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

Similar Messages

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.

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 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 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 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 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?

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 doesn't delete previous back-ups. Why?

I'm using a 500gb external drive for backing up.
Every time TM tries to do a backup, it says it failed because there isn't enough disk space. Before, TM used to delete old backups to make space for the new one but now it doesn't seem to do it automatically.
I've checked everything I can think of and the preferences window does state that "the oldest back-ups are deleted when your disc becomes full".
It seems to be working if I reduce the size of my backups by excluding more.
Is there a built-in "preference" that Time Machine has to store at least two back-ups?
I'm happy to simply store one backup if I can adjust the setting to do so?
Any suggestions/advice please?

It will never delete the only backup if only one complete backup remains, no. If it needs to make a new full backup for any reason, it will only remove the exisiting backup once the new one is complete and in place, so for at least a short period, it would need double the normal backup space.
Without knowing the full history and details of backups on that drive, I would say you are pushing things quite a bit with so little available space. Depending on just how much changes in any one backup cycle, or if anything needs to be replaced because something gets corrupted, you could get warnings or outright errors. Basically anything that causes TM to need to make a larger than usual backup could cause you problems.
As Pondini mentions elsewhere in his FAQ, a good rule of thumb is to have a backup drive at least 2x-4x the size of the drive being backed up. External 1TB drives are pretty cheap these days - you could avoid a lot of headaches if you got and used a larger drive.
An alternative for that drive you have now is to use something like Carbon Copy Cloner (Bombich software) or SuperDuper (Shirt Pocket software) and make a full bootable system clone, then use the incremental option in those tools to keep it up to date. If you setup the incremental to basically always keep the clone to just a true single snapshot in time of what your boot drive has on it, then the clone will never take up more space than your boot drive. A cloned drive is itself a bootable complete copy of your entire current internal boot drive and system. The downside of such a clone is that it only includes copies of everything from the most recent incremental cloning operation, so you cannot go back in time to multiple previous versions of a file as you can in TM.
In an ideal world, you could get a bigger drive and start using it for TM, and also use your existing drive for a clone. Redundant backups are an asset (I keep 3 on hand at all times - a TM, and two clones).

Time Machine doesn't delete old backups

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