Capsule .... the problem I have now is that Time Machine will not backup at all
I have tried several times to perform a Time Machine backup today, without success. I receive a message that 'Backup requires 246.75 GB but only 170.97 GB are available.
I've checked the TM backups on the Time Capsule and the earliest, latest and ONLY backup is one performed yesterday at 10.18am prior to my moving the iPhoto Library to the EHD. The EHD is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and is partitioned into four equal partitions of 250 GB (the fourth partition is slightly less. The 1st partition has a SuperDuper Bootable Clone of my hard drive (including the iPhoto Library on the Hard Disk). The 2nd partition is the new location for the iPhoto Library. The 3rd and 4th partitions are empty.
Can someone suggest whether I would be safe to somehow (how?) delete the existing TM backup on Time Capsule and simply start with a 'brand new' TM backup tonight? I'm thinking that if I have all 500GB available then TM SHOULD be able to perform a full backup and then I'll be OK with incremental backups for a while.
Also, is it possible/feasible (I know it wouldn't be the safest thing to do) to backup the iPhoto Library on the 2nd partition of my EHD to one of the blank partitions?
i would be grateful for any suggestions as to the best way to proceed
Cheers
Tricia

Cvdk,
This is why it may not be a good idea to store other files on the same disk/partition as the Time Machine backups. consider the following:
Here is Apples’ line on this: “Time Machine works best if you use your backup disk only for Time Machine backups. If you keep files on your backup disk, Time Machine won’t back up those files, and the space available for Time Machine backups will be reduced.” [http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/11430.html]
This hasn't stopped some from successfully partitioning Time Machine hard disks and storing data on the other partition. As long as the Time Machine backup has its' own partition, you avoid any potential opportunities for conflict.
However, this is not an option for Time Capsule users as there is no easy way of partitioning the Time Capsules’ internal hard disk without elaborate effort. Granted, the Time Capsule is advertised as being able to perform both as a Time Machine backup destination and as a shared network drive [Apple Store (U.S.) - Time Capsule - 500 GB]
Nevertheless, some have experienced problems with maintaining files/folders occupying the same disk as Time Machine backups. In this case, they use the Time Capsule hard disk solely for Time Machine backups. Then attach an external hard disk to the Time Capsules USB port and store additional files there. This added disk will still be available to all Macs that can access the Time Capsule. (Note though, that any USB disks attached to the USB port of the Time Capsule can not then be backed up to the Time Capsule via Time Machine. Time Machine will only backup your Macs internal hard disk or any external hard disks physically attached to the Mac. Time Machine can not backup one remote device to another remote device.)
Hope this clarifies things.
Cheers!

Deletion of archivelog disk out of space

hi,
can anyone help me how to delete the archive logs as my disk space is going out of space.
thankyou
satyanag

Hi,
I totally agree with Khurram. The removal of archive logs might seem like quite simple subject on the surface - but you must give very serious thought to your backup and recovery strategy.
In answer to your question, this command will list any archivelogs (amongst other things) which have been backed-up and are no longer required to be held on disk:
report obsolete;
Run it, review the output, and if you want to go-ahead and remove the items identified, run this:
delete obsolete;
In the future, you might want to alter your backup script so that it automatically removes archive logs. You probably have a line that looks something like this:
backup archivelog all
Adding 'delete input' to the end will remove archive logs after they have been backed up.
backup they all delete input
Cheers,
Andy Barry
http://www.shutdownabort.com

Time Machine Disk out of space

Every time Time machine does a backup I get a message saying that the disk is full and it will delete the oldest backup. In fact, the disk has tons of free space. When I do Get Info on the disk it says that 214 gigabytes are available. My internal hard drive which it is backing up only has 22 gigabytes on it.
As things stand now I can only store about 6 days of backups and things will certainly get worse.
I am running Mac OS X 10.7.2. I have VMWare Fusion installed and Windows 7 as a virtual machine under Fusion.

here it is:
Filesystem                          Size   Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2                       698Gi   46Gi 651Gi     7%    /
localhost:/x4-2qwsQFDj-Rw5mjpzuUI 698Gi 698Gi    0Bi   100%    /Volumes/MobileBackups
/dev/disk1s3                       371Gi 342Gi   28Gi    93%    /Volumes/Time Machine Disk
unknownb88d12299a84:~ sganarelle$
and here is the screenshot:

Time Machine Error: The backup disk ran out of space unexpectedly.

