Time machine doesn't delete old backups when disk is full

TM disk is 750GB. It tells me there is not enough room for backup…then I look into TM and find there ARE NO BACKUPS anymore. (There were a few days ago.) All backups are gone, except for one two days ago, which was when I began getting the "no room" error.
I assume I've lost everything, as the TM disk shows only the backup from 2 days ago. True?
Do I just format and start again?
Is there a fix for this "no room" message? (It says oldest backups are deleted when disk becomes full. But it doesn't do it.)
Do people rely on this?

How much data is TM backing-up? (What's shown for +Estimated size of full backup+ under the exclusions box in TM Preferences > Options?)
Note that your Time Machine disk should, in most cases, be at least twice the size of the data it's backing-up. See #1 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
It appears that Time Machine needed to do a large backup, perhaps a full one, for some reason, and deleted as many old backups as it could (but it won't ever delete the last remaining one, as that would leave you with no backup at all), trying to make room.
If in doubt, 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 the backup in question, then copy and post all the messages for that run here, along with the amount of data that TM is backing-up.

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Backing up to a thumb drive - time machine doesn't delete older backups when it's full. I will have to erase and re-do the drive. Why?

Backing up to a thumb drive - time machine doesn't delete older backups when it's full. I will have to erase and re-do the drive. Why?

You are both right.
Time Machine can backup FROM:
It cannot back up a USB thumb drive.
Time Machine can backup TO:
•A USB thumb drive (but most aren't large enough, and are very, very slow)

Time Machine doesn't delete old backups

Hi,
I keep getting errors from the TM backup that the disk for backup is full. It appears that TM doesn't delete the old backups that are on the disk. Any idea why it is not deleting the backups to make space? I also checked the button to notify me when deleting....useless....I am using Lion/Mountain Lion
Thanks

When you have issues of this sort.. Pondini is your man..
See http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
There is no need for admin / Root / SU login to TM.. that will not achieve anything.
You can delete the current set of TM preferences and start over.. See A4.
You have to delete the whole existing backup to start over. Or archive it off as I said if you want historical record, and erase the disk.
You erase the TC by using Airport Utility, under disk is erase option.. that is the fastest way. A quick erase via AU takes about 1min. Do use any other erase option, as they will take several hours.
You can also delete a sparsebundle.. but it is a long and time consuming process. That is important though if you have multiple backups on the TC you do not wish to lose.
See Q12 here http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
There are many many posts about how to speed up deletion of large backups.
eg https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2224110?tstart=0

Time machine will not delete old backup when space is needed

Time machine says there is not enough space to complete backup yet will not delete old backups

Start with C4.
Time Machine Troubleshooting

Time machine will not delete old backups

time macine will not delete old backups....is there a manual way to do it

Just let it run. It will manage itself fine, you may benefit though from reading Pondini's Time Machine FAQs

Time Machine does not automatically delete old backups when drive is full

I back up to a 1TB external drive with TM. It will not delete old back-ups and instead tells me that the drive is full. I thought TM was supposed to manage all of this on its own.

It will, if it can. But it will never delete your last remaining backup.
See #C4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting, probably the pink box there.
Basically, if Time Machine has to do a full or very large backup, and your Time Machine drive isn't well over twice the size of the data it's backing up, there won't be room for the last backup, plus the new one, plus some workspace.

Time Machine doesn't recognize old backup after logic board replacement

I recently had my logic board on my MacBook Pro replaced and when I tried to backup, Time Machine did not recognize the old backup on the drive and tries to create a new one. The drive is mounted fine.
Is there a way to continue using my old backup, or do I need to delete it and create a new one?

lissy-loo wrote:
Hi there I've just had this problem on my computer too but is there a possibly easier way to explain what is on this site...
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080128003716101
I read through but got lost about half way down when it says:
"The last bit of information needed is the old MAC address. Open Terminal and change directory to the root of the Time Machine backup database, then get the old MAC address:...."
I was in terminal but couldn't work it out. Is this not a good idea to stumble around in if i have no idea what I'm doing? Seems difficult but I really wanna work it out because my Time Machine hard drive is full so I can't just get to back up everything from scratch and don't wanna delete what is already on there. Any help would be much appreciated!!
Hi, and welcome to the forums.
If you're not comfortable with the procedure, I'd advise against it. Mucking about with Terminal can cause all manner of problems.
But you can find your Mac's Ethernet Address via the *System Profiler* app. Click the Apple logo in your menubar, then +About This Mac,+ then +More Info+ to start it.
Select Network in the sidebar, then Ethernet in the upper panel. Near the bottom of the lower panel, under Ethernet, you should see *Mac Address.* It's 6 hex numbers (12 characters), separated by colons. Omit the colons when you type it into Terminal.
As noted in the Troubleshooting Tip, it's easy to do this wrong, get no error message, and have it not work (been there, done that!).
If it doesn't work, your only choices are to erase the drive and start over, or get a larger one and transfer your backups to it (see item #18 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip* at the top of this forum).
How big is your TM drive, vs. how much it's backing up? TM usually needs 2-3 times the space of what it's backing-up (see item #1 of the FAQ Tip).
Are you so concerned about not losing your backups because you've been deleting things from your internal HD, relying on TM to keep it's copies? If so, post back -- that's a terrible idea.

