Time machine constantly backing up very little

I've noticed over the past week that time machine is running almost constantly. My external WD drive is always spinning as is the TM menu icon. When I click on the icon it will display something like "preparing 500 files" or "backing up 11mb). Then it backs up and goes through the cleaning up process. If a back up starts on the hour it may take 40 minutes to back up that 11mb. Then it starts again in about 5 minutes. I originally thought it was possibly safari caches and constantly changing web files. I excluded them and other often changing files. I closed everything and rebooted. I waited and even with nothing running it would still go through the same thing. Apple support suggested reinstalling the OS. Before I do that, anyone had this problem? Thanks

Also having the exact same problem. Very slow back-up of many tiny files -- it just took about 30 minutes to do 145KB! What's going on? I've excluded the System, Library and Applications folder. That brought the number of files down from tens of thousands to just a couple thousand. But it still constantly backs up and takes forever, even it's it's a just a couple MB of data. Any info much appreciated!!!

Similar Messages

Time Machine Stops Backing Up A Little While After It Starts

Hello I also have a problem. I have a 2 Tb Toshiba hard driver that stops backing up early on in the back up proccess. I tried it 2 computers and it would not back up for neither. This is what I got from using the time machine buddy.
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/RECO EXTENDED/Backups.backupdb
145.28 GB required (including padding), 1.80 TB available
Waiting for index to be ready (101)
Error (256): fetching properties: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=256 "The file “IC_AppleTV.png” couldn’t be opened." UserInfo=0x7fc8c98521f0 {NSURL=file://localhost/Volumes/RECO%20EXTENDED/Backups.backupdb/Reco%E2%80%99s %20iMac/2011-12-08-024910.inProgress/D5BE534C-33B4-442D-A913-4D54DC5DC22D/Macin t osh%20HD/Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/Resources/iTunes.help/Contents/Resour c es/ru.lproj/Art/IC_AppleTV.png, NSFilePath=/Volumes/RECO EXTENDED/Backups.backupdb/Reco’s iMac/2011-12-08-024910.inProgress/D5BE534C-33B4-442D-A913-4D54DC5DC22D/Macintos h HD/Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/Resources/iTunes.help/Contents/Resources/ru .lproj/Art/IC_AppleTV.png, NSUnderlyingError=0x7fc8c9852540 "The operation couldn’t be completed. Input/output error"}
Stopping backup.
Error: (-43) SrcErr:NO Copying /Applications/iWork '09/Keynote.app/Contents/Resources/pt.lproj/BGNonCancelableProgressPanel.nib/ke yedobjects.nib to /Volumes/RECO EXTENDED/Backups.backupdb/Reco’s iMac/2011-12-08-024910.inProgress/18DE9A24-0DED-425C-ACAC-13211C677E31/Macintos h HD/Applications/iWork '09/Keynote.app/Contents/Resources/pt.lproj/BGNonCancelableProgressPanel.nib
Copied 132688 files (14 KB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Copy stage failed with error:11

A quick search for Toshiba finds several with problems of one sort or another. Hard to tell if it's really a pattern, but if the other drive works fine . . .
How old is this drive? You might want to check with Toshiba or the vendor.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16881781#16881781
https://discussions.apple.com/message/15946467#15946467
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16903380#16903380
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16755523#16755523
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16230622#16230622
https://discussions.apple.com/message/15466136#15466136
https://discussions.apple.com/message/10245199#10245199

Time Machine not backing up. Very slow, essentially hanging. I have 10.7.5 Mac OS X Lion (11G63). I have put in all updates. I tried to put my folders into "private" in the Spotlight (b/c I read that might be the problem). Still not working.

Time Machine not backing up. Very slow, essentially hanging. I have 10.7.5 Mac OS X Lion (11G63). I have put in all updates. I tried to put my folders into "private" in the Spotlight (b/c I read that might be the problem). Still not working.
Thanks in advance for any help!

For all things Time Machine see Pondini's excellent information here...
http://pondini.org/OSX/Home.html
Start at Troubleshooting.

Having trouble getting Time Machine to back up my external hard drive. Any suggestions?

I'm running Mountain Lion on my iMac and I've been using Time Machine to back it up to my Time Capsule. Recently, the iMac's hard drive filled up, so I moved my iTunes library to a new Airport Time Capsule. But I can't seem to get Time Machine to include the new Airport Time Capsule in its back up.
The only suggestion I can find is to make sure it's not excluded in the Time Machine options, and I can see that nothing is excluded. However, when I go into Time Machine, the Airport Time Capsule is greyed out in the Finder window.
Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance, I'm a little nervous about having my iTunes library hanging out there without a back up...

