How to prevent Time Machine from ejecting volume?

I just set up a Buffalo Cloustor NAS (which is working very nicely, thank you) and one of its features is that it plays nice with Time Machine backups. I also recently took advantage of a MacUpdate promo on Back-In-Time. BIT works fine as long as the NAS backup volume is mounted but for some reason Time Machine ejects that volume when it's finished its backups. I've seen similar problems in threads of non-Lion version of OSX but they seemed to be troubles with USB or FW drives rather than an Ethernet NAS. I'd rather keep the NAS volume mounted so I can use this 3rd party app.
Here is a copy of the console messages filtered on "time machine" for the relevant time period:
3/24/12 7:11:03.180 PM
com.apple.backupd
Disk image /Volumes/cloudshare/Mini2009’s Mac mini.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
3/24/12 7:11:03.196 PM
com.apple.backupd
Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
3/24/12 7:12:37.276 PM
com.apple.backupd
Ejected Time Machine disk image.
3/24/12 7:12:37.678 PM
com.apple.backupd
Ejected Time Machine network volume.
Is there a way of telling Time Machine to not eject when finished? I'm comfortable writing stuff using Terminal if that's what it takes.
Thanks!
-Tod

BordeauxQuill wrote:
If it is useful to anyone else, these are Western Digital My Passport Studio 640GB drives.
Yup, you're the 3rd or 4th to report it with various models of WDs (one fellow had 3 of them!), and a few weeks ago someone had some Iomegas, I think, too.
This confusion may well also explain some weird stats in Get Info I noticed last week (such as the drive apparently having used more bytes than its capacity, as I recall).
Quite likely.
Thank you for your support. I shall come back and mark the thread resolved when I have reformatted the drive.
Cool. Also double-check the contents of the one you don't erase; you may find some extra stuff there.

Similar Messages

How to PREVENT Time Machine from switching disks

I have two USB drives. I use one for iTunes and the second for Time Machine backups. Problem is, when I plug in the iTunes disk, if the Time Machine disk is not connected then Time Machine switches to this disk and initiates a backup. I have specified in Preferences that the other disk is for TM; also tried 'locking' the preferences screen. But, still TM continues to start backups onto this iTunes disk when I plug it in (assuming, as above, that its regular disk is unavailable).
How can I prevent TM from doing this; and force it to wait until its own drive is available? Have checked forums and found no answer. Any help appreciated. Thank you.

BordeauxQuill wrote:
If it is useful to anyone else, these are Western Digital My Passport Studio 640GB drives.
Yup, you're the 3rd or 4th to report it with various models of WDs (one fellow had 3 of them!), and a few weeks ago someone had some Iomegas, I think, too.
This confusion may well also explain some weird stats in Get Info I noticed last week (such as the drive apparently having used more bytes than its capacity, as I recall).
Quite likely.
Thank you for your support. I shall come back and mark the thread resolved when I have reformatted the drive.
Cool. Also double-check the contents of the one you don't erase; you may find some extra stuff there.

How to prevent time machine from deleting certain backup folders?

So, I have problem undrestanding time machine. Time machine has made a backup of my files in Nov 2012 and another backup from Jan 2013. There is some files in Nov 2012 that I want to keep them forever and never be deleted. So, they were backed up by Time machine (I have deleted those files from my computer so they're no lonegr excist in my compuetr). Althought they do excist on my time machine under the Nov 2012 folder, I am not able to modify them at all for example, I'm not allowed to copy them somehwere else. Since, I can not make another copy of them, I am worried if time machine delete my Nov 2012 in future and then they will be gone. Can someone please help me in modifying/ controling my folder so it won't be deleted in future?

You are using Time Machine incorrectly, your files will be deleted from Time Machine after you delete them from your Mac, the only variable is when.
Time Machine is a backup, not a storage system.
Restore them now and copy them to long term storage (another hard drive)

How to stop time machine from backing up encrypted lion partition

I am using 10.6.8 but I created a Lion partition on the same disk. I am trying out Lion and I do not want Time Machine to back it up. I was able to exclude the Lion volume until I encrypted the Lion partition using Filevault 2. Now when I'm using Snow Leopard, there doesn't seem to be a way of preventing Time Machine from backing up the Lion partition. Am I missing something?

