TM is asking for more room to do a backup...

[stuartrozier]

Hello,
I've been having this recurring problem with time machine, where i have a 600gb drive connected, backups are taking place as scheduled - but when it come near to the end of the 600gb, tm is asking for more space to be made ?

i thought time machine would automatically overwrite the older backups if their was no room for new ones ?

many thanks in advance

stuart

 

[LittleGreyMan]

Hello,
I've been having this recurring problem with time machine, where i have a 600gb drive connected, backups are taking place as scheduled - but when it come near to the end of the 600gb, tm is asking for more space to be made ?

i thought time machine would automatically overwrite the older backups if their was no room for new ones ?

many thanks in advance

stuart

Hey, try to manually delete the old backups.

 

[stuartrozier]

thank you, whats process for this - an it is advisable ? are they not all encrypted
stuart

 

[LittleGreyMan]

It doesn't damage anything, really.
When you connect the exteral hard drive, open it in finder and enter the backup files and delete the ones you don't want.

 

[Significant1]

How big is your data?

 

[kingdLo]

You should definitely delete the oldest backups first. Manually add them to the trash. I did this just yesterday and gained 100GB space back!

 

[stuartrozier]

thank you. how do you do this ? thanks (manually deleting backups i mean)

 

[kingdLo]

thank you. how do you do this ? thanks (manually deleting backups i mean)

In finder navigate to where your TM is located. For me, this was on my 2nd HDD internal. Inside was a folder named Backups. In here were tons of backups that TM created. I simply wiped them all to start fresh. It ended up being close to 1 million files all together.

 

[fhall1]

Here's more processes on how to delete old TM backups: http://osxdaily.com/2015/07/27/delete-old-backups-time-machine-mac/