Linc Davis wrote:
You can't back up the internal drive of the Time Capsule with Time Machine. It will only back up locally attached storage devices, not network devices. There's no way around it. You may be able to back up the TC with third-party software such as "Carbon Copy Cloner," but it will be very slow. The internal drive of the TC is only suitable for use as a backup device. It's not suited for storing original data.
yeah well you can use the external hard drive as a data extension to the time capsule internal hard drive. like a RAID in effect...

When i run Time Machine to back up my computer onto an external hard drive, i have no way of knowing when the back up process has been completed. I don't know when it is safe to disconnect the external hard drive - which is store in a separate location.

When i run Time Machine to back up my computer on to an external hard drive, i have no way of knowing when the back up process has been completed. This is necessary to know because i don't leave my external hard drive connected to the computer. I routinely disconnect it after backing up the hard drive, and then i store the external hard drive in a different location from the computer. So, knowing when the back up process has been completed would be a very helpful thing to have the computer specify.

Just enable Time Machine's menu extra (System Preferences -> Time Machine -> Show Time Machine in menu bar.
This will add a little Time Machine icon to your menubar. When Time Machine is actively backing up your data, the icon will spin as a visual indicator. You can also click the menu icon to see the backup status, including how much data is left to back up.

Can I Use Time Machine To Back Up a FAT32 Disk Containing Image Files?

New iMac User Here. I just bought a brand new but mid-2010 27" i7 iMac. Although I've used recent MacBooks when traveling I've got no experience with Time Machine or other similar third party back up software.
I moved to the iMac from a desktop PC running Windows XP Pro SP3. I use the computer(s) mainly for photo image storage and processing. My workflow is based upon Adobe Lightroom (now v3.4.1) and I plan to stick with it. In the PC I had three internal hard drives, 2 of which were dedicated to image files. They were formatted as Windows NTFS. In preparation for the switch I formatted an external drive as FAT32 and copied all the image files to it. Now with the iMac I have Lightroom installed on its internal hard drive but keep the image files on the external hard drive and access them as needed. So far, so good.
The problem arose when I tried to set up Time Machine to back up both the internal hard drive and the external external drive. It will back up the former but not the latter. It tells me it does not interact with FAT32 disks.
Any thoughts, explanations and/or solutions for establishing a simple, single back up routine for both internal and external drives will be most appreciated.

Thanks very much for the quick response. You confirm my intial suspicion, but your suggestion relies on my memory to accomplish on a regular basis (not the best of solutions) and further would be an extended disk run every night because it would not just be backing up new additions but the whole large disk, right?

My Macbook won't start, and I must reinstall the disk. I haven't used time machine to back up, and I want to use an external drive to back up now. How can i do this from the utilities page?

I am currently in Zambia on missions work and my computer is constantly exposed to heat. I have just been trying to avoid using it during the hottest part of the day. Today though, I started it up and it was stuck on the grey page with the rotating circle for over an hour, then once the circle left, it remained frozen on the gray page. I used command + r at startup to go to the utilities page to analyze the disk. It found that there were problems with the disk, but then it could not fix those problems and told me to backup as much information as I could and reinstall or redo it all. I haven't ever used time machine to back up any of my information, but i have an external drive that I can use right now to backup my files. I can't get into my computer though to backup the files. How can I use this external drive to backup my files while the computer is currently messed up? Please help.

Emergency Backups (Data Recovery)
A)          Format an external disk:
          (This will erase all data on the external disk.)
          Boot in recovery mode (power then Command-R).
                    Alternative: Network recovery boot (power then Command-Option-R keys)
          To format (and erase) the destination recovery disk:
          Plug in the drive you are about to erase.
          Select the volume that is NOT your system disk.
          Click on Partition.
          Pull down under Partition Layout to 1 Partition.
          Click on Options…
          Select GUID Partition Table.
          Name: Emergency Backup (or whatever you prefer)
          Format: Select Mac OS Extended (journaled)
          Click Apply.
          Click Partition.
B)          Try to boot in Safe Mode (power then Shift key).
          (This will be a slow boot. Be patient.)
          If it won’t boot in Safe Mode, jump to C.
          If it boots in Safe Mode, try to boot in normal mode.
                    If that fixed your problem then start a Time Machine backup.
                    http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427
                    https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-4055
          If not, boot in Safe Mode again.
          Go > Computer.
          Double click on the system disk.
          Drag the Users folder to the recovery disk.
C)          To clone the disk:
          Boot in recovery mode.
          Select Disk Utility.
          Try to repair the system disk twice.
          Whether or not the repair succeeds:
          Drag and drop the system disk to Source:
          Drag an drop Emergency Backup to Destination:
          (Take care not to reverse this order.)
          Click Restore (the lower Restore button).
Once your system is healthy, maintain two reasonably current backups. (Time machine restores can fail.)
Create either two Time Machine backups (good) or one or more Time Machine backup(s) and one or more bootable-clone backup(s) (better).
          Use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to create bootable-clone recovery disks.
          See https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3045
          and https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6031

How do I stop Time Machine from backing up Aperture thumbnails?