Time Machine won't delete old backups.

I keep getting an error that the backup failed due to not having enough space yet it says in prefs that old backups will be deleted when the drive is full. Does anyone have a fix for this?

I had a similar problem when I upgraded to 10.8. The TM searched and searchand had it brains semi-scrambled. I got tired of waiting for it to do its thing so I went to the Disk Utility and erased the TM drive. Then had it start over with a fresh backup. It has been working perfect.
It may be time to flush yours and start over.

Time Machine Doesn't Recognize Old Backups

1) Had a mid-2010 27" iMac with Snow Leopard on it.
2) Upgraded Snow Leopard to Lion. Lion recognized time machine disk like it should and backed up like it should. I was able to retain my backups I've had since 2008.
3) This iMac had a hardware issue that prompted the purchase of a new iMac. Plugged time machine into this new iMac today and recovered system like I expected it to.
4) Problem: I can't access my old backup sets. Time machine wants to start from scratch.
Is there a work-around? Do I WANT a work around. In other words, if I can fix this so that Time machine "picks up" where I left off, will it cause problems later?

I'll refer you to Pondini's site. See section B 5 & 6.
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html

Time Machine Still Not Deleting Old Backups and Hence Running Out of Space

... and this with a 1TB external drive there just for this purpose.
You'd have thought they'd have fixed this by now as it's an old issue.

Hi Richard, thanks for the messages. How much disk space is used up on your MacintoshHD? I ask because if you for example have around 850GB of MacintoshHD used, TM would only be able to keep one full backup on the 1TB external drive. All of the other backups will be smaller, incremental backups. When TM needs more space, it can only delete the oldest incremental backups, as the full backup is needed in case of a complete restore. If, at some time in the past, another couple of hundred GB were needing to be incrementally backed up, then the 1TB external drive will not have the space, and your messages seem to bear out this scenario. Since the first occurrence of the failure, the amount of data requiring backup would be increasing by a small amount each week.
Even if the very first full backup on the TM drive was of a small MacintoshHD (say, from just after installation), you might have hundreds of GB of music or pics or movies etc. These files would have been part of a later incremental backup, but, if they never change again, they're never backed up again. This also means that, there being only one copy of these files on the TM drive, they will never be deleted to make space for more backups. This could be an explanation of why, in your log messages, you see so little data actually deleted when it tries to make space; you may not have many files that change often.
By way of comparison, my full backup is only 27GB As all my data, music, etc are stored on a network drive, and my incremental backups are of the order of hundreds of KB rather than hundreds of GB. Because my network drives are fault tolerant, I only need to use TM to backup my MacintoshHD and the TM drive is therefore set at only 256GB.
It seems the only two solutions would be:
1. Move movies, music etc. to another drive or, more sensibly,
2. Get at least a 2 TB external drive for TM to use. I seem to remember that there is advice out there to have a TM drive of at least double the size of your total data size that needs to be backed up. Mine is overkill at a ratio of ten times the size, but you get the idea.
if, on the other hand, you only have 50GB of disk space used up on MacintoshHD, then there must be more than one full backup of it on the TM drive. In this case, if you are prepared to, you can start the TM drive from scratch by deleting its files or reformatting it. This would make TM take a full backup of the MacintoshHD as it currently stands and then the 1 TB drive will have plenty of room for incremental backups again. The down side is that you would lose any past versions of changed files; this point in time is the furthest back you can go to from then on.
I hope this helps and I'd love to know the outcome.

I am trying to update my time machine backup on time capsule, but time machine keeps trying to create an entirely new backup (evidenced by the 200GB backup size). How can I get time machine to modify my old backup rather than create a new one?

I am trying to update my time machine backup on time capsule, but time machine keeps trying to create an entirely new backup (evidenced by the 200GB backup size). How can I get time machine to modify my old backup rather than create a new one?