The FAQ says Snow Leopard can't read the Filevault 2 disk which seems to imply I won't be able to keep Time Machine from backing up the Lion partition. That seems wrong. How can Snow Leopard's Time Machine see the disk to back it up, but can't see it to exclude from backup?

How to disable Time Machine from backing up to hard drive

Mountain Lion (OSX 10.8) will not install onto iMac (under OSX 10.7.4) because: "hard drive is Time Machime backup disk" error message. However, TM Preferences does not show the iMac HD as a TM backup Location Option - it only shows the LaCie External Drive - which has been the storage drive receiving the Time Machine Backup. How do I remove/prevent Time Machine from looking for and/or backing up to the iMac Hard Drive if the TM Pref does not list the iMac Hard Drive as an option? Note: The iMac HD icon on the desktop is a "Time Machine image" (blue Drive icon w/white white counter clockwise arrow). Thanks.

Check to see if you have a file called backups.backupdb on the hard drive you are attempting to update.
If the install procedure see such a file, it might think that it is a TM backup drive.
Allan

How to stop Time Machine from backing up Temp Files?

Hi folks!
I am trying to find out how to stop Time Machine from constantly backing up 'useless' temporary files accumulated from web browsing? Although I don't change or add large files to my HD, Time Machine backs up hundreds of MBs every hour. Those file amounts make sense when I consider that I browse a lot to YouTube, SoundCloud, etc to watch videos or listen to music - I just don't want them to be backed up.
Under Time Machine Options I already excluded the following items from backups:
~/Library/Caches
/Library/Caches
~/Downloads
But even though I did this weeks ago, Time Machine stills finds large files to be backed up every hour and my only guess is that I am still missing a location where either Safari or Firefox - the two web browsers I use - store temporary files.
Can you help?
Thanks a lot in advance!

oas2103 wrote:
they come from my anti-virus software
Are you sure you need that? There are no viruses that run on OSX. None. Zip. Zero.
If you're running Windoze on your Mac, that's the same as running it on a PC, so it needs all the same anti-everything stuff you'd use on a PC.
There is some "malware," such as Trojans, for Macs, though. But (unlike viruses that can get onto your system without your knowledge), you must approve their installation (via your Admin password) and/or operation (via the "This application was downloaded from the internet ..." prompt).
Appropriately enough, some of these Trojans are included in pirated versions of Apple software, such as iWork!
For the gory details, see Thomas Reed's [Mac Virus Guide|http://www.reedcorner.net/thomas/guides/macvirus].
Thanks a lot again!
You're quite welcome, and thanks for posting back.

Unable to prevent Time Machine backing up volume mounted from sparsebundle

I have a password-protected sparsebundle that contains my financial files, private data, etc, which I mount as a volume at startup. It's about 8GB. If I'm going to be away from my computer for a bit, I'll unmount the volume as an extra security measure.
I don't need or want Time Machine to back up the files INSIDE the volume, just the sparsebundle itself. If I needed to access a backup of a file inside the volume, I'd rather just pull up an earlier version of the sparsebundle, mount it, and find the file in there.
However, I've recently discovered that I can't exclude the mounted volume from Time Machine backups in the usual way - the volume name is greyed out when I go through the System Preferences/Time Machine pane, and won't let me select it to be excluded from backup.
So what's happening is that TM is backing up the contents of the volume, which is showing up as folders on the TM backup drive. Inside these folders is the complete listing (and actual data) of all the files in my secured volume!
Even if I UNmount the volume from my system, it's still possible to access the data via Time Machine.app (and via Finder, on the TM backup disk).
So, essentially, even though I've password protected the sparsebundle CONTAINING the data, all a person needs to get the data is to have access to my user account on my Mac, and they can get the data via the above methods.
Is there any way to allow TM to back up the sparsebundle itself, but not the listing of the contents (and data) of the mounted image?
It seems odd that I can exclude the volume contents from being indexed by Spotlight, but can't exclude them from being specifically backed up by Time Machine.
Thanks in advance for any assistance!

I have exactly the same issue. I cannot exclude the content of mounted disk images from my backup using the GUI (strangely on my other computer the content is not backuped).
I have manually edited with a text editor the preference file (Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist) today (I am using 10.6.3) and added in the SkipPaths section the mounting point of the disk image (typically /Volumes/NameofDisk ). So far so good. The corresponding folder appears in the backup but is empty.
Use at your own risk

How can I prevent Time Machine from deleting a backup?