Hi,
My 2TB backup drive recently became full, and I became curious as to what was filling it up. I wrote a perl script to analyze the Time Machine backups, and I noticed that over 50% of my backup was filled with AP.Thumbnails and AP.Minis from the Aperture project directory. In particular, the AP.Thumbnails files in the backup consumed 737 GB of disk space!
The problem with the thumbnails files is that they are a single file that contains all of the thumbnails for all of the 40,000 photos I have in Aperture and it is now 20gb in size. Every time I add a new file to Aperture, the thumbnail file changes, and I get a new 20gb of data added to my backup. I add photos often which means that most of my backups have 20gb of Aperture files (which are easy to rebuild and don't need to be backed up).
I decided to try and stop Time Machine from backing up these files, and there seems to be no way of doing so (without telling Time Machine to skip backing up my entire Aperture project which I don't want to do). In Finder, you can do a "show package contents", but the Time Machine GUI doesn't allow this.
I tried to tell Time Machine to exclude the files via the GUI, but Time Machine sees the Aperture Library as a single package and won't let me exclude individual files from within the package.
I googled around, and found the attribute that Time Machine puts on files to exclude them from the backup. I used xattr to set the attributes:
xattr -w com.apple.metadata:comapple_backupexcludeItem com.apple.backupd <filename>
I also used this command on the iPhoto thumbnail files.
I used spotlight to find all of the files with this attribute using this command:
sudo mdfind "comapple_backupexcludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"
This command returned the iPhoto files, but did not return the Aperture files.
However, if I run "xattr" on the Aperture files, the attribute does exist!
During my next time machine backup, the iPhoto files were skipped as I wanted them to be, but the Aperture thumbnails were backed up again
I thought that maybe time machine was looking at the aperture package as an atomic unit, but iPhoto is stored as a package as well, and the attributes worked there on files inside the package.
Does anyone have any idea why time machine is still backing up these files? Is there any way I can get around this?
It seems to me to be an incredible oversight on Apple's part since both tools are Apple. The thumbnails files are very expensive to backup, and they are not necessary for backup since the are easy to rebuild from the original photos which are also backed up.
Thanks,
Ron

Shadow99999 wrote:
Hi,
My 2TB backup drive recently became full, and I became curious as to what was filling it up. I wrote a perl script to analyze the Time Machine backups,
No need to write your own script for that. there are a couple of already made nice GUI tools for this - TimeTracker http://www.charlessoft.com/ and BackupLoupe http://soma-zone.com/BackupLoupe/
and I noticed that over 50% of my backup was filled with AP.Thumbnails and AP.Minis from the Aperture project directory. In particular, the AP.Thumbnails files in the backup consumed 737 GB of disk space!
The problem with the thumbnails files is that they are a single file that contains all of the thumbnails for all of the 40,000 photos I have in Aperture and it is now 20gb in size. Every time I add a new file to Aperture, the thumbnail file changes, and I get a new 20gb of data added to my backup. I add photos often which means that most of my backups have 20gb of Aperture files (which are easy to rebuild and don't need to be backed up).
I decided to try and stop Time Machine from backing up these files, and there seems to be no way of doing so (without telling Time Machine to skip backing up my entire Aperture project which I don't want to do). In Finder, you can do a "show package contents", but the Time Machine GUI doesn't allow this.
I tried to tell Time Machine to exclude the files via the GUI, but Time Machine sees the Aperture Library as a single package and won't let me exclude individual files from within the package.
I don't have aperture but I think most people exclude the whole thing from TM backups and back it up separately. but if you want to exclude a subfolder in a package that's easy too. just select the package in finder, control-click on it and select "show package contents". in the resulting finder window drill to the folder you want to exclude and drag it to the TM exclusion list in TM system preferences->options.
I googled around, and found the attribute that Time Machine puts on files to exclude them from the backup. I used xattr to set the attributes:
xattr -w com.apple.metadata:comapple_backupexcludeItem com.apple.backupd <filename>
I was not aware of this method for excluding stuff from TM backups. could you provide a link to where you found this?
I also used this command on the iPhoto thumbnail files.
I used spotlight to find all of the files with this attribute using this command:
sudo mdfind "comapple_backupexcludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"
This command returned the iPhoto files, but did not return the Aperture files.
that's because Spotlight never looks inside packages unless you start a search inside a package directly. iphoto seems to be the only exception. I don't know how it's done.

