Time Machine is full.

I use a 3-year-old external hard drive to back up my laptop using Time Machine. An error message says Time Machine is full. Can I use iCloud, which I am registered (?) for but don't think I ever use, or should I do something to my external hard drive. Needless to say, I'M CONFUSED. Thanks for your help

Here is the source authority on Time Machine (one of our Users: Pondini):
http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html

Similar Messages

External hard drive used for Time machine is full and having a hard time backing up. what should I do?

External hard drive used for Time Machine is full and having a hrad time backing up. What is my best option moving forward? NAS?

For All things Time Machine see Pondini's Excellent Infirmation here...
http://pondini.org/OSX/Home.html
Start with FAQs and Troubleshooting.

My external hard drive for backup and Time Machine is full. I bought a new HD. Can I just begin using it, or must I transfer old BkUp and TM to the new HD?

My external hard drive for Back Up and Time Machine is full. I bought a new HD. Can I just begin using it and rely on the old HD for past Time Machine versions, or must I transfer the old Back Up and Time Machine files to the new HD?

It is your choice.
If you don't want to be able to far back into the time slots covered by the old disk then just start using the new disk.
If you want to retain the ability to go back into those time slots then copy it.
Allan

If my time machine is full and it deletes backups to free up space does it mean i will eventually loose data

I have been backing up my hard drive with a external hard drive as atime machine
the last time i backed up time machine said that it had deleted the oldest backup to make more space for newer ones .
I looked back through the various back ups i have made and found that all my vidoes that i had taken off my computor and put on my external hard drive were only on the earlest backups
my question is if the earliest backups are deleted to make space will i eventually loose all my videos - if so is there a way to avoid data being lost

troyboy65 wrote:
My time machine is full as it is backing up my imac and macbook. I am getting the orange flashing light.
I have looked at the settings and it does not seem to give many options on length of backups etc.
Im not sure what to do.
You may not need to do anything; Time Machine ordinarily deletes your oldest backups automatically when it needs room for new ones. The orange light is completely separate and independent from that.
Are both Macs getting backed-up regularly? Check via Time Machine Preferences > Options.
How much data is on each of your Macs, and how large is your TC?
I do have an old 500gb hard drive. Can i re format this and piggy back it to the time capsule to give me 1.5 tb?
No. Time Machine backups can't "span" multiple drives.
But if there really isn't enough space, you could connect that drive to your Time Capsule's USB port and back up one of the Macs to it, instead.

Time Machine Disk Full

I have Time Machine set to automatically delete the oldest backups when the disk is full. Now the current backup has failed telling me the disk is full and that I have the reduce the backup size or select a new disk.
What gives? Why aren't the old backups making room for the new one?

Pondini's excellent Time Machine - Troubleshooting may provide some help.
See # C4
http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html

Time Machine/disk full problem

Time Machine, which has worked perfectly since i bought my Mac back in 07, has stopped backing up. The disk that I have been using for backups has become full. For a short period it was removing old backups in order to do a new backup but has now stopped doing that and my last one was January 11. What is the best course of action? Manually deleting old backups?
Edit: It looks like it is trying to delete old backups, but deletes one which isn't enough.

Thanks, I followed the advice to uninstall the incomplete backup file and that seemed to be working nicely. However, while I was watching the backup progress - Backing up X of Y - as X got close to Y, Y started getting bigger. So as a result it is running out of disc space. I verified by hard disk and it passed without a problem. I suppose I could just go ahead and delete some to make more space so that when the backup starts getting bigger than expected it still has enough space.

Time Machine Disk Full but won't delete older backups?

My Time Machine has worked since day one. And when my 1TB disk gets full, it deletes the older backups and makes room for new ones.
However, since last week, it tells me there is an error, the disk is full, and I need to make room for XXXX amount of gigs before the back up can be completed.
Why is this happening now?

