Time Machine not automatically deleting old backups My MacBook is currently using around 180GB of its internal drive. However, when I plug in my 250GB external drive to make backups of my Mac, I incessantly get the error &quot;your backup drive does not have enough storage to perform the backup.&quot;
My backup drive still has 15GB free. From my understanding, older backups should be deleted to make space for newer ones. Is there any reason why Time Machine does not automatically delete the older backups to make space for the newer one?
If you wish to delete your biggest backups (because Time Machine won't do it automatically), you can download TimeTracker, which will calculate the size of each backup, as well as show you which files are taking up space. From there, you can:

decide to delete all backups of a file (by using the Time Machine UI and selecting &quot;delete all backups of 'file'&quot;)
Add the large file(s) to System Preferences &gt; Time Machine &gt; Options &gt; Ignored files
Delete an entire single backup by opening Terminal, typing sudo tmutil delete  and dragging, from finder, the backup you wish to delete. It should say something like this in the end: sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/Backup\ Drive/Backups.backupdb/My\ Mac/2020-08-27-150021