Time Machine doesn't manage the space on my external drive- no space left

I have a 500GB internal drive and have a 500Gb external firewire drive. I have around 200Gb of music and video files but had been happily letting TM get on with things. Today i started to get an error screen saying that the external drive was out of space and the backup had failed. Does TM not manage the backups and automatically delete the oldest to make space for the newest one?
I'm a little confused and the logic used in the help options seems to point to me either excluding items going forward (which seems counter productive) or buying a new external drive to fill up each month. Can someone please shed some light for me.

My understanding of how this works is that hourly & daily backups "expire" & are automatically removed after 24 hours & one month respectively, but weekly backups never expire -- they are kept, as the preference panel says, until your backup disk is full.
Thus, if your backup drive fills up, TM will try to create space by removing older, unexpired hourly or daily backups (& optionally warn you about this) to make room for new ones, but it will not remove older weekly backups to make room for new hourly or daily ones.
If you think about it, this makes sense: a weekly backup is most likely much larger (in terms of actual file space) & contains many more files than a daily or hourly one, so it would be undesirable to delete a lot of files to make room for relatively few others.
IOW, the drive will eventually fill up with weekly backups & at that point, it is full, period.
Related comments:
I believe there is no danger in using the Leopard Finder to 'delete a file' in the time-stamped folders it exposes. Because of the changes made in the file system to support TM, what happens is only the link in that folder is deleted. Links in any other folders remain unaffected. Only when you remove the last link to the actual file does the file system mark its space unused in the directory, effectively the same as a normal file delete.
This is why just deleting an instance of a TM backed up file won't gain you more than a few bytes of drive space -- only by deleting all instances is the file space of the actual file freed up.
For similar reasons, Disk Utility's 'erase free space' function should be safe to use on a Time Machine volume for security reasons. Just don't use any disk utilities on this or any other Leopard-formatted drive that aren't rated for use with Leopard -- they don't know about the changes in the file system & could really mess things up if (for instance) they try to rebuild the directory structure from scratch.

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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.

HT201250 Can I do a backup using Time Machine on a server, or it needs an external drive only?

Can I do a backup using Time Machine on a server, or it needs an external drive only?

Time Machine can back up to a server. The drive or partition used still needs to be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
(65169)

Time Machine doesn't see the WD Hard drive attached to the AEBS

I've been having issues of dropped connections with my WD HD connected to the AEBS vis USB. My backups have been failing and I sometimes get this error message:
The server may not exist or it is not operational at this time. Check the server name or IP address and your network connection and try again.
I wouldn't mind if I had to start over by trashing prefs but, in the Time Machine preference window I can't select the HD connected to AEBS as it doesn't show in the Change Disk window.

sperkins921 wrote:
I'm having an issue with my external HD not being recognized as a drive for Time Machine. Is it because it's NTFS formatted?
Yes. It must use either the GUID (preferred for Intel) or +Apple Partition Map+ (preferred for PPC Macs) *Partition Map Scheme,* and the +Mac OS Extended (Journaled)+ Format.
Is there anything I can do?
Yes. Make two (or more) partitions, which you should do anyway if you want to put anything on the drive besides TM backups. Use the first for TM, format the other(s) however you want. See item #5 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip* at the top of this forum.
Also, should I be able to create a back up file on the internal drive? Not even that drive appears in the list.
Not in the same partition as OSX. You could make a second partition there, but you'd get a warning from TM reminding you that it's not a good idea to have your originals and backups on the same drive.
Sorry for noob style questions- I never bothered with TM before, and having my other MBP stolen has led me to want to use it....
Yup, most of us learn things the hard way, don't we?
You might want to review these:
Time Machine Tutorial
Time Machine 101
How to back up and restore your files
Time Machine Features
Apple - Support - Mac OSX v10.5 Leopard Time Machine
and perhaps browse the rest of the FAQ Tip.

External Hard Drive for Time Machine - 2 TB. Can I remove other external drives it was backing up?

I have an external drive dedicated for Time Machine, it's 2 TB. Last year I started backing up computer (500 GB) and one external hard drive that has 500 GB. IAlso, I have another external drive that is 1 TB connected to my computer. I noticed last week that I was hearing that other external drive sounding funny, so I thought I would add it to Time Machine to back up. Now today my Time Machine failed. I tested the drive or verified the drive and all was well. My thought is because I added this drive to Time Machine it failed because of not enough room? Is there a way to remove that other external hard drive and go back to just the computer and the 500 GB?
I did btw out of a panic mode buy the GDrive that has Thunderbolt with 3 TB, yet I can't use Thunderbolt because that plug is used for my monitor, bummer. But, maybe using this new external drive I can back up the 500, the computer and the 1TB. Any thoughts?