Is this what you are looking for?
2007-11-19 09:27:21.670 Backup[583:11717] split failed with err -54
2007-11-19 09:27:21.679 Backup[583:11717] * Assertion failure in ZXSizeNodeCountIncOrDecForFileType(), /SourceCache/BackupProject/BackupProject-374/Engine/ZXPlanSize.m:67
2007-11-19 09:27:21.684 Backup[583:13587] unable to gzip /tmp/backupTargetTmp.bv9I5E/Thank God!!!!!!!!!!!! - 2007.11.18-23.57.42.723.backXX/Contents/backup.log: file does not exist
2007-11-19 22:30:06.806 Backup[493:10b] * -[NSConditionLock unlockWithCondition:]: lock (<NSConditionLock: 0x1434c620> '(null)') unlocked from thread which did not lock it
2007-11-19 22:30:06.823 Backup[493:10b] * Break on _NSLockError() to debug.
2007-11-19 22:30:06.832 Backup[493:3d0f] * -[NSConditionLock dealloc]: lock (<NSConditionLock: 0x1434c620> '(null)') deallocated while still in use
2007-11-19 22:30:06.832 Backup[493:3d0f] * Break on _NSLockError() to debug.

Time Machine doing full backup of external drive again

I have a Time Capsule, as well as an external data drive connected to my Mac. The external drive (named Yoda) is NOT excluded from backups. Yoda has about 703 GB of data on it.
I recently replaced the hard drive inside my time capsule. Consequently, a full backup was made, which was to be expected.
When the new full first backup was done, I disconnected the Yoda drive. A day later, I reconnected it, and now Time Machine is saying it's doing a 703 GB backup. Since the size TM indicates its backing up is ever so slightly larger than the total amount of data on Yoda, I'm assuming it's doing a full backup of the Yoda drive for some reason (the only other drive, the system drive, only has about 200 GB on it).
The files on Yoda weren't changed, certainly not all 703 GB of them. No hardware changes were made, no updates, tinkering, modifications, or anything. The Mac itself has not even been shut down or logged out. The ONLY thing that's happened was the Yoda drive was unmounted and disconnected, then several hours later it was reconnected.
Why is Time Machine repeating a full backup of this external drive? Is this going to happen every time I disconnect and reconnect the drive? Is there any way to make this not happen, short of excluding the drive (which I don't want to do)?

After posting this thread, I did find a similar thread (in the "More Like This" section) and saw your responses in it. You had suggested the same thing, as well as doing #A5 if that didn't work.
I tried #A4 and although that seemed to work in the other thread, unfortunately it didn't work for me. So I moved on to #A5, but I could not get my Time Capsule drive to show up in the Disk Utility. I didn't see a "data folder", but I did try directly dragging the sparsebundle to the left pane of the Disk Utility, but that seemed to hang Disk Utility.
At this point I'm probably going to try deleting the plist file as per #A4, erasing (reformatting) the drive, rebooting, and starting a whole new backup from scratch. It's not going to take much longer than backing up the entire external drive by itself would have, and I still have older backups (up to a few days ago) on the original Time Capsule drive in case of massive disaster.
So we'll see how that goes...

How to restore beyond time machine last full backup

I had a disk problem over the weekend and macbook pro wouldn't boot.
This has happened once before when it was within warranty period and I took it to the Genius bar and they ran diagnostics on the drive and said it was ok. Disk Warrior however was saying it had bad sectors and was failing but Apple disagreed. Apple then resinstalled the o/s and it was working ok and I restored everything back ok.
The same thing happened on Saturday and it wouldn't boot. Disk Utility said it couldn't be repaired and Disk Warrior said it was failing.
I did exactly what the Genius did and booted from internet recovery and went to restore from Time Capsule. During the restore process it listed only the full backups that had been taken so I picked the most recent but that was 6 days ago. It has completed the restore and Disk Utility says disk is fine.
So I'm asking two questions really.
1) Is there a way to restore beyond that last full backup and apply the incrementals to get it to the last hourly Time Capsule backup? When I go into Time Machine now it only has today in it and last hour so doesn't seem to be able to access previous incarnations of the backups.
2) Is there a way to run fsck or something on the disk to get any bad sectors as marked to not be used to prevent the problem from happening again?
I am toying with getting a solid state drive but not immediately.
My urgency is to get some files I was working on (Adobe illustrator) within the last week. They would have been on the incremental backup but everything is restored from that 31st March full backup.
Regards
Mike

Hi
But isn't that based on the fact that those backups are visible in Time Machine? All I see is today, not 2 days ago.
Mike

Restore iTunes library from Time Machine, after full hard drive wipe

I had to do a full hard drive wipe on my MBP running 10.6.6, so I made a full Time Machine backup before hand. I reinstalled os x (10.6.3) and used migration assistant to restore my files from the Time Machine backup.
Most of this process has been painless, however, when I open iTunes it's empty. I have all the music files, iTunes Library.itdb, iTunes Library Extras.itdb and iTunes Library Genius.itdb. Is there a way to restore my previous iTunes library with these files? I feel like this should be a pretty basic thing to do but I haven't found much/any documentation of it online. Any help would be much appreciated.

