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For now more than 2 weeks, I cannot backup my internal hard drive with Time Machine. I have backed up to 2 external hard drive (external hard drive number 1 and 2) that worked fine so far, but the backups were not going forward although I connected them many hours (until days) to my machine.

I bought a new external hard drive (external hard drive number 3, 2TB), twice the size of my internal hard drive (1TB) and Time Machine filled completely the 2TB external hard drive, did not complete the backup and when I tried to back up actively again with this hard drive, I had an error message saying "Time Machine couldn’t complete the backup to “Bckp_all_04”: "The backup disk needs 968.60 GB for the backup but only 100.00 GB are available. Select a larger backup disk or make the backup smaller by excluding files."

What shall I do?

ecjb
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  • In DiskUtility, what format method did you use to to format this new external hard drive? You should be using AFPS or HFS+ at the very least. – IconDaemon Apr 03 '23 at 11:19
  • Does this answer your question? How can I manually delete old backups to free space for Time Machine? – Allan Apr 03 '23 at 12:56
  • thank you for your answer @IconDaemon. I will reformat the disk and try again with the external hard drive number 3. But what I find weird is that previously working external hard drives (number 1 and 2) are hanging forever – ecjb Apr 03 '23 at 13:01
  • @Allan no it does not answer the question. As stated in the question, the external hard drive (2TB) has been freshly bought, therefore has no old backups on it and is twice the size as the internal hard drive (1TB). It should therefore also not have any capacity issue – ecjb Apr 03 '23 at 13:33
  • Disk format is actually APFS, not AFPS. Damn my dyslexic keyboard ... – IconDaemon Apr 03 '23 at 13:52
  • Are you connecting these drives directly to the Mac, or through some sort of Dock or hub? – IconDaemon Apr 03 '23 at 13:53
  • Check the free space on the internal disk, sometimes this message is not related to the external TM disk, but the internal. Time Machine needs to guarantee there is sufficient space for snapshots. From personal experience I've found forgotten Trash contents to be a prime suspect. You can clear up snapshots on the internal disk also, through Disk Utility. – Andy Griffiths Apr 03 '23 at 13:53
  • @IconDaemon Yes! I have a docking station! :). So I don't remember what I did previously but now the external hard drive is directly connected to the computer. And the computer is connected to the docking station (on which the wireless keyboard, the mouse and the screen are connected) – ecjb Apr 03 '23 at 14:23
  • @IconDaemon I erased the disk once again with disk utility with the following format: APFS, case sensitive and following scheme: GUID partition map. But I am 99% sure that I used the APFS format on previous atempt where it failed. So we'll see but I am not sure it will solve the problem – ecjb Apr 03 '23 at 14:26
  • @AndyGriffiths I just emptied the bin. Let's see if it helps solving the problem – ecjb Apr 03 '23 at 14:29
  • So after I emptied the bin, I tried 2 other time (formatting, erasing the content and starting the backup on an empty external hard drive): the problem persists: the external hard drives gets completely filled and the backup cannot be completed – ecjb Apr 05 '23 at 06:53

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