I have a mystery with time machine. I used to have a computer which I backed up all the time. I've used time machine since it was invented and they used to sell a little white box that was the "machine". So i'm not new at this.
When we changed to using external drives and apple didn't provide the white boxes odd things started happening. The current problem is this:
When I changed to a new lap top I asked it to "start new backup". My assumption being it the old one would be preserved from the old computer in case I ever needed it. The new one would just start running.
FYI - the external drive is 10TB so there is LOTS of room (or should be).
My computer is called "Pternotus"
I do not back up every day, but at intervals I plug in my lap top and run the time machine. I did it yesterday. You can see in one of my pictures a back with 2026-09-19 (yesterday).
The acutal external disk is called expansion and that's where the old computer back up is (that's what time machien settings tells me).
The new computer should be "backups of Pteronotus" but it seems to have generated multiple version of this.
When i open time machine settings there is only one and it tells me it can't back up because there is no space on the external disk. This is because all those duplicate versions have back ups and it can't seem to access them to delete the oldest and replace the way it should.
So... what do i do? manually go in and delete the contents of all these versions? Then ignore them and hope it starts properly making backups in the one it can access?
I'd really like to get rid of all those duplicates, but i can't see how. I can "eject them" but I can't delete them. When I plug the drive back in, they are there again.
Notice.. that in the picture of them open, the dates are not chronological. It looks like sometimes it backed up to one, sometimes to another?
I would rather not erase and reformat this external drive, I don't really want to delete the old computer that is back up on the original drive. It's all these new partitions (?) that seem to have been created by time machine when I told it to start new back up that are somehow simply not really working.
Ideas?
Thanks
B
I don't know how they were created, I don't know how to get rid of them. They seem to be "full" of back ups we can't replace.