Take the files that you list and the iTunes music folder from the TM b/u and drag them to the iTunes folder. To put it in simpler terms - drag the iTunes folder from the TM to the same location on the internal HD.
By default the path should be HD>User>Your Account>Music>iTunes(your iTunes files are here)>iTunes Music (your music files are here)
MJ

How do you know when time machine is full?

Hi there,
Just got my new time machine & everything is okay but just wondering, what happens when it gets full? Do you get a warning when it's about to reach full capacity. Also, to create the available disk space to allow it to carry on backing up, how do you delete say the oldest files. Basically, what I'm asking is how to manage it so it keeps backing up effectively.
Ta, mMel

Not to worry. One of the big advantages of TM over other backup apps is, TM +manages it's space for you.+
As you probably know, TM keeps it's hourly backups for 24 hours; and converts the first of the day into a daily backup which it keeps for a month. Then it converts one per week into a weekly backup that it keeps as long as there's room.
Thus, it will fill whatever drive/partition you assign to it.
When there's not room for new backups, it will begin deleting the oldest of those weeklies, but it's smart enough that it won't delete it's copy of anything that still exists on your HD.
Cool, eh?

Time Machine missing full backups - Need help.

I was going to restore my Imac from Time Machine, and when I went to restore, its last full backup was from December 25, 2009 and nothing from 2010. I had checked it recently and saw backups images from January. Is there anything i can do? If i restore from the 25th, will my images from January February still be there?

Are you doing a full system restore, booting from your Leopard Install disc?
If not, please explain just what you're doing.
If so, there are two possibilities:
Did you rename or replace your internal HD after 12/25? If so, those are treated as two separate disks; thus there may be two drives in the "pop-up menu" above the list of dates. See item (f) in question #14 of the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
Have you excluded any System files from Time Machine backups? If so, you cannot do a full system restore (since you didn't back up the entire system).
Where are your backups, and why are you restoring? If your Mac is still functional, try looking at your backups with the Browse option, per #17 of the FAQ Tip, to see just what's there.

Time Machine making full backups--not incremental

Hi,
I just installed Snow Leopard on my Mac Pro a couple of days ago, and have been using Time Machine to make backups (never used it before now). I have TimeMachineEditor installed, and have it set to make a backup daily at 3:30am. It backs up data from my 500GB main hard drive to another internal 500GB hard drive.
The first backup went without a hitch, and did a full backup as expected (everything). But the second, third, and fourth backups all were full backups as well....not incremental as they should've been. The fourth one was actually a manual backup I did to test it...I chose "Back Up Now" to see if it did full or incremental. It did a full backup.
So, after four backups, each a little over 100GB, I'm already running out of space Has anyone else run into this behaviour? Is this a consequence of TimeMachineEditor having screwed it up somehow? Even if it has, shouldn't a manual backup still do an incremental backup?
Very strange....

canadavenyc wrote:
V.K. wrote:
yes, well, if Toronto ever gets a team in any sport worth rooting for, I might stop posting on apple forums and start watching them.
lol...well, seeing as how you'll clearly be here a while then... ...perhaps I can prevail upon you to answer one last question that just occurred to me.
Let's say I have tons of TM snapshots on my backup drive, and at some point I want to delete a few to clear some space. I know TM automatically goes after the earliest ones when the drive fills up,
You should know that TM also constantly thins recent backups. It keeps hourly backups for 24 hours and then deletes all but one for every day; it keeps daily backups for 30 days and then deletes all but one for every week. it keeps all weekly backups till the TM drive gets full at which point it starts deleting the oldest ones.
but let's say I manually want to delete a few snapshots that contain, say, a massive cache file or something totally useless to keep around, which I could afford to delete and would gain me a lot more drive space.
When I go into the TM interface to do the removal, how can I figure out which snapshots to get rid of? How would you do it?
TM offers two options. you can delete an entire backup corresponding to a time point or it can delete all backups of a given file/folder. to do that enter TM and scroll back in time to some time point. select something and click on the "gears" action button in Finder toolbar. you'll see options "delete backup" (deletes the entire backup for that time point), and 'delete all backups of this item". deletes all backups of the selected item from all time points. I use the latter sometimes to get rid of backups of very large files.

