Time Machine filled up my external hd... now what?

[ero87]

I'd love to maintain the functionality of Time Machine, but it just filled up my external harddrive.

I know that I can "exclude" more data from being backed up, which should give me a little more time before Time Machine fills it up again... but how do i delete the unnecessary data that's already been backed up to my external hd?

Time Machine is confusing me in general - wouldn't i need an unlimited amount of external space for it to be practical? If I rip a movie with Handbrake, Time Machine backs it up, and then I delete the original, I'm still wasting a lot of space on my external for no reason. Any solution to this?

Thanks so much for your help.

 

[emptyCup]

I'd love to maintain the functionality of Time Machine, but it just filled up my external harddrive.

Time Machine is designed to fill the drive, or partition, it is on. It will automatically coalesce your hourly backups into a daily backup each day, and your daily backup ups into weekly backups each week. When it fills the space it has it will begin to delete the oldest backups. How far back into time you can go depends on the size of your backup drive and how much stuff you change.

You can exclude things in Preferences. If you are running Parallels, or something like that, you may want to. Otherwise, excluding things from your backup defeats the purpose.

 

[gr8tfly]

I know that I can "exclude" more data from being backed up, which should give me a little more time before Time Machine fills it up again... but how do i delete the unnecessary data that's already been backed up to my external hd?

Once you exclude something, you can go into Time Machine, select the file/folder, and click on the Actions pop-up menu in the Finder tool bar. There's a "Delete all backups of xxx" option.

Time Machine is confusing me in general - wouldn't i need an unlimited amount of external space for it to be practical? If I rip a movie with Handbrake, Time Machine backs it up, and then I delete the original, I'm still wasting a lot of space on my external for no reason. Any solution to this?

You could put those files on an external drive or maybe use an excluded folder. Of course, if you really didn't mean to delete the file, then Time Machine would have done its job.

 

[Nugget]

I'd love to maintain the functionality of Time Machine, but it just filled up my external harddrive.

This is exactly how time machine will always work. If you want to carve out some of the external drive reserved for your own use, you can re-format it into two partitions.

 

[gnasher729]

Time Machine is confusing me in general - wouldn't i need an unlimited amount of external space for it to be practical? If I rip a movie with Handbrake, Time Machine backs it up, and then I delete the original, I'm still wasting a lot of space on my external for no reason. Any solution to this?

I use one folder exactly for that purpose which is excluded from backups. Use Mac The Ripper to load the DVD into that folder, then compress it into the same folder, and then finally remove it into the place where I want it.

Time Machine _will_ fill your harddisk, but that is nothing to worry about. If the harddisk is full, it will remove older versions. So the ability to get older versions back is limited by hard disk space.

 

[ero87]

I use one folder exactly for that purpose which is excluded from backups. Use Mac The Ripper to load the DVD into that folder, then compress it into the same folder, and then finally remove it into the place where I want it.

Time Machine _will_ fill your harddisk, but that is nothing to worry about. If the harddisk is full, it will remove older versions. So the ability to get older versions back is limited by hard disk space.

thanks for the responses, i'm startiing to udnerstand... but Time Machine is giving me an hourly error now, saying "cannot do the backup." I'm assuming this is because my external hd memory is down to only 50 MB. What's wrong here?

 

[ero87]

here's what it says:

 

[Macsterling]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3B48b Safari/419.3)

I used time machine a couple days and got everything I wanted backed up. After that I just turned it off so it wouldn't update every hour. I figure I will backup once a week or whenever I feel the need to. That way I can use my external for other things as well.