I just want to make one particular backup immune to Time Machine's auto-delete function. It's the one I used to migrate from my old computer to my current one. I tried to just drag-copy it on to a different drive, but apparently I don't have permission to copy my own computer's backups... weird.
Anyway, there's got to be a way to lock this particular backup. I going to have to keep Time Machine off until I can find out how.

Explodey wrote:
There's always a way, with a little ingenuity. I just went to Get Info for that backup and changed the system privilege to "read only." And if that doesn't work, I'm sure something else will.
I am sure of one thing that you are going to end up breaking Time Machine which in all likelihood you will not discover until you need to recovery data from it.
Agreat source of information on Time Machine can be found at http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html

How to restore time machine from wireless hard drive?

I backed up my data to a wireless hard drive before I wiped my hard drive. But now I'm having trouble restoring it.
Can't restore it from time machine, as it was not fully complete.
Migration assistant asks for a password to the hard drive, which I don't know. The person in my family who bought the drive entered it, but then migration asssistant greys out continue and nothing seems to happen
I opened the hard drive myself and there's a bunch of blank files named 01 349 049 984 and such. No extension.
Help?

The exhaustive list of backup devices supported by Time Machine consists of Time Capsule and locally connected and mounted volumes, period. Time Machine can use NAS devices, but there are many caveats including but not limited to the necessity for AFP to be running on the server. Wireless storage devices introduce yet another element of uncertainty.
OS X Mountain Lion: Disks you can use with Time Machine
Anything else, and you're a test pilot. Let Apple know how it works for you.

How to stop Time Machine from creating entirely new backup of external drive?

I've included an external drive to be backed up into Time Machine. For a few days, the drive was disconnected, however, so only Macintosh HD was getting backed up. I recently re-added the external drive. However, now it appears that since the external wasn't included in the most recent backups, it's decided to re-backup the entire drive.
Is there any way to prevent it from backing up the entire external drive and instead just backup the changes made, or is that not possible because there is a gap in the backups made for the external?

First, the amount that TM says it's going to back up is not necessarily the amount it will back up. You'll only know that when the backup finishes.
I haven't tried this myself, but it may be that after you exclude a volume, TM loses continuity with the previous snapshot. In that case, future backups should be incremental, as long as you don't exclude the volume again.

How to stop time machine from filling up trash

I've been using time machine to backup my mac and I've noticed that whenever it deletes old backups to make room for the new ones it leaves my trash bin with about 30,000 files. This takes up a lot a space and is very time consuming to empty. Does anybody know how to prevent it from sending the old files to the trash or have any suggestions period? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Fox 8991 wrote:
I've been using time machine to backup my mac and I've noticed that whenever it deletes old backups to make room for the new ones it leaves my trash bin with about 30,000 files. This takes up a lot a space and is very time consuming to empty. Does anybody know how to prevent it from sending the old files to the trash or have any suggestions period? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
That's not how it should work, and something I've never seen on this forum. We do see this when people delete backups manually, via the Finder (which can cause all sorts of troubles).
How large is your internal HD, and how much data is on it?
Where does TM put your backups (external drive, Time Capsule)?
Click here to download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window.
Navigate to a backup where this happened, copy and post the messages here, please.

Prevent Time Machine from changing device icon...

When I use Time Machine on a disk, it changes the icon. In my particular circumstance, I don't want to do this as the attached device is a Drobo containing lots of other stuff, and I'd rather keep the default icon (a nice picture of the Drobo itself).
How do I do this?

Thomas A Reed wrote:
You should not be mixing Time Machine backups and other data on the same volume. TM will fill the volume, which will make it difficult to work with other files on that volume.
As I understand it, Time Machine only performs differential backups, so unless I'm regularly creating and destroying large amounts of data, it probably won't use much disk space at all?
If you wish to do this, you should partition the Drobo into two volumes, one for the TM backups and one for the other stuff.
An annoying feature of Drobo (that I discovered after purchasing) is that their website both recommends and discourages this! The Drobo software only works properly if you create one volume using Drobo dashboard. If you partition the disk, Drobo then only sees (and reports on) the first partition. Adding more disks to (or upgrading disk capacity in) the Drobo only increases the size of the second partition, so you have to make the first one your fixed-size Time Machine partition. When I tried this, it seemed to affect the blue lights on the front of the Drobo, which also only reported on the Time Machine partition - the very partition I don't care about as Time machine manages itself!
Of course, if you do that, be aware that backing up data from one partition onto the TM backup on another partition is no good... it would all still be on the same drive, and thus all gone when the drive fails.
This is only true of a single external disk. In a RAID (or RAID-like) system, when a single drive fails, your data is preserved while you source a replacement disk.
Anyway, all of this is a distraction from my original post, which remains unanswered.

