"Not enough room!", says Time Machine

[hikeNM]

OK, here's the deal.

I have an external HD I use for Time Machine backups that's 270GB. My internal that Time Machine is backing up is 250GB.

For the past few days, Time Machine keeps giving me an error saying that it doesn't have enough room to backup anything.

I know it keeps copies of stuff, but I thought it started erasing old copies as soon as the external was full. Is this not the case?

Can anybody tell me what I might be doing wrong?

Thanks in advance!

 

[MacDawg]

From what I can tell by researching the issue is
1. You can start over with a new TM backup
2. You can manually delete an old backup and see if that frees the space you need
3. You can try deleting the .plist for TM

There seems to be several different possibilities why this might be occurring for you.
Apparently there is a point at which TM can't delete enough old space to perform the new backup on its own.

Here are a couple of resources for thought

http://discussions.info.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11143086

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1443045

http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/368046/time-machine-thinks-there-isnt-enough/

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/980997.html

 

[hikeNM]

From what I can tell by researching the issue is
1. You can start over with a new TM backup
2. You can manually delete an old backup and see if that frees the space you need
3. You can try deleting the .plist for TM

There seems to be several different possibilities why this might be occurring for you.
Apparently there is a point at which TM can't delete enough old space to perform the new backup on its own.

Here are a couple of resources for thought

http://discussions.info.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11143086

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1443045

http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/368046/time-machine-thinks-there-isnt-enough/

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/980997.html

Thanks for the reply.

I've decided to wipe the slate clean and do a fresh TM backup.

From what I can tell from research on the internet, it seems that TM needs about twice space of the HD you're backing up to work very well.

Don't have the funds for that, so I'll have to find a suitable workaround until then.