04-21-2010, 03:37 AM

Hi all,

I recently had to restore my entire sytem from a time machine backup. This went smoothly, but now my time machine drive won't continue to work as it did. The error message I get begins with:

Time machine could not complete the backup.
This backup is too large for the backup disk. the backup require "x" gb but only "y" gb are available....

This is, I'm guessing, because TM doesn't recognize that the data on the disk is actually time machine backups. I suppose I could just wipe the drive and start fresh, but there must be some way not to loose my old backups. Can someone help?

Thanks!

04-21-2010, 03:48 AM

You may have to reselect the Drive for Time Machine so it can continue using it. If you click Enter Time Machine from Menubar you should get a message like this;


Click for full size

04-21-2010, 10:21 AM

When I click Enter Time Machine, I get the usual screen, only no backups are showing .
screenshot2.jpg
When I enter the set up for Time Machine, I don't see the window and choices you showed in your screenshot anywhere.
screenshot1.jpg
Not sure how I would get that to appear.

04-21-2010, 04:20 PM

What shows up if u remove current drive in Sys Prefs > Time Machine > Select Disk and then reselect the same disk?

04-21-2010, 09:48 PM

Tried that. Didn't present me with any new options, and resulted in the same error upon trying the backup again.

Noticed last night that the only date showing on the drive when viewed in Finder was from yesterday, so it seems to have already overwritten my old backups (although I could be reading this wrong). I decided to go ahead and overwrite them with a fresh backup. So problem solved for now, but I'm dissapointed to have lost all those old backups. Hopefully it won't be an issue. Doesn't make sense to me that one would have to give all that up just for having done a system restore from the latest one.

04-23-2010, 01:00 AM

You may not have lost the old ones - have a look in your back up - if there are 2 sparsebundles then u may have just started a new one.
2 in the pic here for 2 iMacs;


Click for full size

Having said that have no idea why my sparse bundle has correct modified date and Es iMac shows the creation date under modified even tho all back ups are there when going into Time Machine, even last nights one.