Speaking of Time Machines

[bazookaman]

I just got a warning that mine is filled up and I should exclude some items. Well I've excluded all the items I want to exclude. I really haven't had a need to redefine what gets excluded from my backup. But apparently that is Apple's solution. So I have around 800gb left on a 12tb hard drive and I'm just supposed to keep excluding more and more things?

I really thought Time Machine started tossing older files to make room for newer files. But Apple says the solution is to plug in a new drive. That seems kind of silly. But I don't know what else to do. I don't want to erase this drive and start over, as I WOULD like to have SOME backups.

[rz]

well, it's supposed to overwrite older files when it fills up. I have a 3TB Time Machine capsule that filled up a long time ago, and up until it crapped out last year, it was overwriting old stuff.

[Sarcany]

If you have 800GB available on a Time Machine backup drive, it sholdn't be bugging you to exclude items.

...

If there's a typo somewhere in there and you really do need to exclude some items to resume backups...

There are some types of files that are very large and frequently change with the result that the archival versions of these files fill up a backup drive quickly.

Do you have a Parallels or VMware or other virtual machine? If so then consider excluding the virtual drive file.

Some apps including old versions of MS Office (Entourage and Outlook) can make large database files that you might reasonably exclude if you have IMAP email.

You may have a very large archive of iOS backups in the ~/Library/Application Support/MobileConfig folder which can be excluded.

[bazookaman]

Sarcany wrote:
If you have 800GB available on a Time Machine backup drive, it sholdn't be bugging you to exclude items.

Well I thought so too. But there you go. It have the little red exclamation point icon and everything.

Sarcany wrote: Do you have a Parallels or VMware or other virtual machine? If so then consider excluding the virtual drive file.

I moved my Parallels VMs to an external awhile back since I found out about the Parallels bug that won't allow you to reclaim space.

Sarcany wrote: Some apps including old versions of MS Office (Entourage and Outlook) can make large database files that you might reasonably exclude if you have IMAP email.

I try to keep that junk tidy. And I've moved ALL my mail to the server.

Sarcany wrote: You may have a very large archive of iOS backups in the ~/Library/Application Support/MobileConfig folder which can be excluded.

I don't think I do since I rarely back up to the computer.

At any rate. I'm not sure what happened but I came back to my desk and it was backing up. No idea what happened. Just looking now and it says I have 660gb available of 12tb. So we'll see what happens tomorrow when I reconnect the drive at work.

[bazookaman]

Well thats weird. So this morning after I got to work, I checked and now I have 800gb available. However, it says my OLDEST backup is February 9! So I spend the Time Machine disk and it shows that I have 217 backups going all the way back to May of last year. So WTF is up with Time Machine? Either I do or I don't have a valid backup? Time Machine says no, I have two days worth. The Time Machine drive says yes, I have almost a years worth.