TM keeps complaining the backup disk is full, but it isn't

[jmpage2]

Hi guys.

I have a very small installation of OS X, my total install up until a few months ago was only 40GB or thereabouts.

I recently switched my VM from bootcamp w/fusion to a pure VM with parallels, in part, so that I could start to use Time Machine to backup my Windows installation also. I am using the Parallels option 'optimize for TM' with snapshots.

Around the time I did this, I increased the quota size on my Synology Diskstation so that I would have more room for TM backups. My original quota was for 100GB, which worked for years without ever complaining the backup disk was full (I think I had used perhaps 60GB of the 100GB that was available). I increased this to 200GB so that I would not run out of space anytime soon with the 25GB or so that the Windows VM was going to take.

However, I am now getting "disk full" messages from TM almost every time I backup and it has removed most of my older backups (my oldest backup is now only six weeks old)... what's particularly confusing is that right in the TM preferences I can see that my backup disk has over 100GB of free space.

Is there any way to fix this short of destroying my old TM backup and starting over?

Thanks.

 

[iMikeT]

I had a similar issue with Time Machine this past week. I was attempting to backup but I received a message that Time Machine wasn't able to perform a backup as it "needed more room to work than what was available on the drive". I'm not sure if there's any way to actually fix this than to get a larger HD.

 

[jmpage2]

My TM is not on an individual hard disk. It's on a 10TB Synology DiskStation and I just set a quota for the account that I back up with TM. It was originally set to 100GB but I increased it to 200GB. I'm wondering if somehow TM thinks it is still 100GB.

 

[MWPULSE]

My TM is not on an individual hard disk. It's on a 10TB Synology DiskStation and I just set a quota for the account that I back up with TM. It was originally set to 100GB but I increased it to 200GB. I'm wondering if somehow TM thinks it is still 100GB.

Time machine tends to like a bit more extra space for backing up, i know that i have a 200gb internal on my macbook pro, Time machine would only be able to back up maybe 2 times on my 320gb external cos it wants extra working space.

Although saying that you have a 10tb disk you say? How much of that is allocated for time machine? Just 200gb? How big is the internal drive for the entirety of your computer? i tend to just double that, straight up.

Pete

 

[jmpage2]

Time machine tends to like a bit more extra space for backing up, i know that i have a 200gb internal on my macbook pro, Time machine would only be able to back up maybe 2 times on my 320gb external cos it wants extra working space.

Although saying that you have a 10tb disk you say? How much of that is allocated for time machine? Just 200gb? How big is the internal drive for the entirety of your computer? i tend to just double that, straight up.

Pete

Well, that might be true (TM wants extra space) but if true, does not explain why, with a 40-50GB installation of OS X, I never ran into disk full issues in 2+ years with a 100GB available TM volume.

Also, my wife's Macbook Pro has about a 60GB install size for OS X and her 150GB TM volume has also never reported full (it uses a separate account).

The size of the SSD in my iMac is 256GB, I don't really want to fork over 512GB on my Synology just for my TM account.... I need that space for important things, like my MKV movie collection.

 

[MWPULSE]

Well, that might be true (TM wants extra space) but if true, does not explain why, with a 40-50GB installation of OS X, I never ran into disk full issues in 2+ years with a 100GB available TM volume.

Also, my wife's Macbook Pro has about a 60GB install size for OS X and her 150GB TM volume has also never reported full (it uses a separate account).

The size of the SSD in my iMac is 256GB, I don't really want to fork over 512GB on my Synology just for my TM account.... I need that space for important things, like my MKV movie collection.

I am not too sure myself lol.. Whenever i got issues with TM space, i tended to just go in and delete the earliest backup. Then it would be fine. I do remember that VM's and such like don't always play nice with TM, but it does seem like you have taken necessary steps to get rid of the fluff there. Try using disk inventoryx or Grand Perspective on your drives n see if theres anything particularly untoward on there Thats about the only advice i can really offer...

Sorry bout that.

Pete

I know how you feel, balancing the space between media , movies/itunes etc.. is always a challenge.. (speaking as a guy who has a 100gb iTunes library, on a 200gb internal drive)

 

[phyrexia]

Some time ago, I set up Time Machine on one of my Macs to back up to a networked windows drive. I had lots of trouble and had to jump through flaming hoops to get it to work.

In the end I had to create the sparseimage bundle separately, and then move it onto the windows drive. IIRC, When I created the image in the proper format, I specified a total filesize for the file. The backup does not take up this much space on the disk to begin with, but can expand to fill the file.

I suspect that TM only allocated 100GB for the image file initially, given that was the largest possible size on the partition you created, and that TM is ignoring the additional space you have allocated. Perhaps you could try to create a new backup in a 200gb partition, or perhaps you can manually change the size of the sparsebundle image.

 

[jmpage2]

I am pretty sure you are correct. When TM creates the sparse bundle, apparently it sets the size and even if the available volume size were to increase, TM is not going to utilize the extra space.

Probably I could have migrated the existing sparse bundle to a new one using disk utility, etc, however, under the circumstances (since it had already purged my older backups anyway) I just opted to delete the sparse bundle and create a new one.

Now apparently TM is aware of the larger volume size as I have not seen any backup full messages in the last couple of days.