Topic: Memory issues

[6pairsofshoes]

I have an imac with 1T HD hooked up to an external 2T HD running Time Machine.  I have another 2T external to store media (movies, tv shows, music).  Recently, I got some memory prompts on my imac so I threw out about 100G of unnecessary files, moving some to the 2T for that purpose.

The info specs on the imac HD now say Capacity: 1.03 TB
Available: 125.64GB (107.4 GV purgeable)
Used: 1,000,511,946,752 bytes (1TB on disc)

Is there something I didn't do that I should have to clear the HD space?  It looks like my efforts to get rid of that 100GB weren't entirely successful.
Also keep getting error messages re: Time Machine can't back up.  The 2T HD that is supposed to take the backups has only 200G free.  I'm kind of scratching my head as to how to resolve this.  I don't need every iteration of my imac HD saved on there, only the most recent month or so.  I feel like I'm in over my head.
Any advice about how to resolve this will be very welcome.

[6pairsofshoes]

Big Sur.  Not the most current, but often when I upgrade some of my other apps need replacing because they are no longer compatible, and that's such a pita that I've been reluctant to do so.  It's not clear to me why failing to upgrade would cause this.  But I guess I could wipe the external clean and then do a new backup.  Or were you suggesting I wipe the imac and then restore?
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.

[6pairsofshoes]

Big Sur prefers APFS (in fact the OS will have automatically converted the drive it is on to APFS), but your Time Machine is probably HFS+ (if it predates High Sierra). Thus there is a time bomb that likely wouldn't survive a transition to Monterey, and appears to have already happened. To recover you need to start again (which is no great loss, as the Time Machine you have is already likely unusable). This is bloody irritating, because Apple could/ should have warned folk of this before encouraging them to upgrade.

The file system is also likely behind your mac space issues, as APFS uses magic rather than common sense, so mere mortals have almost no chance of understanding the relationship between used space and free space. But if you are stuck with a "too-full" drive, the only real way of getting space back is to reformat the drive and restore from a back up, but you don't want to do this unless you are absolutely rock-solid 100% certain that you have a recoverable back up.

Thank you.  I guess I can do a second time machine on the second external for a secure backup and then wipe the imac assuming that one of the backups will work.  I'll probably move some of the work related files to a laptop or something so I can be sure I won't lose those.  It's one thing to lose a tv series but quite another to lose work.

[6pairsofshoes]

And just like that, everything is back to normal and I didn't do anything except maybe restart the computer a couple times.  Go figure.

It would be nice to understand why it did that.  The Time Machine prompts that were popping up every minute or so have stopped, too.

[dweez]

As an IT professional, I love it when things magically fix themselves </sarcasm>

[6pairsofshoes]

Yup. The same with cars: when you get a fault light that magically goes out you can't tell if it is fixed, or lurking waiting to strike when you least need it. At leat if you did something to fix it you can be (possibly falsely) assured that it is fixed.

Yeah.  I am not sure why it did this in the first place and it bothers me that it persisted for a couple of days and then went back to normal.  I try to keep the HD space reasonably free, meaning, leaving about 50-100G free.  Maybe I got too close to full and this happened.  It's not clear why it didn't reset itself after I threw out 100G of material and emptied the trash.  I probably should go into the Applications folder and throw out some obsolete apps, too.  I don't like when things happen that I don't understand or can't explain, so I'll keep an eye on this.  I've resisted upgrading the system since it often means having to locate and download new software for various applications.  That's time consuming and interrupts other work.

[dweez]

Yup. The same with cars: when you get a fault light that magically goes out you can't tell if it is fixed, or lurking waiting to strike when you least need it. At leat if you did something to fix it you can be (possibly falsely) assured that it is fixed.

In my head, now the fault light is faulty too.

[smokester]

I've become so fond of my fault lights that I've named them. Agreed, it's usually "scallywag", but it's a name after all.

[kayos0826]

remember folks... format C:
fixes all the lights....lol

[smokester]

remember folks... format C:
fixes all the lights....lol

Man! them were the days. Now I think of it, I can't remember a time in the last 10 years when I've had to do that.