Due to the Thunderbolt 1.2 update, I had to restore from a Time Machine Backup, but after that, Time Machine won't do incremental back up any more.
The hard drive has 250GB of free space… It was 1TB and is used for backing up the iMac 27 inch which has about 700GB for the Mac partition (the other 300GB is for Bootcamp).
So after the restore, it won't incrementally back up any more. It would try to back up everything from scratch and will fail because it tries to back up about 600GB into the 250GB free space and will stop.
Is there a way to make it work again?
Best Answer
Four options are available for you - none of them is a clear winner that works in all cases:
tmutil inheritbackup
commandThis last option has gotten me over the hump several times when clients cannot afford to lose their backup. I image their backup drive before starting (just in case) and then use the Time Machine System Preference options to exclude most of the drive. The first option is the most precise if you are comfortable with the terminal application and command line tools.
By excluding everything except perhaps /Library and /System you should be between 10 and 30 GB for the estimated size of a Full Backup and Time Machine will let you make a new backup. Then the trick is to slowly remove items from the exclusion list in stages to not have the next backup estimate exceed the remaining free space on your backup volume.