Not enough room on Time Machine hdd after restore.
Hi to all!
I did my first-time-ever wiping of my MBPro's hard drive and full re-install of Snow Leopard and restored with my Time Machine back up just a week ago. I was a little anxious because I didn't know what, if anything, might be left "unrestored" apart from of course folders that I'd set for Time Machine to ignore in the past. All went smoothly and I'm very happy with that aspect. My hard drive is cleaner and the computer runs quite a bit more smoothly now.
With all of that, though -- now that I've done a full system restore, my Time Machine is telling me that there's not enough room on my external drive to back up my main hard drive. It's as if (or actually is the case that) Time Machine isn't using the previous back-ups as something to build upon and it's trying to make a first full back-up of my main OS partition.
My OSX partition is 225gb with currently 25gb free, my Time Machine hdd is 300gb with 110gb free.
Before my restore, I would occasionally get messages saying that an old back-up needed to be deleted to make room, which was fine, but now it's the case that no back-up can follow through at all. My last restore point continues to be from the day before my hdd cleaning and re-install.
Right now it seems like my only option is to delete my previous back-up history and let it start anew, which would be annoying, or to move Time Machine to a larger hdd, which I suspect is unnecessary.
I'm not the most knowledgeable on the finer details of how Time Machine's back-ups work, but any help and kind explanation will be really greatly appreciated!
Thanks very much.
I did my first-time-ever wiping of my MBPro's hard drive and full re-install of Snow Leopard and restored with my Time Machine back up just a week ago. I was a little anxious because I didn't know what, if anything, might be left "unrestored" apart from of course folders that I'd set for Time Machine to ignore in the past. All went smoothly and I'm very happy with that aspect. My hard drive is cleaner and the computer runs quite a bit more smoothly now.
With all of that, though -- now that I've done a full system restore, my Time Machine is telling me that there's not enough room on my external drive to back up my main hard drive. It's as if (or actually is the case that) Time Machine isn't using the previous back-ups as something to build upon and it's trying to make a first full back-up of my main OS partition.
My OSX partition is 225gb with currently 25gb free, my Time Machine hdd is 300gb with 110gb free.
Before my restore, I would occasionally get messages saying that an old back-up needed to be deleted to make room, which was fine, but now it's the case that no back-up can follow through at all. My last restore point continues to be from the day before my hdd cleaning and re-install.
Right now it seems like my only option is to delete my previous back-up history and let it start anew, which would be annoying, or to move Time Machine to a larger hdd, which I suspect is unnecessary.
I'm not the most knowledgeable on the finer details of how Time Machine's back-ups work, but any help and kind explanation will be really greatly appreciated!
Thanks very much.
Comments
Hmm... So could anyone at least please tell me if this is normal behavior or not? I'm sure that at least some of you have done a complete restore with Time Machine backups before.
Just curious as to why you want to retain the backup from before you did the re-install. You have a fresh install that has no problems I assume, so if it was me, I would delete the old and do a fresh back up. It sounds to me like your external HD is trying to install a new backup after the old one and there isn't enough room for 2 copies of your system. I haven't done this myself, so this is just an opinion.
Just curious as to why you want to retain the backup from before you did the re-install. You have a fresh install that has no problems I assume, so if it was me, I would delete the old and do a fresh back up. It sounds to me like your external HD is trying to install a new backup after the old one and there isn't enough room for 2 copies of your system. I haven't done this myself, so this is just an opinion.
I did a restore so that my hard drive would be less fragmented and would run smoother. I liked having my TM backups that dated back to around September or earlier last year. Just because the most recent backup has helped and served its main purpose doesn't mean that I necessarily want to delete my old archives and start fresh.
This seems to be rather moot now though, because I see now that my last attempt at a backup just a couple of days ago did go ahead and overwrite my previous histories. So they do appear to be gone and I've started fresh anyway. It's not as disappointing as it could be -- the restore itself has been great and fine. I just don't see why it needed to delete my whole previous history.
It's slightly annoying but not a massive deal. Now I know to have at least twice (or a lot more) my current hdd space for time machine if I want to retain old backups after restoring.
now that I've done a full system restore, my Time Machine is telling me that there's not enough room on my external drive to back up my main hard drive. It's as if (or actually is the case that) Time Machine isn't using the previous back-ups as something to build upon and it's trying to make a first full back-up of my main OS partition.
That's because it IS "trying to make a first full back-up of my main OS partition" because you just told it to make a (first) backup of what it sees as a brandnew internal HD. So it needs to prepare a brandnew partition for that backup on your external HD. Which doesn't have enough free space left for that with your old Time Machine backup files clogging it up. So you will have to get rid of those. And start with having Time Machine create its first, complete, backup ? on its own partition on your external HD ? as the basis for subsequent incremental backups.
Creating that first, complete, backup set will take some time. Hours! So better leave your Mac running tonight. And mind the screen and disk sleep settings (or they might time out your Time Machine backup process long before it is finished). Or, better yet, get and install the Caffeine application, which keeps processes running by taking over and temporarily disabling the screen and disk sleep settings. In a MacBook or MacBook Pro even with the lid closed.
I did a restore so that my hard drive would be less fragmented and would run smoother. I liked having my TM backups that dated back to around September or earlier last year. Just because the most recent backup has helped and served its main purpose doesn't mean that I necessarily want to delete my old archives and start fresh.
This seems to be rather moot now though, because I see now that my last attempt at a backup just a couple of days ago did go ahead and overwrite my previous histories. So they do appear to be gone and I've started fresh anyway. It's not as disappointing as it could be -- the restore itself has been great and fine. I just don't see why it needed to delete my whole previous history.
It's slightly annoying but not a massive deal. Now I know to have at least twice (or a lot more) my current hdd space for time machine if I want to retain old backups after restoring.
Did you ever figure this out? I have the exact problem.