It must have found the old backup corrupt.. so you will more than likely have little choice. You can archive off the old backup if it is still useful.
You can also verify it. See A5 http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
He also has some info on this problem. eg C13.

Time Machine Backup Error. Time machine could not delete the backup disk image .sparsebundle

Time Machine is giving an error message. Time Machine couldnt complete the backup. I am using the Seagate GoFlex Home. Error message states Time Machine could not delete the backup disk image "/volumes/Go Flex Home Backup/iMAc.sparsebundle". Does anybody have any ideas?

I have deleted all files in the Time Machine backup via Windows, Finder, and GoFlex UI.
I think this is your problem.. you need to follow the exact setup from seagate to get TM running again.. please read the manual... I do not have one but I do have another brand of NAS and setting up TM involves a fairly complex set of instructions.. because it is not a native Apple device.. your computer does not recognise it as TM capable.. you need to use the work around the manual will explain.

"Time Machine could not delete the backup disk"

This morning, I got the "Time Machine must create a new backup for you" message referred to here: http://pondini.org/TM/C13.html
I went ahead and told it "start new backup" but after a few minutes, got this message, ending in error message -1: "Time Machine could not delete the backup disk." It did not reference a sparsebundle file or some other specific file name as I've seen in some other threads, and I haven't been able to find this exact issue anywhere in the forum or on Pondini's page.
I went ahead and told it manually to do a new backup, but I am concerned that it will "lie to me" about the verifiability of the files per Pondini's page above (orange box at the bottom). I'll attempt to force it to manually verify once this backup completes to see what happens, I guess.
I'd appreciate any input.

And now an effort to manually start a backup produces this error: "This backup is too large for the backup disk. The backup requires 233.73 GB but only 188.30 GB are available."

Time Machine doesn't recognize past backups anymore

My Macbook pro just came back from being repaired (issue with the video display).
I think they had to replace the logic board or graphics card or both - but I'm not sure.
Everything works fine now... except for Time Machine.
Before the Macbook Pro was shipped off I would backup regularly to an external hard drive.
While my Macbook was gone I had to use some of the backup files from within the Backups.backupdb file system. So on my Powerbook G4 with Tiger I had to go in manually and copy files over. No big deal... or so I thought.
Now Time Machine does not recognize the past backups from before I shipped the MacbookPro.
It just wants to start an entirely new backup again.
Is there a way I can get Time Machine to recognize my old backup again?
I'd hate to have to go in manually from now on. It's not exactly convenient.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

OK, I didn't explain that well...
So here is what I'm typing in and what I'm getting back (the name of my computer being "Jason Argo's Computer":
Last login: Thu Jul 17 22:22:16 on ttys000
Macintosh:~ Jason$ cd /Volumes/Chubs/Backups.backupdb
Macintosh:Backups.backupdb Jason$ xattr -p com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress Jason Taylor's Computer
I don't know why but I'm getting nothing back now. Before I was getting errors saying no such directory exists. I've typed in ls as well and get nothing.
Any ideas?

HT3275 Time Machine doesn't see the back-up disk

Time Machine doesn't see the back-up disk after I've logged off and then back on, even though the disk is available to the iMac 24/7. Turning the disk off and then on in the current session works, but this seems to defeat the purpose of an unattended back-up disk. I can't find a setting that ensures the back-up disk is recognized after log-in or restart. Is there a solution?

Is this Mountain Lion??
It seems to have made some changes that make the disk drop out.. it does this even if you are continually connected to the TC and we don't have a solution yet.
For your login issue, is the TC using a disk password.. or are you setting it to default? Could you try just turning on the guest account in the TC to read and write access and see if this helps. Tell us how it goes.
There is another fix.. but it involves using disconnect all users from v5 airport utility.. Apple removed the function in v6.
If you are on Lion or Mountain Lion even you can install the v5 utility.
How to load 5.6 into ML.
1. Download 5.6 for Lion.
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1482
Click to open the dmg but do not attempt to install the pkg.. it won't work anyway.
2. Download and install unpkg.
http://www.timdoug.com/unpkg/
Run unpkg on the desktop.. it is very simple.. drag the AirPortUtility56.pkg file over to unpkg.. and it will create a new directory of the same name on the desktop.. drill down.. applications utilities .. there lo and behold is Airport utility 5.6 .. drag it to your main utilities directory or just run it from current location.
You cannot uninstall 6.1 so don't try.. and you cannot or should not run them both at the same time.. so just ignore the toyland version.. the plastic hammer.. and start using 5.6.. a real tool.

Time machine doesn't delete old backups when disk is full

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