"Quota violation warning" & Time Machine stopped working

How many Macs are you backing up using Time Machine?

On your Mac if you select the Time Machine icon on the Menu Bar, go to Open Time Machine Preferences and click Options what is the estimated size of a full backup?

Just one Mac backing up to the drive and the current estimated size is 170.43GB.

Time Machine is stating that there is "Zero KB of 805.31GB" available on the drive, but I presumed that's the trigger for it to start deleting old backups...

I have the same issue with an Nv+

Hello all,
I had the same problem occur today on a Duo with 2*1tb drives with radiator 4.1.8. I've been using the Duo for TM backups for two years with almost no issues. I too thought that TM would just start deleting old backups once the limit set in Frontview was reached. I'm now using a Macbook Pro (2010) but previously used a Macbook to backup using TM. When the error occurred, the mac locked up and I had to hard reset to get it going again. As above, system preferences say Zero kb available.

I just got this error a few minutes ago:

Disk block limit reached on volume C for user 'ReadyNAS'. Disk space used: 1536000 MB (Limits: 1536000 MB soft, 1536000 MB hard) User 'ReadyNAS' is now prevented from using additional disk space -- grace time has expired..

I logged into my ReadyNAS and went to the TimeMachine section, thinking I could just increase the capacity that TimeMachine can use. The capacity was configured for 1500GB yet the max was configured: (Max:919). I couldn't seem to increase the value that TimeMachine can use, even though I still have free space available on my NAS.

Does anyone know how I can increase the space available for my TimeMachine backups? I have 4 Macs in my house backing up to it. It has worked well for years, until today...

Hi there,

I had this exact set of issues / error messages in my console log a few days ago on my ReadyNAS Duo. It appeared that the sparse bundle had go to big for the space allocated and I could not increase the space allocated in front view because the required larger number was already bigger than the free space [despite of course the fact it should have known the prior figure was already available - overzealous error checking - e.g. TM max size was 180GB on a RAID-1 500GB drive setup at the point of overrun free space was listed as 179GB, given the initial 180GB was already allocated I should have been able to increase the size in front view but could not as 180 was already > the 179 free space].

The solution for me was to:
1) Stop Time Machine
2) Mount the ReadyNAS share directly in finder and copy the sparse bundle to my Mac
3) Now I had more free space I could increase the TM size in front view to 260GB
3) I increased the size of my spare bundle as well for good measure [hdiutil resize -size Xg /path/to/file]
4) I copied the sparse bundle back
5) I moved the local copy of the spare bundle on my Mac to a folder excluded from TM backups
6) Turn TM back on....everything started working for me now, no hanging, no errors in log, backup completed
7) delete the local copy of the sparse bundle to save space.

Hope that helps someone else fix their issues. Good luck all.

I ended up deleting the TM sparsebundle with ssh (although I had to rename it because even with '\' instead of spaces I couldn't delete it). I made sure I had a backup of all my important files first. Once that was done I reset my max size in frontview making sure it was a fair way under the max allowable and started the backup. I must admit TM found the readynas immediately and started backing up immediately as well (and all has been fine since). Prior to this TM could take quite a while to locate the readynas and could take a long time preparing. I'm not sure if it was due to the changes in Snow Leopard and Lion or the fact that the sparsebundle is much smaller at the moment, but it's definitely faster now. All in all probably worth the hassle (hopefully it won't recur in future).