Time Machine Could Not Back Up

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Level 1

4 points

Time Machine Could Not Back Up

My computer hasn't backed up since

"Time Machine couldn’t complete the backup to “LaCie”". ("LaCie" is my backup drive)

"Time Machine could not back up the disk “Macintosh HD” because a snapshot of the disk could not be created."

I've been getting these messages for several days now. I don't know how to get Time Machine working again. I have nearly 3 TB available on my backup drive, so that is not the problem. My 2020 iMac recently updated to Monterey 12.5, but I believe I had this problem before the update. Any ideas?

iMac 27″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Aug 7, 2022 09:34 PM

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Answer 1

Tesserax

Level 10

157,278 points

Aug 28, 2022 10:35 AM in response to Dottie_5

This message typically indicates that your source drive may not have enough space for Time Machine (TM) to create a snapshot. With Monterey, TM first creates a complete snapshot of your Mac's data drive onto itself. This drive is, by default, called Macintosh HD - Data. It then compares what has changed, and then creates a second snapshot onto the destination drive. Since you state that the latter drive has plenty of space, I would suspect that your source drive may be the issue.

... and if this turns out to be the case, one solution would be to delete all existing snapshots on your source drive to create the needed space. It would also behoove you to see if you can unload some apps/data from your source drive as well.

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Time Machine Could Not Back Up

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