I keep getting the following message when I try to back up my MacBook using Time Machine: "The backup disk ran out of space unexpectedly. Time Machine will try to make more space available by removing expired backups during the next scheduled backup."
However, I have deleted everything from the external harddrive, which holds 500 GB. I have only used 38.9 GB of space on my computer. The errors being recorded are as follows:
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/Iomega_HDD/Backups.backupdb
Error parsing SystemMigration.log to determine source volume of system migration.
Backup content size: 36.5 GB excluded items size: 5.0 GB for volume Macintosh HD
No pre-backup thinning needed: 38.19 GB requested (including padding), 437.50 GB available
Waiting for index to be ready (101)
Stopping backup.
Error: (-34) SrcErr:NO Copying /Applications/.DS_Store to /Volumes/Iomega_HDD/Backups.backupdb/Jennifer Kwapisz’s MacBook/2011-08-06-113458.inProgress/9273E0A6-8BD8-4282-ACEC-E1E410605A89/Macin tosh HD/Applications
Copied 0 files (36 KB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Copy stage failed with error:28
Backup failed with error: 28
Any idea what's going on and what I need to do to fix it?

Please read this:
http://pondini.org/TM/C18.html
Ciao.

Time Machine:The backup disk ran out of space unexpectedly. .....

Hi,
I upgraded to Mountain Lion when it was released and yesterday I began getting this notice from Time Machine:
"The backup disk ran out of space unexpectedly. Time Machine will try to make more space available by removing expired backups during the next scheduled backup."
I have a one terra external hard drive with exclusively Time Machine. It says it has 3.4 gigabytes available, but isn't deleting old backups and making room for new, like before. I tried the "encrypting" solution, but it still keeps on giving me this message. Should I erase and format? If so, what option should I chose to format?
My Hard Drive has 240 gigabytes, so 1Tb should be more than enough.
Thank you!
Gloria

SuperDuper and Time Machine are two completely different backup utilities. If you want something like what SuperDuper does then don't use Time Machine. You have many other options that won't use up all the space on your backup drive:
Backup Software Recommendations
Carbon Copy Cloner
Data Backup
Deja Vu
SuperDuper!
Synk Pro
Tri-Backup
Others may be found at VersionTracker or MacUpdate.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.
Do the following to erase your drive:
Erase a Drive
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.

On a Mac mini OS X server 10.8.5 TimeMchine cannot copy 2.5 TB to a 6 TB Thunderbolt disk, runs out of space, Carbon Copy Cloner works perfectly

On a Mac mini OS X server 10.8.5 TimeMachine cannot copy 2.5 TB (from a Lacie 2big Thunderbolt data disk) to another 6 TB Thunderbolt disk, runs out of space, Carbon Copy Cloner works perfectly: claiming just 2.5 TB after the copy. Thunderbolt disk is
LaCie 2big Thunderbolt Series 6 TB

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
Launch the Console 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. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Enter the word "Starting" (without the quotes) in the String Matching text field. You should now see log messages with the words "Starting * backup," where * represents any of the words "automatic," "manual," or "standard." Note the timestamp of the last such message that corresponds to an abnormal backup. Now
CLEAR THE WORD "Starting" FROM THE TEXT FIELD
so that all messages are showning, and scroll back in the log to the time you noted. Select the messages timestamped from then until the end of the backup, or the end of the log if that's not clear. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste (command-V) into a reply to this message.
If all you see are messages that contain the word "Starting," you didn't clear the text field.
If there are runs of repeated messages, post only one example of each. Don't post many repetitions of the same message.
When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Some personal information, such as the names of your files, may be included — anonymize before posting.