Time machine disk full after switch to new mac-how to empty?

Hi,
I have been using a Time Machine-disc of 320 GB for my iMac of 320 GB for a while. Some months ago it reached the point that it was full and started to delete older backups - so far all OK.
Yesterday I switched from old iMac to new MacbookPro, and migrated all data with migration assistant.
When connecting my TM-disc to my new MBP, Time Machine indicated this disc is full and can only be used if I backup less stuff - which I don't want to do of course.
I started deleting older backupfolders from the TM-disc 'by hand', but apart from that this takes ages, I also wonder if it is the right thing to do.
I also tried to fool the system by changing the name of the backupfolder from 'iMac...' to 'MBP...' but this was denied.
What is the way to go here? Not buying a new one or erasing it altogether, I hope?

wim jans wrote:
Thanks Pondini for helping out.
I found your faq, it is big! I now know how to see my old data again in TM, thanks!
I did something you say is not good: I threw away older backups by the finder. But it seems my backup works still ok.
Yes, sometimes you'll get away with that, sometimes not.
Back to my problem. I have 190 GB data on my hard drive, so I would need 'at least' 380 GB for TM-disk, which is 350. I still wonder: the same amount was flawlessly backupped until 2009, so if I would delete all backups from the disk, it should be usable once more, no?
Yes, for a while. It's a bit small, so this might happen again, and if, like most of us, you put more and more stuff on your Mac, there won't be enough room to keep old backups very long.
But I want to keep my latest backup for security. I think of doing following:
throwing away all but last backups, copy what's left on a partition of my MBP and copy it back to the TM-disk, which is connected with USB-cable to the computer.
Can you tell me if this would work? Thanks!
Not in the way you want. You can copy a single backup elsewhere, but that will convert it into "normal" folders and files; it's no longer recognized as a Time Machine backup. You cannot copy it back into a different set of backups.
Even if you could, it would still take up roughly 190 GB, so there still wouldn't be enough space for a new backup.
If you really want to keep it, your best option might be to restore part of it to another disk, or a partition on your new Mac, and leave it there. There's no point to restoring the backed-up version of OSX, and probably the apps. Your home folder(s), or selected parts of them, would probably be enough.
Perhaps a better option would be to get an additional external HD. Make a partition on it just large enough to restore some or all of the backup there. Use the rest of the disk for "secondary" backups, in case something happens to your existing one. See #27 in [Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/FAQ.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of the +Time Machine+ forum) for some suggestions.

Are files in "Latest" folder in Time Machine backup full versions

I need to transfer several gigabytes of files from a Time Machine Backup of an older iMac to a new Mac Mini. Can I just connect the external drive with the Time Machine backup on it to the Mac Mini, open the Backups.backupdb folder and copy all of the files in the "Latest" backup? Will these be full versions of the files? I spoke with a couple of Apple Support techs and one said that all of the backups were "threaded" together, thus my concern about getting full versions when I just drag and drop from the Backups.backupdb folder rather than going through Time Machine or Migration Assistant. The other tech said yes, the files in the "Latest" folder in the Backups.backupdb would be full versions, but I'm still not convinced.
Would prefer not to go the Migration Assistant or "restoring" through Time Machine. In some of my tests I wasn't comfortable with the way it worked.
Has anybody done this before - copying files directly from the Backups.backupdb folder rather than "restoring" through Time Machine?
--Newsads

I need to transfer several gigabytes of files from a Time Machine Backup of an older iMac to a new Mac Mini. Can I just connect the external drive with the Time Machine backup on it to the Mac Mini, open the Backups.backupdb folder and copy all of the files in the "Latest" backup? Will these be full versions of the files? I spoke with a couple of Apple Support techs and one said that all of the backups were "threaded" together, thus my concern about getting full versions when I just drag and drop from the Backups.backupdb folder rather than going through Time Machine or Migration Assistant. The other tech said yes, the files in the "Latest" folder in the Backups.backupdb would be full versions, but I'm still not convinced.
Would prefer not to go the Migration Assistant or "restoring" through Time Machine. In some of my tests I wasn't comfortable with the way it worked.
Has anybody done this before - copying files directly from the Backups.backupdb folder rather than "restoring" through Time Machine?
--Newsads

Time Machine is full.

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for