Just to wrap up: I have 2 Macs running and both backup drives quit around the same time(so I thought). Turns out the enclosures were defective, not the drives themselves. Two new enclosures @ $19.99 and all is well. By the way, LaCie enclosures don't work better or last any longer than el-cheapos. Shopping tip: If you're looking for a new hard drive, it is probably cheaper to buy one in an USB enclosure, remove it and throw out the enclosure. This same logic showed up at Home Depot where a 6 foot length of ABS pipe is $3.88 and a 3 foot length is $3.89. The seemingly constant backup spinner has been relegated to once-daily backups via 'Time Machine Editor'. By designating temporary movie files not to be backed up, I have reclaimed 100 Gb of drive space, thus allowing many more backups to be stored. By the way, you can erase a whole day's backup file, but not a folder within it. If you do drag a backup file out of the drive by mistake, it can't be put back - be careful. My apologies for writing a blog, but it's been a slow month in MUGLO- land. > >> Hi - my original problem - which led to the purchase of a new backup >> drive - was that the old one ran out of room - time machine wasn't >> overwriting as it backed up - I also couldn't find a way to erase >> the old drive! I'm hoping that I won't run into this problem >> again .... but as a precaution, I downloaded the time machine editor. >> > Manage your account options at //www.freelists.org/list/muglo Wayne Dobson pwdobson@xxxxxxxxxx (519) 474-1253 res. (519) 860-2725 cell --- Manage your account options at //www.freelists.org/list/muglo