Shine a spotlight on the solutions to your most irritating Mac problems

> Create space on your backup storage

I’ve been backing up with Time Machine to a pair of mirrored 1TB hard disks on my NAS. Now Time Machine tells me that storage is full, and won’t free up space for more backups…

As your backup storage becomes full, Time Machine tries to thin your old backups to create free space to accommodate new ones, but there’s a limit to what it can achieve without removing some of the files you have backed up there. It will then inform you that its storage is full, and you can either provide it with a fresh backup volume with ample free space, or delete some of your old backups. Your existing networked storage is relatively small, and is only likely to last a short time before it becomes full. The best solution, if you want to keep your existing backups, is to swap those 1TB hard disks for a pair of 2TB or larger drives, and archive the old ones so you can still retrieve old files from them if necessary. After synchronizing the new drives in your NAS, create a new backup store in APFS format and add that as the destination for Time Machine’s backups. It will then perform a lengthy full backup before resuming its normal service with more free space.