Can't get Time Machine to back up server or attached drives

Tried to use the search on these new discussion forums and was told I'm not authorized to search the server forums so sorry if this has already been asked and answered.
I'm having a serious issue trying to back up my Mac Mini Server running 10.6.7. The setup is I've got the main server hard drive running the OS and storing user folders, the second drive is storing all server data (mail, ical, etc). I have an attached Drobo that is where all our company's job files are stored. I want to back up mainly the job files to an external USB drive via time machine. I wouldn't mind having the server and data backed up as well but it's not as essential as the customer files. I have not been able to get a successful Time Machine Backup of anything. Time Machine will start backing up and hang after what seems like a random amount of data has been backed up. This can range anywhere from a few hundred Gigabytes or a few Megabytes. The last attempt has stalled out at 17MB of 518GB.
The troubleshooting I've done so far is to try to back up only certain things, so:
Format the USB Drive then try to back up only the main server hard drive, excluding all else.
Format the USB Drive then try to back up only the server data hard drive, excluding all else.
Format the USB Drive then try to back up only our jobs folder on the Drobo, excluding all else.
The result has been the same every time. Seemingly random amount of data get's copied and then the backup hangs. I do not get an error message the Time Machine backup icon on the menu bar just keeps spinning and I have the Time Machine window up that says:
Time Machine Backup
Backing up 269,376 Items
17.3 MB of 518.7 GB
This current attempt was to backup just our jobs folder and was started yesterday morning so it has been over 24 hours. Disk Checks on the external USB drive come up with no errors every time I've scanned it.
Hoping someone has a solution. One of the main reason's the company owner decided to get a mac server was how well time machine worked on his mac at home and the idea of being able to go back to pervious versions of customer jobs if necessary.

I agree with Sven. I use TM to backup my server and have had EXCELLENT success. I work in a school with many teachers that love to delete files and empty the trash on their user accounts.
>>facepalm<<
They promptly come-a-runnin' crying about how they've lost that ever important document. Time machine to the rescue!
About the hanging problem... I've see it as well. I fixed it by finding the document that it was trying to back up. I copied it to a USB stick and deleted said file from the server.
I ran the time machine backup again, and it worked! I kindly asked the teacher to just remake the file in question. Luckily it wasn't anything important. I just chalked that one up to a corrupt or unreadable file.
Another thing to beware of. DO NOT expect time machine to be able to do a complete system restore on OS X server. It's great for getting those lost files while the system is up and running, but it will not work when trying to replace your Open Directory. It might get stuck on MySQL, and Mail as well. These databases are VERY finicky. If you need to back up your OD database, open up server admin and select "Open Directory."
Click the "Archive" button at the top.
To the far right hand side of the "Archive in" field, click choose.
Select the location that you want to save your archive to (the time machine drive will work) and click choose.
Click "Archive..." Type the name for your OD backup and type a password if desired. You don't need to have one.
Lastly... Smile on the inside knowing that your OD is nicely backed up and safe!

Using Time Machine to back up one Airdisk to another Airdisk

I've got a hard drive (I'll call it HD1) attached by my AirPort Extreme Base Station (802.11n). I've been using Time Machine to back up my MacBook's internal hard drive to that drive for several months now, with no problems. I just bought an additional external hard drive (HD2) and attached it to my AEBS, along with HD1, using a USB hub. Both drives are working fine.
However, I have been unable to get Time Machine to back up HD2 to HD1. Even when HD2 is mounted on my desktop, Time Machine will not back it up - it backs up only my internal hard drive. When I connected HD2 directly to my computer by a USB cable, Time Machine will back it up to HD1. It's only when it's connected to the AEBS that Time Machine ignores it.
I would very much like to have both hard drives connected to the AEBS all the time, but I need to have my data on HD2 backed up. Has anyone been able to back up one airdisk to another using Time Machine?
Any thoughts are much appreciated.

Even if that worked, that would be horribly inefficient. The data from HD2 would be copied from the drive through the AEBS to your MacBook then back to the AEBS and to HD1.
HD2->AEBS->MacBook->AEBS->HD1

What is Time Machine really Backing Up?

