Time Machine question

[DP]

I'm sure I've seen this question posted before but... My wife has a TM on her computer and she has lately gotten the "Time machine doesn't have enough space left" and it's not backing up the new stuff. I looked in Preferences but see nothing to address the situation. Doesn't TM erase the older stuff to replace with the new when the drive assigned to TM fill up?

[GuyGene]

That's what I thought too. It replaces old data with new, not using up much additional space. But, what do I know? Robert, Onamuji, someone who knows will be by and tell us...

[modelamac]

Read about TM in Mac help, as it answers your questions.

[GuyGene]

:facepalm: Of course.

[DP]

Well, I thought someone had a two second answer that I was missing, as this forum is excellent at, without having to get mired in some research that takes a bit of time.

[Onamuji]

Time Machine cleans out obsolete items at the end of the backup operation.

If you've added more stuff to your boot drive than there's capacity for on the backup volume at the beginning of the operation then the backup daemon will stop and throw an error.

...Another way to get that error is to copy stuff to the backup vol. Apple didn't design Time Machine to share space with other stuff. If there's anything other than the backups.backupdb folder on the backup volume then you're asking for trouble.

The best fix for a full backup drive is usually to start a fresh backup on a new drive that has more capacity.

[NewtonMP2100]

.....time paradox.....

[DP]

Thanx, Doc...