Backup out of space

Last week my backup failed because it was out of space and I received a message that the next time I ran the backup it would delete some older folders so it would have room.
So I ran backup several time and continued to get that same message over and over.
Then I manually went into my backup and moved several months of backups from last year but still received the messaqge. Evidently just trashing the backups does not reclain the space.
I then reformated my disk and did a full back up of all my disks and now I am OK for several months
But this is not a good procedure.
Is the Apple message a bug?
Why doesn;t the disk reclera9im the space whenI trash o9lder backups?
What Should I have done?
Thanks
Danny

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
Launch the Console 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. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Enter the word "Starting" (without the quotes) in the String Matching text field. You should now see log messages with the words "Starting * backup," where * represents any of the words "automatic," "manual," or "standard." Note the timestamp of the last such message that corresponds to an abnormal backup. Now
CLEAR THE WORD "Starting" FROM THE TEXT FIELD
so that all messages are showning, and scroll back in the log to the time you noted. Select the messages timestamped from then until the end of the backup, or the end of the log if that's not clear. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste (command-V) into a reply to this message.
If all you see are messages that contain the word "Starting," you didn't clear the text field.
If there are runs of repeated messages, post only one example of each. Don't post many repetitions of the same message.
When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Some personal information, such as the names of your files, may be included — anonymize before posting.

Time Machine running out of space but doesn't delete old backups

First some context:
I am running Parallels Desktop on a 2011 iMac. The VM is on a partition that is excluded from Time Machine.
I have a second partition where I copy the VM every night using CCC. (This avoids TM backing up a large VM every hour).
TM says initial backup is 220 GB. I have a 1TB USB drive attached. So normally, this works fine.
This morning 100GB were copied to my Parallels Desktop partition. So TM should copy something in excess of 100GB during backup.
Currently, only 15GB are free on my backup volume. But TM doesn't try to delete old backups. It doesn't seem to recognize the size of the backup. Instead when it starts, it predicts about 1GB to backup. Then during backup the amount grows (note that no new data is changed during backup!) and it finally hits the wall at 15GB because the disk is full.
Any idea why TM doesn't figure out the real backup size?
Here's the log from TM Buddy:
10.12.12 13:25:13,472 com.apple.backupd[27667]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine-Backups/Backups.backupdb
10.12.12 13:38:34,588 KernelEventAgent[48]: tid 00000000 type 'hfs', mounted on '/Volumes/Time Machine-Backups', from '/dev/disk1s2', low disk
10.12.12 13:38:34,000 kernel[0]: HFS: Low Disk: Vol: Time Machine-Backups freeblks: 38389, warninglimit: 38400
10.12.12 13:38:45,000 kernel[0]: HFS: Vol: Time Machine-Backups Very Low Disk: freeblks: 25589, dangerlimit: 25600
10.12.12 13:38:45,066 KernelEventAgent[48]: tid 00000000 type 'hfs', mounted on '/Volumes/Time Machine-Backups', from '/dev/disk1s2', low disk, very low disk
10.12.12 13:38:45,088 mds[42]: (Warning) Volume: Indexing reset and suspended on backup volume "/Volumes/Time Machine-Backups" because it is low on disk space.
10.12.12 13:39:47,794 KernelEventAgent[48]: tid 00000000 type 'hfs', mounted on '/Volumes/Time Machine-Backups', from '/dev/disk1s2', low disk
10.12.12 13:39:53,885 com.apple.backupd[27667]: Error: (-34) SrcErr:NO Copying /Volumes/WBackup/Parallels/Smart iMac Windows 7.pvm/Smart iMac Windows 7-0.hdd/Smart iMac Windows 7-0.hdd.0.{a09d01ec-5596-4f65-b4cd-86aeff90082f}.hds to /Volumes/Time Machine-Backups/Backups.backupdb/Smart iMac/2012-12-10-072536.inProgress/3380F092-9336-408F-90EB-387FDE60A79D/WBackup/ Parallels/Smart iMac Windows 7.pvm/Smart iMac Windows 7-0.hdd

I would highly recommend the following resource to help you with this problem:
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
Hope this helps

