External hard drive full

[badshoehabit]

Guidance needed, please.

I have a 500gb Verbatim portable hard drive which I use for back ups through Time Machine (TM). I back up about every two weeks, or if I have uploaded a big batch of photographs.

With yesterday's back up I got a message that the drive was full and older back ups had been deleted to make space. I am using 278.63gb of storage on my MBP so I imagined there should still be plenty space on the hard drive. My understanding was that once you had made a full back up, subsequent ones merely added changes. Is that correct?

What is taking up all the space on the external drive (says 10.3gb available)?

Do I need to worry about losing anything if the drive is full, or will space always be created by losing the oldest (March 2016, when I got this MBP)? Should i get a bigger hard drive?

I read on an earlier thread that if you do not have an external drive plugged in constantly (which I don't with a MBP) that TM backs up to the internal hard drive. Is this correct and can/should I switch it off?

Thanks.

 

[McBie]

To be fair, 500 GB is not a lot for a backup disk.
Time Machine will indeed delete the oldest backups to make space for new backups. That can be a risk if you use your backup disk as an archiving mechanism.
( Archiving is not the same as a backup )
Also, if you have Time Machine set to do regular ( hourly ) backups and the backup disk is not connected, it will make a backup on your local disk until such time you connect your backup disk again.
That can take up quite some space on your local disk if you don't backup for a week.
Your assumption on the backup mechanism that Time Machine uses is correct. It will take its first full backup and then only add the changes since last backup ( Incremental backup ).

Cheers ... McBie

 

[badshoehabit]

After this the drive fell on the floor and subsequently refused to connect so I've bought a new one. It didn't owe me anything.

 

[chscag]

Dropping a drive on the floor is usually a signal that it's ready for the junk heap. But to get to your previous question about not keeping the drive connected.... you should turn off the automatic or ghost backups that Time Machine will attempt to do if the drive is not attached. I keep my Time Machine drive likewise disconnected but since I'm on an iMac the ghost backups do not apply.

Read through this article which explains how to turn off the ghost or local snapshot backups that Time Machine attempts when the drive is disconnected.

 

[badshoehabit]

Thanks, good advice.

 

[harryb2448]

Ahhh Sue very cunning way to have to get a new, bigger drive. I was going to suggest just erasing it but a little late now eh?

 

[RadDave]

Dropping a drive on the floor is usually a signal that it's ready for the junk heap. But to get to your previous question about not keeping the drive connected.... you should turn off the automatic or ghost backups that Time Machine will attempt to do if the drive is not attached. I keep my Time Machine drive likewise disconnected but since I'm on an iMac the ghost backups do not apply.

Read through this article which explains how to turn off the ghost or local snapshot backups that Time Machine attempts when the drive is disconnected.

Hi Chscag - enjoyed the link above - the article is from 2013 and the 'Storage' bar graph has changed for the current macOS, i.e. Sierra - I have about a week's worth of local TM snapshots (second pic below) (about to attach my external HDs - do about once a week) - when I open the storage bar (first pic), there is no longer a category called 'Backups' - get the categories labelled and described in the quote - I suspect that those 'snapshots' are included in the 'System' category or maybe 'Documents'? Dave

System - 38.3 GB
Documents - 17.1 GB
iTunes - 13.8 GB
Apps - 12.7 GB
iOS Files - 5.1 GB
Music Creation - 1.8 GB
Purgeable - 3 GB

.

 

[badshoehabit]

Even though automatic back ups was 'on', my machine appears not to have done any snapshots since the drive was attached on Jan 8.