Time Machine running out of space

[2trout]

I have had this weird issue for a while. I have set Time Machine backup to overwrite old files when it start to run out of space.
Yet, when the 1TB SSD is getting close to full, I get a message saying that backup failed to due insufficient space.
This makes no sense since I set it to just overwrite older files. The only way to overcome this is to re format that backup HD and start again.
Any thoughts on this, thanks.

 

[Taz Mangus]

Are you backing up Virtual Machine files?

 

[webbga]

I have the same issue. Apparently, as it has been explained to me, Time Machine needs more free space than your system takes up to back up your system. It will not delete its current backup until it has backed up your current system and there is not room for two. I cannot swear to this, but I read it recently and I am in the market for a larger drive now. My one terabyte no longer does the job.

 

[gnasher729]

I have the same issue. Apparently, as it has been explained to me, Time Machine needs more free space than your system takes up to back up your system. It will not delete its current backup until it has backed up your current system and there is not room for two. I cannot swear to this, but I read it recently and I am in the market for a larger drive now. My one terabyte no longer does the job.

On the positive side, I paid less than £100 for 5 terabytes.

Of course it is very very good not delete the previous backup before the next one is finished, in case something goes wrong in between and you might end up with nothing.

 

[2trout]

Are you backing up Virtual Machine files?

no, I am backing up my whole system, default setting

 

[2trout]

I have the same issue. Apparently, as it has been explained to me, Time Machine needs more free space than your system takes up to back up your system. It will not delete its current backup until it has backed up your current system and there is not room for two. I cannot swear to this, but I read it recently and I am in the market for a larger drive now. My one terabyte no longer does the job.

I am not running out of space for one backup....that is not the issue. It takes a few backups before I get the error message. So increasing the backup HD may not help, because once it gets towards the end of the HD capacity, no matter how large the HD is, it may well come up with the same error message again.....

 

[Boyd01]

I used a 2tb Time Capsule to backup my 512gb MacBook Air for about 6 years, never got a message about insufficient space. Have been using a 5tb Time Machine disk to backup the internal 2tb SSD plus an external 2tb SSD on my new Mini for four months now. Never had any error messages there either.

You may just need a larger Time Machine disk. But it's also a bad idea to let your internal SSD get too full. As I understand, Time Machine also makes smaller backups to your internal SSD periodically. Perhaps this is the source of the error message?

 

[bigfatipod]

I get the same message using Mojave. I have a 2tb primary drive and a 4tb external that TM is using to back up. It seems kind of silly that I would need a backup drive larger than twice the size of my primary...

 

[Buadhai]

I have the same problem. The reason is that Time Machine has stopped deleting old backups. It should delete daily backups older than 30 days. When I checked today (November 8, 2020) Time Machine had hourly backups going back to late September. No wonder it runs out of space.

drwxr-xr-x@   4 root     admin    136 Sep 25 16:24 2020-09-24-162130
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root     admin    136 Sep 25 17:27 2020-09-24-172509
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root     admin    136 Sep 25 18:28 2020-09-24-182426
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root     admin    136 Sep 25 19:41 2020-09-24-192427
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root     admin    136 Sep 25 20:24 2020-09-24-202036
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root     admin    136 Sep 25 22:19 2020-09-24-212445
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root     admin    136 Sep 25 23:23 2020-09-24-222055
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root     admin    136 Sep 25 23:23 2020-09-24-232042
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root     admin    136 Sep 26 00:22 2020-09-25-002218
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root     admin    136 Sep 26 01:31 2020-09-25-011945

I know I can manually delete the old backups, but isn't that Time Machine's job?

 

[Buadhai]

I have the same problem. The reason is that Time Machine has stopped deleting old backups. It should delete daily backups older than 30 days. When I checked today (November 8, 2020) Time Machine had hourly backups going back to late September. No wonder it runs out of space.

I know I can manually delete the old backups, but isn't that Time Machine's job?

I tried manually deleting old backups, but that didn't work. What seems to have worked was reformatting the backup drive and starting all over again.

Time Machine seems now to be deleting old backups.

 

[Tony M]

I have the same issue - Have a 4TB external Time Machine drive and 167 GB on the mac mini hard drive. Time Machine will not backup with error message saying not enough room on the external drive for backup. Why isn't TM deleting oldest backups as it is supposed to ? And is there a way for me to go in and manually delete a series of oldest backup files ?

 

[Erehy Dobon]

Just Enter Time Machine from the menu bar item, then select the oldest (top) bar. I believe a right mouse click will bring up a menu with the ability to delete that backup. I am pretty sure you cannot delete multiple backups at the same time. You'll have to do them individually.

If there was a large gap in time between two backups, deleting the older one will free up more space as more things changed. Same with deleting the last backup before an operating system upgrade or other major disk activity event.

