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Yosemite warning!

Avatar Michael Corgan
Had this from the organiser of the Bath & Bristol MUG:
With regards to Yosemite/Time Machine - I installed the upgrade last night and thought no more about it. This morning I the message telling me that my Time Machine disk was full popped up. I get these once ever six months or so. Time Machine isn’t the best piece of software. Rather than check if it has enough space prior to performing a backup it’ll start the backup and then tell you it’s run out of space. I then delete an ancient backup and it’s usually happy again for another 6 months or so.

When the message popped up I thought it’d just be a case of hopping into the Time Machine backups, deleting the oldest backup and then that would be it for another six months. Well, I went in there, and the only backup was from last night! Not only that, but it’d backup up one of my external drives twice! - Iomega and then an Iomega1!

After much digging around and getting nowhere I wiped Time Machine, and am currently performing an initial backup. 17 hours remaining!


So be sure that you have a back up of your Mac hard drive elsewhere before installing to Yosemite!

Re: Yosemite warning!

Avatar Mick Burrell
He (she?) and I would need to disagree about Time Machine. I think it's an excellent piece of software but it's also an extremely complex database of files with links to older versions stored on the disc. The last thing I think you should do is "delve" into the backups and start deleting stuff as these links will get broken resulting in data not being accessible. The only safe way to retrieve data from a Time Machine backup is to use the Time Machine application.

When you use TM as intended, each incremental backup is not huge so if your disc is full, TM is capable of deleting old backups to make room. However, if your disc is full and there is a large amount of data to copy e.g. new OS or attached to a new machine then given enough free space, TM copes but I have found in the past that if there is little space it can give up. As an example, I was helping someone who had bought a new machine but copied all data over from the old. On attaching her TM drive, there was 355GB to copy and only 2.5GB of free space. In these circumstances TM could not automatically free up space - nor could i!
 
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