Help, please! So, I ran TM today. After checking for changes, TM told me that I didn't have enough space for a new backup and refused to continue. The partition of the external HDD that I'm using is full nga, but previously it would just warn me that an older backup would be deleted to make space for my new one. In fact, I believe that it actually did some deleting since the current free space (20+GB) is greater than what remained from my last backup. Now, the last time (24 days ago) I backed up was pre-SL. I found this on the Apple Support Forum, which gave me the idea that TM is considering my SL system as a new machine. My HDD isn't with me at the moment (I'm out) so I still have to check if I can access the older backups. So, what are my options? Can I force TM to delete another backup to make room? Do I have to give up on my old backups and reformat the partition? I would really prefer to avoid the last, though.
You can manually delete backups from within Time Machine interface. You can even choose which backup or backups you wish to get rid of to free some space.
to delete backups from Time Machine, go and run Time Machine and on the Finder window, you'll see a gear button. Go ahead and click that and you'll see an option to delete backups from there. Do it from Time Machine. I learned this the hard way and was forced to reformat my external drive. I was manually deleting thru the Finder menu of my external drive.
Finder deleting screws up the TM backups? I'll check that on my next backup since I deleted all my older backups. I couldn't access it via Time Machine for some reason, probably since it was carried over from a previous machine but backing up has been no problem otherwise. @bad_boy, what I did before was copy the backup in another drive, let TM do an initial backup but stop it after it creates the .sparsebundle file. Then, I renamed the file and it backed up as usual, retaining my old backups. Just keep another copy around in case it goes awry. You can also clone your existing TM backup to that new backup, it reportedly works much better. More help: http://www.tuaw.com/2009/07/20/mac-301-time-machine-backups-after-your-macs-brain-surgery/ http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2176662&tstart=0&start=0 Second link says you can copy in SL the Backups.backupdb folder directly.