aashton wrote:
Now today my Time Machine failed. I tested the drive or verified the drive and all was well. My thought is because I added this drive to Time Machine it failed because of not enough room? Is there a way to remove that other external hard drive and go back to just the computer and the 500 GB?
When you say the Time Machine failed, do you mean the drive containing the Time Machine backups failed, or what failed was trying to back up the new drive you added? If Time Machine was able to complete the first full backup of the new drive, then adding Time Machine didn't cause the problem, it was a coincidence. If Time Machine runs out of space it just starts deleting the oldest backup. I suppose it might fail on the first Time Machine run after the initial backup if it didn't have space to delete stuff. When you look at the Time Machine drive in the Finder, is it in fact full? If there's plenty of space left on it, it's not clear what the failure was about.
Also, testing and verifying with Disk Utility will spot some problems but not all.
aashton wrote:
I did btw out of a panic mode buy the GDrive that has Thunderbolt with 3 TB, yet I can't use Thunderbolt because that plug is used for my monitor, bummer. But, maybe using this new external drive I can back up the 500, the computer and the 1TB. Any thoughts?
Thunderbolt can be daisy-chained, so if it or other Thunderbolt devices have a pass-through port it might be possible to do all that. But it might be better to return the drive and get a USB 3 drive instead. It would be fast enough, cheaper, and more versatile. For a single hard drive (not a RAID or SSD), Thunderbolt is not really much faster than USB 3.

Can Time Machine back up data stored on a mounted external drive?

Can Time Machine back up the data that I have stored on an external drive? It's mounted on the desktop but I can't seem to add it to Time Machine.
Is it that Time Machine doesn't back up mounted External Hard Drives? If so, does anyone have a hack?

then the problem is not those external drives. As I said, I've never seen this particular error message.
Try using a different connection or a different port for your TM drive. If that doesn't help I'm afraid your options are very limited.
Unfortunately, TM is configured in such a way that when anything goes wrong, there is usually nothing a user can do short of reformatting the TM drive and starting backups anew. I'm very much afraid that's what you are looking at.
At least, I have no other advice to offer.

Can Time Machine be used to backup both internal and external drive?

I have a Mac Book Pro with Lion OSX installed. I have an external fire wire hard drive connected which contains my iTunes Library. I would like to use Time Machine to backup both the internal drive and the attached external drive. Can this be done?

Yes, make sure the drive is not excluded under the Privacy tab in Time Machine.
System Preferences > Time Machine

Time Machine doesn't see the WD Hard drive attached to the Extreme Base Sta

All of a sudden I can't get Time Machine to recognize the drive that's been attached to the Base Station.
It doesn't show up in Browse other time machine disks or, when I go to choose a back up disk.
What's going on?

Try connecting it directly to your Mac. If it still doesn't appear, see if Disk Utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder) can see it. If not, and it has a separate power supply, that may be the problem. Otherwise, you need to go disk shopping.
If the Mac does see it when directly-attached (don't try to do anything with it), then the problem must be in the AEBS, communications, security, or network. For that, you may do better in the Airport and Time Capsule forums, hiding in the +Digital Life Section+ at: http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=140

Hi, Question about secure empty trash. I moved some Time Machine backup files to the trash from an external hard drive. Now I can't secure empty trash. It starts, finds 74,003 files, and does nothing. The external hard drive shows it's empty, but it isn't

I moved some time machine backup files from an external USB hard drive to the trash. Tried secure empty trash. It counts 74,003 items, then just sits there. The external hard drive window shows it's empty, but the info pane says it only has 50G of memory left. I left the secure empty trash on over night. It did nothing. Ideas?
Thanks,
Ron

Relaunch the Finder, then from the Finder menu bar, select
Finder ▹ Preferences ▹ Advanced
and uncheck the box marked Empty Trash securely. Try again to empty the Trash.

Time Machine will not delete the oldest backup when external hard drive is full

I may not understand this timemachine thing, but....
I have macbook pro, 15", mid 2011, mountain lion......I have a WD Passport Studio I have ben using to back up with time machine periodically. I tried to back up today and it says i do not have enough room on my external drive. I tought the time machine automatically deletes the oldest back up?

I agree with Linc's response but you also have to realize that it will keep the oldest backup and start removing snapshots if it can.
It is my undestanding that time machine does what is called a full backup the first time and then the snapshots done after that are changes since the first backup. I'm not sure if time machine then does periodic backups or just snapshots.

Time Machine stopped updating files in subfolders on my external drive

I've been using Time Machine for about a year. I have two external drives connected. One is 2TB and is the "BACKUP" drive used for TM backups. The other, "VOLUME ONE" is 1TB and is used for client and media files. I went to look for a file in TM backups that had been on Volume One and it's not there. I then noticed that TM while had been performing backups, nothing was actually updating since August 3 (I'm not sure if that's the actually date but it was the most recent date on a quick check).
I then repaired permissions on the iMac Hard drive, repaired both external disks, trashed TM preferences, and shut down and then restarted. Seems everything is now backing up correctly except if you go into the subfolders on Volume One. For instance, "TestFile" is updated when it's VOLUME ONE/Folder1/Folder2/TestFile, but not if it gets placed one position down, VOLUME ONE/Folder1/Folder2/Folder3/TestFile. The only items I have excluded from backups are the BACKUP drive, /Applications and System Files and Applications. The files not being updated are not applications or preferences. Also, my BACKUP drive says it has 1.2 TB available.

