Time Machine unable to complete backup

[samos]

Recently Time Machine takes forever to back to my 1TB external. There's still about 320GB of space, so I am not sure why this is happening.

I went ahead and deleted old backups that I can see in the TM folders. These are from ten years ago and not needed anymore. Even now, however, it seem to be taking too much time to backup.

The last backup said it needs 5 hours or more to complete, so I cancelled it when it was at 16 percent.

Do I need a new disk (this one seems fine but it is 8 years old and lightly used)?

Is there some TM setting that I need to know about to resolve this?

Thanks!

 

[TonyAguila]

Recently Time Machine takes forever to back to my 1TB external. There's still about 320GB of space, so I am not sure why this is happening.

I went ahead and deleted old backups that I can see in the TM folders. These are from ten years ago and not needed anymore. Even now, however, it seem to be taking too much time to backup.

The last backup said it needs 5 hours or more to complete, so I cancelled it when it was at 16 percent.

Do I need a new disk (this one seems fine but it is 8 years old and lightly used)?

Is there some TM setting that I need to know about to resolve this?

Thanks!

1TB for a Time Machine backup seems too small. What is the size of your System drive? Do you have any other external drives connected aside from Time Machine? Just to give you a perspective, my Mac Studio has a 4-TB internal drive, I have two 4-TB external SSDs connected to it, and two external Thunderbolt4 4-drive enclosures housing my three external Time Machine backup drives and miscellaneous data drives on the other five drives.

I have Time Machine set up to exclude most of the files on the external enclosure. In stead, I have most of that data backing up to other external drives using Carbon Copy Cloner. I know that it sounds like a nightmare setup, but I came up with that setup over many years and I can’t remember not being able to restore files from those archives, not one.

You probably have no need for anything close to what I have, but at the very least, you ought to have at least two external Time Machine drives, each at least 200% the size of your internal drive PLUS any other external drive(s) not counting Time Machine. Good luck!

 

[samos]

1TB for a Time Machine backup seems too small. What is the size of your System drive? Do you have any other external drives connected aside from Time Machine? Just to give you a perspective, my Mac Studio has a 4-TB internal drive, I have two 4-TB external SSDs connected to it, and two external Thunderbolt4 4-drive enclosures housing my three external Time Machine backup drives and miscellaneous data drives on the other five drives.

I have Time Machine set up to exclude most of the files on the external enclosure. In stead, I have most of that data backing up to other external drives using Carbon Copy Cloner. I know that it sounds like a nightmare setup, but I came up with that setup over many years and I can’t remember not being able to restore files from those archives, not one.

You probably have no need for anything close to what I have, but at the very least, you ought to have at least two external Time Machine drives, each at least 200% the size of your internal drive PLUS any other external drive(s) not counting Time Machine. Good luck!

First, apologies for the tardy reply. Here are the details you asked for:

System drive-256 GB
Format-Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
It's a Seagate 1 TB
Used space is 683 GB. Available space is 317 GB
No other
I have backups from my previous two Macs. Basically I created new backups once I bought newer Macs. There are a total of 3 backups.
There are also straightforward copy-paste backups of pictures, books, and audio files. These are of course outside the folder structure of the TM backups.
The TM disk is not partitioned
Yes, I have another external HDD. I use that one for simply copy-paste backup as needed. It mostly has my photo archives from years gone by.

In general, can you share advice or a link on how to selectively keep older files from previous years on TM? I would like to keep some link to the past, and not entirely delete the older data.
Thanks!

 

[TonyAguila]

First, apologies for the tardy reply. Here are the details you asked for:

System drive-256 GB
Format-Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
It's a Seagate 1 TB
Used space is 683 GB. Available space is 317 GB
No other
I have backups from my previous two Macs. Basically I created new backups once I bought newer Macs. There are a total of 3 backups.
There are also straightforward copy-paste backups of pictures, books, and audio files. These are of course outside the folder structure of the TM backups.
The TM disk is not partitioned
Yes, I have another external HDD. I use that one for simply copy-paste backup as needed. It mostly has my photo archives from years gone by.

In general, can you share advice or a link on how to selectively keep older files from previous years on TM? I would like to keep some link to the past, and not entirely delete the older data.
Thanks!

In general, Time Machine will back up your whole drive plus all other external drives attached to the Mac. Then, in General -> Time Machine, click on Options and you will be able to select external attached drives to add or exclude from the backup. So as long as you keep the desired data on the main drive and attached drives, you will have to copy or move the data to an external drive or partition and then EXCLUDE that drive or partition from the list. Does that make sense? In short, TM will back up everything except the devices on the EXCLUDE list.