Usually, this message comes up when you are making the INITIAL backup from a particular machine, and there is not enough space on the drive to hold it. In this situation, obviously, Time Machine has nothing it can cull off the drive to make room.
There are two causes for this. One is that the drive has been used to backup other machines, and Time Machine won't cull their backups to fit yours. The second is that TIme Machine is UNDER THE IMPRESSION that this is the first backup for your machine, even when it isn't, and that the files already on the drive belong to some "other machine," as above. This can happen if you switch from direct-attached backup to network-based backup or vice-versa. It can also happen because Time Machine just flat gets confused. Given that Time Machine is complaining to you that it suddenly has to make a 300GB backup, I'm pretty confident it's under the impression that it is doing an initial backup. There's a guy named Pondini that has written a whole website full of tips about how to un-confuse Time Machine in these cases. A web search will bring it up. On Jan 18, 2014, at 9:05 PM, Kevin Callahan <[email protected]> wrote: > I have a 2T drive that has been backing up my MPro flawlessly for a year or > so. Now I'm getting this message: > > The backup disk needs 292.42 GB for the backup but only 154.24 GB are > available. Select a larger backup disk or make the backup smaller by > excluding files. > Latest successful backup: January 7, 2014 > > But Time Machine is supposed to delete old files to make room for new. > The Time Machine panel says: "The oldest backups are deleted when your disk > becomes full". > > Is this an issue with the size of the most recent backups? In any case, the > point of Time Machine is to avoid manual management of backups. > > Thoughts on how to solve this? > > Thanks, > Kevin > > _______________________________________________ > MacOSX-talk mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
_______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
