Time Machine Stopped do to space

I am using Time Machine. One of my external HDs doesn't have enough space anymore to do the backup. It's my second HD for TimeMachine. I do alternative back ups. It still has back ups on it, right? It just doesn't have anymore room. I had my computer given a clean install at the apple store. Is it necessary to do a back up of the whole system on my HD 2? It's doing it on my HD1. But isn't the entire system already backed up? Hope I am clear.

I'm not sure I understand the question. Are you wanting to have one Time Machine backup that is an entire drive and one that includes say a backup of data only.

Question two. I purchased a new 2 TB external HD to use on TimeMachine. I said yes to deleting all the contents on it. It's taking hours "cleaning up" the Time Machine Back Up. What's the deal with that? Is it preparing the HD for back up?

I will get back to your other question when I can think how to put it in the right words.

Thank you!

One of the reasons much prefer cloning to the external drive using CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper.

You could have used Disk Utility and just erase hard drive it takes less time and it formats it correctly.

osxx said:

You could have used Disk Utility and just erase hard drive it takes less time and it formats it correctly.

Click to expand...

Can I stop it from "Cleaning up?" and just do it that way? This is kind of ridiculous.

You know what? I'm going to have to learn all of this..... Time for me to get serious with my OS X skills.

Okay, I stopped it from "cleaning up." Now, where exactly do I go into the utilities to reformat it so I can start doing a correct Time Machine back up? Thanks

NEVER MIND I DID IT!