If Chris Nava's reply didn't help you, read on. ![]() In my case, this freed up enough space to let the backup continue successfully.įirst, I wanted to point out that it's strange that the dialog shows commas in the numbers instead of decimal points. Since you don't need any backups of UselessStuff, you can enter Time Machine, right click on UselessStuff, and click "Delete all backups.". You exclude it from the backup as described above, but that doesn't delete the previous backups of UselessStuff from the disk, and you still don't have enough space for the backup to complete. Let's say you analyze your hard disk contents and realize there's a 20GB folder (let's call it UselessStuff) which was being backed up. This happened to me again recently, and just excluding folders from the backup wasn't enough, so I found another trick. I presume that my changes brought the delta to a small enough size that it fit in the remaining free space on the backup disk. I didn't have to launch the backup, it automatically retried. The info from Disk Inventory X also led me to delete a bunch of large unused files.Īfter the two changes listed above, the backup proceeded successfully. I excluded these from the backup using "Time Machine" > "Options" > "Exclude these items from backups". I used Disk Inventory X to look at the contents of my hard disk, and identified a few large folders which didn't need to be backed up. I realized this when I looked at the disk contents and saw that there was only one backup folder under Backups.backupdb. ![]() The problem turned out to be that the disk contained only one (large) backup, and didn't have room to store the current delta (delta = changes to files since last backup). Time Machine already excludes standard caches, but not all apps handle cache files that way.This happened to me recently I was pretty annoyed because I expected that if there wasn't enough space, Time Machine should just delete the oldest backup. For instance, if you are using a third-party video, graphics or audio editor it may have a folder where it creates and deletes "render files" constantly. Sometimes these are large files that are created and deleted often. One technique to make a Time Machine drive last longer is to use the Time Machine options to exclude folders that really don't need backing up. ![]() I also don't know how old this Time Machine backup is, whether it is 6 months or 6 years. Hard to advise which one is right for you since I don't know more about your situation. You can erase the backup drive and start again, or get a larger backup drive and start a new one. But for others it will happen in a shorter time as they create lots of large files (video projects, perhaps?) and delete or archive them very quickly. ![]() You never mention how much data you have and how you use your Mac, but for some people this will take many many years to happen. Repeat that a bunch of times and that's how a Time Machine backup will fill up. But it won't delete the file one.Ī backup wouldn't be worth much if it just deleted files forever and completely without a way to get back at least one version. Now you have 10 versions of the file, the original and 9 others including the last one before it was deleted, right? Eventually is culls the first 9 versions and just has the final one. It will have 10 versions of the file then. For instance, say you create a file and over the course of a month you change it 9 times. But it will keep the last version of a file around. Time Machine does delete older versions of files, yes.
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