Time Machine failure: Disk run out of space unexpectedly

Hi
I'm having serious problems in the last few days with Time Machine backups.
I have an iMac '27 (late 2009) running Mountain Lion 10.8.2. The internal disk is 1 TB, and I use an external FW HD LaCie d2 Quadra 1 TB for my TM backups. After 3 years the disk is always full, but old backups were regularly removed. All the possible source of large variable files were excluded long time ago (VM disks, temporary directories, large download files).
TM used to work quite smoothly, but now, since 10 days, the backup fails with the message
"The backup disk ran out of space unexpectedly. Time Machine will try to make more space available by removing expired backups during the next scheduled backup."
I've checked previous messages in the forum about such an error, but the various cases do not seem to match my specific problem (or I was not able to find the message with working answer).
It seems that the "unexpected" problem is related to the fact that Time Machine is trying to backup again a large part of my filesystem, and it determines this fact only after the backup starts (so there is no pre-cleaning): when it happens I can see that the target size of the backup increases over time, while more and more data are written on the disk, until the disk is full.
I'll try to summarize my situations with an itemized list:
The current backup fails because it runs out of space, leaving an .inprogress file behind
The latest backup did not fail: the log report a successful backup (checked with Time Machine Buddy)
Examining the content of the latest backup, the one that did not fails, shows that some system directories, /Applications, /usr, and /bin are missing
So, possibly, the "unexpected" error happens because the system is backing up a lot of stuff (like 60GB), and TM discover this only after it starts writing the files
I've verified with Disk Utility both the TM disk and the internal HD, and they both report no problem.
After some digging around, I was able to make TM work again removing the .inprogress file (using the Pondini instructions), removing (using the "Star Wars" interface) the latest backup, the one with the incomplete content, and removing a few older backups to create some more free space.
The first time I thought it was a transient problem, but it happened again after a few days.
So the real issue is, why the latest successful backup is actually incomplete, with a large number of directories missing, but there is no hint of this in the logs?
I've read that old LaCie HDs might have problems with Mountain Lion, and with its power saving settings. May this be the cause? I did already turn off the power saving setting (put HD to sleep when possible) before the latest failure, but nothing changed.
I've also tried to update the d2 Quadra firmware, as indicated by other messages and on LaCie website, but the update fails and the provided instructions are less than useful (I'll try to contact LaCie on this issue).
My doubt is that this does not seem a power save issue... the failed backups happen while I'm actually using the machine (so no wake up/disk spin issue seems to happen), and the backups starts with no problem: they just finish abruptly with no apparent reason but with a success message.
Does anyone have problems similar to mine (successful but incomplete TM snapshots)? Is the problem triggered by the HD firmware, or there are other possible causes?
I plan to repair the TM one more time, and then keep it turned off to run only manual backups, but I'm aware that there is no guarantee that also a controlled manually started backup is not going to fail in a similar way.
Thanks for any suggestion.
Maurizio

I am not running out of space, but I do have the same problem. Every so often TM does a backup which is about 60 GB bigger than expected.   The extra is always a new backup of /System /Applications /usr etc. - that is the 'system files'.
The key thing is, as you have noticed:
Examining the content of the latest backup, the one that did not fail, shows that some system directories, /Applications, /usr, and /bin are missing
As a consequence the next backup is, in my case, 60 GB bigger because it includes all the system files.
It is as if 'systemFilesExcluded' was turned on for the previous backup (the one that 'did not fail'). But I have looked in the .exclusions.plist for this backup and it is exactly the same as for other backups and does include:
        <key>systemFilesExcluded</key>
        <false/>
It seems that TM is treating this as if <true/>.
Like you, I have done a disk verify and it finds no errors.
I think this must be a bug. I have had this on four occassions since upgrading to Mountain Lion. And it is doing a large one right now - I have caught it in the act!

I just got a WD My Passport 1TB External Harddrive and i have already backed everything up to it but im still a little nervous about erasing things off the physical drive since it says my disk utility is out of space an implying i need to erase items.

