Time Machine says "There isn't enough space" and says I need 50 petabytes available to back up a one terabyte drive Time Machine hasn't backed up for a week. It says &quot;There isn't enough space,&quot; and yet there is plenty.
I'm backing up to a Western Digital My Passport with 5 TB capacity and 4.81 TB free. Time Machine correctly reports there is 4.81 TB.
I have a 1 TB hard drive on my MBP running Catalina. If I click on the options for Time Machine it says: &quot;Estimated size of full backup: 100.51 GB.&quot;
However, when I click on the red &quot;information&quot; &quot;i&quot; next to the Latest backup, it reports that it needs 50.21 PB (yes, PB) of space. What in the world? I already have things like ~/Dropbox excluded.
The comments got me pointed in the right direction. In my case it seemed to be all the Python virtual environments I have. I excluded all that I could find, including ~/.pyenv/. Would be sad to lose those, but not the end of the world. I'll have everything else in source control.