Resolved Time Machine: Disk Usage Limit option is missing

[J.Appleseed]

Hi all,

I've been backing up my computers to a Time Capsule for years. Recently, I discovered on my MacBook that Time Machine allows you to set a disk usage limit that ensures Mac back-ups don't take up more than X GB.

I find this to be an incredibly neat feature, and I also want to set this up on my iMac, but I am surprised to see this option missing entirely. My MacBook Pro (2021) is running macOS Sequoia and my iMac (2017) is running macOS Ventura. At first, I figured that Ventura might predate this feature but that doesn't seem to be the case. In 2022, right after the macOS Ventura release, people were already talking about the Disk Usage Limit option so I'd definitely expect it to be included in Ventura.

I have only discovered this option after some of my MacBook back-ups got corrupted; what I did is remove all previous back-ups to do a new set up of Time Machine on my MacBook. I also did that for my iMac, hoping it would provide me with the same option to set a custom Disk Usage Limit, but no such luck.

Do you have any idea how I can make the option for Disk Usage Limit appear on my iMac? I'm happy to hear any thoughts.

 

[Grumpus]

Do you have any idea how I can make the option for Disk Usage Limit appear on my iMac? I'm happy to hear any thoughts.

I've never tried it, but take a look at the tmutil man page for the setquota verb, which purports to allow you to set a storage limit in GB.

 

[J.Appleseed]

Thank you @Grumpus! Using the tmutil setquota command in Terminal did the trick. It's odd that I wasn't offered the GUI to do it in System Preferences, but the important thing is that it works just fine like this, too.