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My MacBook Pro is the 250 GB model.

I have a 320 GB external hard drive I am using as a time machine backup disk.

Right now the 320 GB hard drive has 16.14 GB of free space remaining.

The last two backups I tried today both failed because "the disk is full".

I don't see how this can be possible since Time Machine says

The oldest backups are deleted when your disk becomes full.

How do I force it to backup?

Preferably without wiping the whole disk and making a brand new backup (I don't want to lose all incremental history).

minseong
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  • @klanomath I am scared of the answers on that question bc I assumed time machine kept incremental backups, so deleting the older ones would lose a lot of information – minseong Dec 08 '19 at 14:44
  • If the automated TM clean-up doesn't work, you have to do it manually. TM removes the oldest backup(s) first. Deleting the oldest backups manually does exactly the same. – klanomath Dec 08 '19 at 14:50
  • @klanomath how did I run out of space... tmutil listbackups shows only two backups.... – minseong Dec 11 '19 at 16:14
  • @klanomath wow ffs... tmutil listbackups shows 2 backups, so I run delete on the volume/computer_name and now it's showing me so many tens of backups being deleted... how come listbackup doesn't show these. I would have wanted to delete only the older backups. – minseong Dec 11 '19 at 17:00
  • From the linked older q&a: You can use the tmutil tool to delete backups one by one. sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/drive_name/Backups.backupdb/mac_name/YYYY-MM-DD-hhmmss – klanomath Dec 11 '19 at 17:02
  • @klanomath to do that I of course need to see what the names of the older backups are, which I tried to lookup using tmutil listbackups but see my above comments for the problems I had – minseong Dec 11 '19 at 17:28
  • If you check the folder /Volumes/backup_drive_name/Backups.backupdb/mac_name/ with the Finder, you will see all snapshot folders (YYYY-MM-DD-hhmmss). If tmutil listbackups shows less snapshots something's fundamentally wrong with your TM config/history. – klanomath Dec 11 '19 at 18:35

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