TimeMachine backup full

[etaf]

HI All,
I recently setup a few imacs for friends and family abiut 3 of them, plus 2 i own now
I have calculated the space used - On one - full used space 120GB , so using 1TB external drive and now its full, and having to delete old backups,
Same on the other machines - all around 120-200GB , and using 1TB or 2TB external drives, a couple of drives , one on all the time, and 2nd one added every week or so , and kept in a safe or offsite.

BUT they hve all now started to slow down, because the disk is full

Whats the safest way to keep the backup and anu old versions , cant keep just buying bigger and bigger drives.

I thought the system just incremented backups , and looking in detail at one machine the most data is about 8GB and of that maybe 4GB that is chnged regularly, like word documents , Images added via icloud iphone every so often, but that only 3GB now

SO 3-4x only comes to 120GB x 4 = 480GB and after 1 year ( Jan2019 ) 2TB drive is full, nothing else on the drive just the backup files

But as i say , this issue is now on all 5 machines.

My laptop has 256gb sdd and i have filled a 1TB hard drive in 6mths - seems strange

Thanks for any advice

 

[jwhittaker]

It’s not odd, it all depends how many files you change daily. However it will delete old backups and continue... I have a 2tb hard drive and 4 tb backup drive. It filled up a long time ago on average I can go back about 3 months to get files,

 

[etaf]

ok, thanks, for the fast reply
so just let timemachine do its thing in the background, deleting backups , seems to may have slowed a machine down a bit is that to be expected and anyway around.

 

[Fishrrman]

"Thanks for any advice"

OK, you asked, so this is mine:
1. ERASE the backup drive
2. Download either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper
3. Use either one of them instead of tm...

 

[etaf]

Thanks,