 

[Buadhai]

I tried using tmutil to delete old backups, but that didn’t inspire TM to resume deleting old backups. As I wrote just three posts above this one, what worked was erasing the backup drive and starting over. After doing that TN resumed deleting old backups and is working fine now.

 

[Buadhai]

Once again my Time Machine backup is full. The oldest backup is November 10, 2020.

So, TM is not deleting old backups again.

However, according to the Time Machine preferences, the oldest backup is Today at 14:09:

Oddly, when I list the TM directory it says there are 8 files:

MrMuscle:~ mnewman$ ls -la /Volumes/TM/Backups.backupdb/MrMuscle
total 8
drwxr-xr-x@ 256 root  admin  8704 Jan 20 17:14 .
drwxr-xr-x@   6 root  admin   204 Nov 10 10:53 ..
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root  admin   136 Jan 20 15:13 2020-11-10-105328
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root  admin   136 Nov 11 18:43 2020-11-10-162243
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root  admin   136 Nov 11 21:16 2020-11-10-201658
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root  admin   136 Nov 12 00:14 2020-11-10-232223
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root  admin   136 Nov 12 03:17 2020-11-11-022156
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root  admin   136 Nov 12 07:15 2020-11-11-062608
<lots of lines snipped here>

But, obviously that is incorrect:

MrMuscle:~ mnewman$ ls -la /Volumes/TM/Backups.backupdb/MrMuscle | wc -l
     257

Something terribly wrong with Time Machine.

This on a 2017 iMac running Catalina 10.15.7.

Any ideas?

 

[Buadhai]

FWIW, there is an easy but time consuming way to delete multiple backups with a single command. For example:

sudo tmutil delete '/Volumes/TM/Backups.backupdb/MrMuscle/2020-'*

will delete all backups made in 2020.

sudo tmutil delete '/Volumes/TM/Backups.backupdb/MrMuscle/2021-01-1'*

will delete all backups made in January 2021 from January 10th through January 19th.

In my case deleting backups from November 11th 2020 through the end of the year took almost 12 hours.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

Once again my Time Machine backup is full. The oldest backup is November 10, 2020.

So, TM is not deleting old backups again.

However, according to the Time Machine preferences, the oldest backup is Today at 14:09:

View attachment 1716133

Oddly, when I list the TM directory it says there are 8 files:

MrMuscle:~ mnewman$ ls -la /Volumes/TM/Backups.backupdb/MrMuscle
total 8
drwxr-xr-x@ 256 root  admin  8704 Jan 20 17:14 .
drwxr-xr-x@   6 root  admin   204 Nov 10 10:53 ..
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root  admin   136 Jan 20 15:13 2020-11-10-105328
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root  admin   136 Nov 11 18:43 2020-11-10-162243
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root  admin   136 Nov 11 21:16 2020-11-10-201658
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root  admin   136 Nov 12 00:14 2020-11-10-232223
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root  admin   136 Nov 12 03:17 2020-11-11-022156
drwxr-xr-x@   4 root  admin   136 Nov 12 07:15 2020-11-11-062608
<lots of lines snipped here>

But, obviously that is incorrect:

MrMuscle:~ mnewman$ ls -la /Volumes/TM/Backups.backupdb/MrMuscle | wc -l
     257

Something terribly wrong with Time Machine.

This on a 2017 iMac running Catalina 10.15.7.

Any ideas?

Resurrecting old thread here but I have this problem now too. Out of the blue, earlier this, or late last year, TM would bomb due to target space. I looked for answers, and figured to just wipe the target drive and start again. Now it's doing the same thing, no space left. 72.82G left... The error says it needs 57-ish gig to finish the backup, but it should be culling the old backups.

Any fix, other than wiping the drive? With this happening *again*, I'm, thinking that if I get a larger drive, it will only put off the error a little longer. Come on Time Machine!!

 

[mudflap]

Resurrecting old thread here but I have this problem now too. Out of the blue, earlier this, or late last year, TM would bomb due to target space. I looked for answers, and figured to just wipe the target drive and start again. Now it's doing the same thing, no space left. 72.82G left... The error says it needs 57-ish gig to finish the backup, but it should be culling the old backups.

Any fix, other than wiping the drive? With this happening *again*, I'm, thinking that if I get a larger drive, it will only put off the error a little longer. Come on Time Machine!!

I'm re-resurrecting again, sorry. This just happened to me with a network share that I use to TM backup my 14" MBP wirelessly. This is like the third time in a year. I have to wipe the whole backup, pray nothing goes wrong, erase the TM volume, create a new one with a new name, and start over again. This is beyond annoying. I posted here in the forums a few years back about how I can't trust TM any more and I was looking for other solutions. I use CCC, but I wanted TM to work again just for my main Mac because when it works it's so easy. So now I'm giving it yet one more try. If TM once again stops deleting old files, I'm giving up. I can't take changes with backups and risk downtime. I'll have to switch to CCC completely, but it's not meant for versioning. TM is. I'm so frustrated. Sorry for the rant.