Sine my upgrade to Catalina (and I’ve also installed the Supplementary of yesterday) my Time Machine appears to be broken.

When entering Time machine, there are currently no back-ups prior to 2318 yesterday evening. 12 back-up panels are available since then at either one or two hour difference between recorded times and there is also the Now panel. All back-ups under Mojave, which stretched back to back to October 2018, are missing or invisible. The Menu bar icon states that the latest back-up is dated 13 October (four days ago).

It has just attempted to carry out another back-up and returned the error messages:

1) Back-upFailed. There isn’t enough space on “*****”

2) The Time Machine couldn’t complete the back-up to “*****.local”. the back-up disk needs 265.19GB for there back=up but only 99.87GB are available. Select a larger back-up disk or make the back-up smaller by excluding files. Latest successful back-up 13 October 2019.

I don’t understand how on earth it can be trying to back-up 265.19GB but nevertheless I tried checking, under Options in Time Machine System Preferences, “Exclude system files and applications”. That panel shows that the estimated size of the full back-up to be 926.91 TB but when I check that box it only reduces to 917.06GB and I cannot believe that system files and applications only amount to 9 or 10GB! A Get Info on my Applications folder shows that that aone is 21.32GB.

I’ve had quick look on the late “Pondini’s” site but it obviously is out of date now and stops at Mountain Lion.


So, a couple of (OK three) questions:

1) Where have my previous year’s back-ups gone and are they retreivable?

2) Why, notwithstanding the apparent loss of previous back-ups, is it not doing incremental back-ups?

3) can I get this working properly again without losing all existing back-ups and, if so, how?

Apologies for this being bit long and erratic, but I’ve tried my best to make it comprehensible (but not very well )!

Check out this MacWorld article.

Thanks, interesting!

I don't want to restore but it is always useful to know where my backups have gone.

The article "solves" why the previous back-ups have gone but not why Catalina fails with those bizarre out of space messages.

i'll have a check around and see if changing the extension "frees up" space. I'll report back in due course.

Thanks for the tip off.

I experienced peculiar Time Machine actions with Sierra and High Sierra, much like your description in the quote. I'll describe my experiences as they might help get an answer for you:

1. I always had a small amount to back up, even with the system files. About 255 GB

2. I didn’t need files going back any great length of time. A few weeks were fine for me.

3. The Time Machine drive was 350 GB and I figured that, if it ever got full, Time Machine could just dump older files to make way for new ones.

4. The 350 GB drive never got anywhere close to full….usually 80 or 90 GB of free space

However…..

5. If I did an update to the system I would get a message much the same as the one in your quote above. TM never dropped files to make space.

6. I would erase the drive and create a new Time Machine backup. It would be fine until I had another system update.

Then I upgraded to Mojave….

7. I erased the drive and tried to do a fresh Time Machine backup…still the same situation as High Sierra - about 250GB of data to a 350 GB drive

8. Mojave would have nothing to do with it. It refused to record my 250 GB of data on a 350GB drive as a Time Machine backup, insisting that I needed a much larger drive

So…..

I’m wondering if there has been a change in the way Time Machine operates, that began in Sierra or High Sierra and is carried through to Mojave and now Catalina…..except that it is now more of an issue as it has caused you to lose files.

Anyone else have thoughts on this?

I always took Apple’s recommendation that the Time Machine drive should be three to five times larger than the drive being backed up seriously, and at the present time my backup data set extends back in time from the current Catalina beta to some time in Yosemite and I still have roughly a Terabyte free on the 3 TB RAID 5 array I use for Time Machine. Upgrading from one MacOS version to the next has been completely uneventful as far as Time Machine is concerned.

However, based on a variety of reports and observations, it would appear Time Machine in Catalina is “vetting” Time Machine drives more stringently than In previous MacOS versions. (Possibly in anticipation of future changes/enhancements such as enabling Time Machine on APFS drives? — I hope!)

Given a 1TB external HD can be had for under $100 and 4TB for under $200, you might want to update to a larger Time Machine drive or you might consider an alternate backup option such as Carbon Copy Cloner to make periodic clones on a small external drive and manage hourly and daily APFS “snapshots” on your boot drive. (NOTE; you cannot recover individual files from a snapshot but you can restore the “state” of the entire system to a previous time and snapshots only cover the data partition of the Catalina boot drive.)

But I don’t have any need for Time Machine backups extending more than a couple of weeks at most….and I certainly don’t understand why Apple should care, especially to the point of forcing their extended time-frame wishes on me.


Given a choice between spending $100 for a drive that shouldn’t be forced on me, or buying half a dozen reasonably decent bottles of wine……..


Setting my issues aside, does anything here point to why iBozz is having his problems?

Then Time Machine is probably unnecessary overkill for your purposes. CCC clones and APFS snapshots would probably work well for you.


Sounds like a plan to me. Personally I am partial to Chilean wines. I also like good Mexican wines when I can find them. They are often very reasonably priced but so much of their production goes to Europe they are hard to find.


Good point! All I can contribute is I ran into apparently erroneous out of space messages a few years ago on a Time Capsule backup set. The eventual “fix” involved erasing the Time Capsule drive and starting over from scratch. I have also observed that Time Machine backup messages often report very large backups that end up having little to almost no long term impact on Time Machine disk space utilization, especially when the backup includes pruning or condensing the backup sets so the numbers can be very misleading.

It would seem not, alas.

Unless someone comes up with a fix by next Monday (28th October) I'll erase the Time Machine and start over again. I can't think of anything vital that would be lost by so doing (famous last words which I may live to regret!) as vital files are with DropBox but it would be a shame to lose a year or so of security. I do have a clone of my old HD from a year or so ago when my then iMac died and I changed to a new one so at least I could go back to that if necessary.

And why further delay until Monday? This is not Brexit, the interminable delays in getting that resolved, whether ultimately we leave or remain, is a sore point for we poor souls based in the UK and living under what appear to be the most inept bunch of politicians that we have ever endured.

Macbeth would have advised that "If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well It were done quickly" Well, sound though Macbeth's words are, it is the first day when I actually have a day off and will have the time!

Thanks for the advice and for the other interesting tangential avenues which have developed and been explored during the course of this thread.

Unfortunately political ineptitude is all too common in all too many countries these days. Certainly we in the U.S. have no room to criticize the UK’s handling of BREXIT in light of what is going on in our capital. The inmates are running the asylum.