How to stop Time Machine from polling disks

I have shut off Time Machine in system preferences but it continuously asks if I want to use it with a disk that is attached.
The questions is simple - how can I stop this from happening?
I have already tried:
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup -bool YES
It still continues to harass me daily. Any suggestions appreciated!

I may have spoke to soon. I think I finally squashed the prompts with the terminal command I noted above.
Essentially what you are saying is let TM set up a preference file then shut it off - that would probably work. Thanks for the suggestion - if I get the prompt again from TM I will try your idea.

How to stop Time Machine from constantly asking do I want to use it.

Every time I use my SuperDuper app to backup to my external drives I get the pesky "do you want to use Time Machine to backup to that drive?" I say "Don't Use," but it never "remembers" and asks everytime I do a backup. Is there any way to convince it I really don't want to use it!

When you decline a prompt from Time Machine to use a volume as a backup destination, an invisible, empty marker file named ".com.apple.timemachine.donotpresent" is written to the top level of the volume. If that file is deleted (for example, because the volume has been erased or cleaned up somehow) or if it can't be written at all (for example, because the volume is in Windows NTFS format), then you'll be prompted again the next time the volume is mounted.
If you can't determine why the marker file is being deleted or you can't do anything about it, you have the option of disabling all automatic prompts to adopt a backup volume.
Back up all data before proceeding.
These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
Please triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup -bool YES
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.
Launch the built-in Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
Paste into the Terminal window by pressing the key combination command-V. I've tested these instructions only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, you may have to press the return key after pasting. You'll be prompted for your login password. Nothing will be displayed when you type it. Type carefully and then press return. If you don’t have a login password, you’ll need to set one before you can run the command. You may get a one-time warning to be careful. Confirm. You don't need to post the warning.
If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator. Log in as one and start over.
Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign ($) to appear below what you entered. You can then quit Terminal. The change will take effect the next time you restart the computer.
To revert the change, enter the following command in the same way:
sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup

How to stop Time Machine from trying to resize a sparse bundle

With 10.8, I'm backing up wirelessly from my MacBook Pro to a sparse bundle on a Drobo connected to a Mac mini on the same network. I used Drobo's Time Tamer to create the sparse bundle. The sparsebundle is a set size and cannot be resized (this is intentional to avoid filling the Drobo which is mostly used to store non-backed up non-critical data.
Every step of the backup process works, but Time Machine spends a good 20-30 minutes during each backup "resizing" the disk image. It doesn't actually suceed in resizing the disk image, but it displays "Looking for Backup Disk" in the Time Machine menu while Console reveals that it's resizing the disk image ("Resizing backup disk image from 17.59 TB to 17.59 TB"). It doesn't cause any errors, but it does turn the backup time from a few minutes
Does anyone know of a workaround to disable this resizing step or to make it fail quickly and proceed with the rest of the backup normally?
I wasn't using Time Machine before upgrading to 10.8 from 10.7, so I don't know if this is a new issue with Mountain Lion. I suspect that this would happen in earlier OS versions too.

I'm experiencing it on a Synology NAS. Time Machine always starts by "Resizing backup disk image from 1.07 TB to 1.07 TB." In the status bar, it just displays "looking for backup disk."
I don't have any solutions yet. Would definitely be interested to hear. I think it might have to do with the fact that I increased the user's disk quota (on the NAS) after doing the initial time machine backup. While Time Machine correctly identified the extra space as available, it somehow can't get over the fact that it changed once.
Things I have done:
Manually ran hdiutil resize -size 1000g *.sparseimage. This did change the reported disk size in the disk's Info.plist, but the next backup still did the resize step.

How to prevent Time Machine from ejecting volume?

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for