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Choose About This Mac from the Apple menu, and then click System Report to open the System Information app. You need to make sure that the new backup drive is formatted properly for Time Machine. Or, rather, in an ideal world that would be true. Once you’ve connected the new drive, just open the Time Machine preferences, click Select Disk, and select the new drive. Getting a new, larger backup drive and starting over with it is easier and more sensible, though more expensive.

You may have to select it under Backup Disks and click Remove Disk first. Then go into the Time Machine preferences again, click Select Disk, and pick your newly erased drive. But, if you want to go down that path, open Disk Utility, select your Time Machine drive in the sidebar, and click Erase. And, of course, if that drive filled up once, it will do so again, potentially fairly quickly unless you exclude some large folders.

Obviously, erasing your current drive means that you won’t have any Time Machine backup at all until a new one completes, which is a risk. If the latter is true and you don’t much care about previous versions of files, a good solution is just to start over, either on a new drive or after erasing your current drive. But you probably know if you’re the sort of person who needs to go back to such previous versions, or if you just use Time Machine so you can restore all your data in the event of a drive failure. One of the great features of Time Machine is that it stores previous versions of files, as we’ve discussed. Start Over, Either on a New Drive or after Erasing Your Existing Backup Drive Time Machine won’t reclaim space used by newly excluded items that already exist in your backup. The only problem with this advice is that it’s helpful only before your backup drive fills up. Then drag the desired file or folder into the “Exclude these items from backups” list and click Save. To do this, open System Preferences > Time Machine and click the Options button. Exclude Large Folders from the BackupĪnother approach that Apple mentions is excluding items from the Time Machine backup. Once in Time Machine, click the Action menu (the gear icon) in the toolbar and choose Delete All Backups of Item.Īlas, this approach may not have much of an effect, since it’s difficult to know how many backups Time Machine has stored. Navigate to one of those items in the Finder, select it, and then choose Enter Time Machine from the Time Machine menu bar icon. Instead, use a utility like GrandPerspective or OmniDiskSweeper to identify folders or files that are both large and unnecessary. You have no idea what you’ll be deleting, and you’ll likely corrupt the entire Time Machine backup, rendering it useless. You might be tempted to look in the Backups.backupdb folder on your Time Machine drive and delete some of the dated folders inside. One possible solution-albeit likely a short term one-is to delete old backups. You have four options at this point, but two of them may not be all that helpful. When that happens, backups will start failing, and this notification will appear after every backup attempt.Ĭlick the Details button in that notification to open the Time Machine pane of System Preferences, and you’ll learn more. In general, this approach works well, since you probably don’t need all the older versions of changed files as long as Time Machine always retains the most recent version in the backup.Įventually, however, even this technique runs into the wall of hard drives having only so much capacity. It warns you when this starts happening and tells you what your oldest remaining backup is. So the first thing that Time Machine does when your backup drive fills up is start deleting those older versions, beginning with the oldest ones. If you modify the same file multiple times per day, every day, you’ll have numerous versions of it in your backup set so that you can go back to any particular version. After that, Time Machine keeps hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for all previous months. On its first backup, Time Machine copies everything on your startup drive to the backup drive. What happens then?īefore we explain, some background. Time Machine is smart about backing up only files that have changed, but after months or years of usage, the drive will run out of space.

It’s inevitable-your Time Machine backup drive is going to fill up.