My understanding of how this works is that hourly & daily backups "expire" & are automatically removed after 24 hours & one month respectively, but weekly backups never expire -- they are kept, as the preference panel says, until your backup disk is full.
Thus, if your backup drive fills up, TM will try to create space by removing older, unexpired hourly or daily backups (& optionally warn you about this) to make room for new ones, but it will not remove older weekly backups to make room for new hourly or daily ones.
If you think about it, this makes sense: a weekly backup is most likely much larger (in terms of actual file space) & contains many more files than a daily or hourly one, so it would be undesirable to delete a lot of files to make room for relatively few others.
IOW, the drive will eventually fill up with weekly backups & at that point, it is full, period.
Related comments:
I believe there is no danger in using the Leopard Finder to 'delete a file' in the time-stamped folders it exposes. Because of the changes made in the file system to support TM, what happens is only the link in that folder is deleted. Links in any other folders remain unaffected. Only when you remove the last link to the actual file does the file system mark its space unused in the directory, effectively the same as a normal file delete.
This is why just deleting an instance of a TM backed up file won't gain you more than a few bytes of drive space -- only by deleting all instances is the file space of the actual file freed up.
For similar reasons, Disk Utility's 'erase free space' function should be safe to use on a Time Machine volume for security reasons. Just don't use any disk utilities on this or any other Leopard-formatted drive that aren't rated for use with Leopard -- they don't know about the changes in the file system & could really mess things up if (for instance) they try to rebuild the directory structure from scratch.

Time machine is making two backup folders for my external drive

I have two external drives connected to my iMac, running 10.6.8. One is the Time Machine drive; the other is PhotosMovies. I've been having trouble for the last several months where about once a week my Time Machine backups won't finish, no matter how long I wait. I may have figured out that it gets hung when I have left a Sparsebundle open and the computer has gone asleep.
But to my question: while trying to troublesheet this problem I also noticed that for the past several months of my backups, within each backup set there are three folders: iMacHD, PhotosMovies, and PhotosMovies 1. I believe at some point that disk was named PhotosMovies 1 because I replaced an older drive with a newer one and I renamed it after I copied everything over and verified the contents.
If I exclude PhotosMovies from the backup in Time Machine preferences, that folder disappears from the backup set but the PhotosMovies 1 is still there. It is the correct size.
How do I get TM to understand that PhotosMovies 1 is no longer on the system?

Does the drive have its own external power supply brick or is it bus-powered? Firewire or USB?
Try resetting the buses per the five steps listed in this document: What to do if your computer won't recognize a FireWire or USB device

Time machine broke my Events an Projects on my external drive, help?

So, for reasons I'm not going to get into (or debate), I had to start using my scratch disk as a time machine backup today. When I set the computer to do the backup, it made it so that all of my events and projects on that disk no longer show up in FCPX. Anybody have any ideas?

Nothing you can do except either switch off Time Machine or move the Events and Projects to another disk.

Is there a way to use Time Machine to backup my Macbook Pro to an external drive connected to my iMac?

I recently purchased a Seagate Goflex Desk 2TB and I've already used Time Machine to backup my iMac running 10.5.8 to the drive. Is there a way to backup my Macbook Pro running 10.6.8 to the drive using Time Machine while the drive is still connected to my iMac? Any help is appreciated!

Choose Connect to Server from the Finder's Go menu, provide the first computer's IP address, log in, and set it up in the Time Machine pane of System Preferences.
(59008)

Time Machine under Lion appears to ignore Paragon NTFS external drives

Have Macbook pro with 2 external drives, one HFS+ formatted as my Time Machine drive, and another NTFS drive with the bulk of my user data (photos and audio files).
To improve NTFS read performance and enable writing, I have been using Paragon NTFS for about 2 months very successfully.
Time machine was also working to backup the NTFS drive under Snow Leopard, with no issues.
However, just moved to Lion, and one of the items I noticed is that the NTFS drive (with all my "valuable" data) is now being ignored by Time Machine. If I enter the time machine Preferences...Options... the NTFS volume is listed in the items excluded from backup. I can remove it from the list, and click save, yet if I return back to Options the drive has re-appeared in the excluded items list.
Is this a bug or intentional? This is a huge drawback, as I really didn't want to migrate everything off this huge drive just to re-format it because of this.

Had similar problem. Upgraded to Lion, couldnt read any NTFS drives! Turns out old NTFS drivers from Paragon dont work in Lion, so had to buy new one. That also didnt work. Eventually followed discussion thread on Paragon support, deleted (manually) the offending drivers (UFS/NTFS) from Library, uninstalled Paragon.
Could now see NTFS drives R/O.
Reinstalled Paragon driver, now cant see drives in Finder but can in Disk Utility. Did a 'repair' on drives in Disk Utility and hey presto! it's all back where it should be.
Now my time machine has stopped working, don't know if they're related.

Time Machine doesn't manage the space on my external drive- no space left

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