Timemachine & External Harddrive Errors

[Lifejuggler]

Hello

i feel like I’m in a bit of a pickle & am running out of time before my Mac mini collapses! Any help, most welcome!

I have a 1TB Mac mini from 2012 and a 2TB ext harddrive I am using as the timemachine. I also have a separate extra hard drive that I copy things to for safety every so often. I intended using the latter drive as media storage but never got it setup correctly. now when I try to open it, it says I don’t have permission. Also in my wisdom years ago I partitioned the 2TB drive, and I cannot seem to alter that without deleting all the contents. I have all my previous CDs & DVDs copied onto my Mac and play everything through the iTunes client. In the interim I have also bought music & films on iTunes directly.

so my issue is that my Mac has about 90gb of space remaining and is now refusing to play locally stored films. the last backup according to the timemachine is a week ago. I have copied most of my photos to google photo (for backups) but still have the Photos client with 9000images which now won’t open. I was trying to export those to google photos too but when you try to export the system just hangs and then crashes.

so what do I do? I think I need to get the movies & music onto a different drive to be able to clear them from the Mac mini (they’re using most of the storage space) but trying to get them copied is proving really hard, and I don’t know if another external drive or cloud storage is the best option. Or will work at all?

any advice, really welcome,

TIA

Jane

 

[TonyAguila]

90 gigs available space in a 1-terabyte drive is critically low. I would leave the 2-terabyte Time Machine drive alone for now if Time Machine is unable to create regular backups. Theoretically it should be more than sufficient but if the other external drive is also being backed up, then it can be a problem.

I suggest getting another external drive. (They are more affordable nowadays.) Then start deleting files that you don’t need—i.e., move to Trash and then Empty Trash. Keep doing it until you get the internal drive down to about 800 gigabytes. If you cannot achieve that, start copying to the new external the larger, more important files. When you are confident with the copy operation, trash and empty-trash the same files until you get down to 800 gigs, at most, on the internal.

With the (old) external 2-gig NOT connected, run Time Machine. It should work because TM will delete older backups whenever necessary. It just needs enough “breathing room” to perform temporary swaps and storage.

Please post an update after you get to that point, or if things are still not working properly.

 

[Lifejuggler]

Thank you so much for your speedy response Tony, I will give it a go over the next couple of days & let you know. thanks again!