I just got a WD My Passport 1TB External Harddrive and i have already backed everything up to it but im still a little nervous about erasing things off the physical drive on my macbook pro since it says my disk utility is out of space an implying i need to erase items.
I cant find the options to erase selected items it only shows that i can erase everything.
I mean technically i suppose i could erase everything an have a fresh start since its backed up to my external. But what exactly are the specific items being erased?
I have bought the newest OS X 10.8.2 an worried that it will get erased also an end up having to repurchase it.
Can anyone help me?
<Personal Information Edited by Host>

Black_Chevy07 wrote:
I just got a WD My Passport 1TB External Harddrive and i have already backed everything up to it but im still a little nervous about erasing things off the physical drive on my macbook pro since it says my disk utility is out of space an implying i need to erase items.
I cant find the options to erase selected items it only shows that i can erase everything.
I mean technically i suppose i could erase everything an have a fresh start since its backed up to my external. But what exactly are the specific items being erased?
I have bought the newest OS X 10.8.2 an worried that it will get erased also an end up having to repurchase it.
Can anyone help me?
If you are trying to delete some files get out of Disk Utility, it is not for that!
How did you backup and what are you trying to achieve?
Please post the exact error messages(s) you have received.

The backup volume ran out of space unexpectedly!?!?

I have been backing up all my data to a 100GB HD for 9 months with absolutely no problem, until today it popped up and say
"The backup volume ran out of space unexpectedly. Time Machine will try to make more space available by removing expired backups during the next scheduled backup."
I still have 2.6 GB space available and the backup went on as usual, except after "preparing", the xxMB out of xxMB change together. I rebooted my macbook and same thing happened again.
Is there anything I can do? I thought TM would delete my old back ups in order to make some space for my latest ones.
Many thanks!

Yes, usually it does. The "unexpected" part is not usual.
First, is there other data on the TM disk? If so, is it in the same partition?
Second, it sounds like TM may be trying to do a full backup (everything on your system). Have you had any of the following: Hardware repairs (if so, what?); done a full restore; gone more than a few days without a successful backup?
Third, how old is your oldest backup?
And there may be better messages in your logs. 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. If you see something there that seems suspicious, copy and post the messages here (be sure to get them all, as sometimes they overflow the small window).

My MacBook Pro is almost out of space on my startup disk?? The computer is only a month old!!

I have a new MacBook Pro, and I also got the iphone 5 for Christmas. I wanted to upload all the pics/videos off of the old iPhone onto my MacBook before restoring it and setting up the new iPhone. Once I started the import process, halfway through, I got a notice saying I was getting close to running out of space of my startup disk. This seems weird to me. I am new to Mac systems, and am trying to find where I can see how much memory I am using, how much I have available. Can someone help me?
I feel very computer illiterate!!!

Would you please post these two displays from your MBP:
This is found >About This Mac>More Info...>Storage. (the Apple icon  is in the left hand corner of your menu bar)
Click on the HDD icon in the upper left hand corner of your desktop, COMMAND I (the letter i). The icon will probably be labeled McIntosh HD.
Ciao.

I am out of space on my Macbook Air and have a Time Machine Backup. I want to complete reset my mac, but wonder if I can pick and choose what I restore to my computer? Can I also use my time machine backup and external storage as well?

I am out of space on my Macbook Air and have a Time Machine Backup. I want to complete reset my mac, but wonder if I can pick and choose what I restore to my computer? Can I also use my time machine backup as external storage as well for the files I don't need everyday?

If you are using "Restore from Time Machine Backup" option from OS X Recovery, you can only choose from the broad categories presented.
... Can I also use my time machine backup as external storage as well for the files I don't need everyday?
To be clear, if you are asking if you can use the volume containing your Time Machine backup to store additional, non-Time Machine files, the short answer is yes.
It's not a good idea though, since the Time Machine backup will eventually fill all available space, after which it begins to remove old, "expired" backups to make room for newer ones. The presence of additional files doesn't change that fact, and Time Machine will not erase them, but you will encounter a dilemma should you want to store additional files on that volume when there is no remaining space. You will have to make room for them on your own, by deleting existing files. Furthermore, since Time Machine cannot back up its own volume, those additional files will not be backed up by Time Machine.
The easy solution for what you describe is to purchase additional external storage. External USB hard disk drives have become very inexpensive; about $55 will buy a perfectly suitable 1 TB drive.
You can also choose to replace your MacBook Air's internal storage with a larger capacity one. Look for a suitable replacement from OWC / MacSales:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Air-Retina
That gets a little more expensive but it is the optimum solution.

"Start Disk" out of space Following Backup..

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