I have two internal HD's one 750gig that has Leopard on it, & a second HD that is 500gigs.
I have Time Machine backing up everything. I have noticed this for some time now, & have watched it
very carefully what is new on my system this month, beside a few texted emails, I have nothing new, no new programs, no new photos or no new music or videos. So what is Time Machine backing up?
I plugged in my external HD & let Time Machine start backing up, it stated it was backing up 5.2gigs of WHAT! is my question.
Thanks

If you have photos, then editing any photos will also require an update. You didn't mention which email client you are using. Are you using VMWare or Parallels? To see what folders/files are being updated, you can try:
www.charlessoft.com/timetracker.zip

How to make Time Machine only back up once per day?

I really really don't need time machine to back up EVERY HOUR. It's overkill for me and with the level of computing I am forcing my computer to do most of the day its VERY irritating. Is there anyway to change the settings so it only backs up once every night?

Yeah, we tried using TimeMachineEditor on a friend's laptop. There will be 2 laptops backing up, and we wanted them both to backup overnight at different times when there would be no interruptions (for user or computer). It seemed to work OK (have to check w/ them), but how do you verify when backups were actually done?
I have a couple related question to this, though, that may also be helpful for folks:
- I'm guessing Time Machine cannot do a backup when the computer is asleep, correct? If a Time Machine backup starts while the computer is 'awake', will it keep the computer from sleeping so it can finish?
- If I set a schedule in the Energy Saver preferences to 'Wake Up' the computer at midnight (before scheduled backup), and 'Sleep' later on (say 4am), does this override the other preferences set for sleep in Energy Saver? (ie - if it's set to sleep after 30min., will the computer wake up at midnight only to go back to sleep 30min. later, or will it stay 'awake' until 4am?)
- Do you need to uncheck 'Put the hard drive to sleep when possible'?

Time Machine Not Backing Up New Files

Time Machine is NOT backing up my recent files.
I recently noticed that Time Machine was backing up really quickly instead of taking several minutes as usual. I checked previous backups and discovered that NONE of my recent files were backed up.
I have a very basic setup. An external usb 1 tb drive formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) being used as the time machine backup drive. A new i5 mac mini with OS X 10.8.4. About 200 gigs of data with one user on the internal drive.
I have followed all of the Pondini troubleshooting steps. I have restarted into safe mode to force a deep traversal. I have repaired permissions and verified all disks with Disk Utility. I have deleted time machine preferences and followed instructions as per Pondini #A4. The backup seems to run but then finishes quickly but DOES NOT BACK UP any recent files.
I have run TMUTIL COMPARE, it showed that many files needed to be backed up.
I have run TMUTIL ISEXCLUDED on some of the files that were not being backed up. It showed that they were not flagged for exclusion.
I have run a manual backup after starting up in Safe Mode, which forced a deep event scan, but then exhibited the same behaviour..
I have acquired a new external hard drive, backed up the complete main drive (using Time Machine which appeared to be successful on the first time full backup), then run a manual backup on that new drive after adding new files and had THE SAME PROBLEM.
Here's the latest console output, which is typical since I have noticed this issue. There appear to be many megabytes of new files to be backed up, but then the operation completes within seconds and no files are backed up at all.
6/23/13 7:15:16.422 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Starting manual backup
6/23/13 7:15:16.966 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Omnius/Backups.backupdb
6/23/13 7:15:17.916 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Using file event preflight for Olympus
6/23/13 7:15:20.277 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Will copy (375.1 MB) from Olympus
6/23/13 7:15:20.298 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Found 845 files (375.1 MB) needing backup
6/23/13 7:15:20.311 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: 1.91 GB required (including padding), 747.18 GB available
6/23/13 7:15:29.264 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Copied 400 files (1.4 MB) from volume Olympus.
6/23/13 7:15:29.298 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Using file event preflight for Olympus
6/23/13 7:15:29.299 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Will copy (Zero KB) from Olympus
6/23/13 7:15:29.300 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Found 5 files (Zero KB) needing backup
6/23/13 7:15:29.301 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: 1.46 GB required (including padding), 747.17 GB available
6/23/13 7:15:30.439 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Copied 140 files (33 bytes) from volume Olympus.
6/23/13 7:15:30.511 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Created new backup: 2013-06-23-071530
6/23/13 7:15:30.608 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Starting post-backup thinning
6/23/13 7:15:30.608 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: No post-back up thinning needed: no expired backups exist
6/23/13 7:15:30.689 AM com.apple.backupd[643]: Backup completed successfully.
Please help. Time Machine is currently useless as a backup solution.

Results (username obfuscated in exclusionpaths):
   -=-=-=-=-=--
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
          <key>sourcePaths</key>
          <array>
                    <string>/</string>
          </array>
          <key>standardExclusionPaths</key>
          <array>
                    <string>/.MobileBackups</string>
                    <string>/MobileBackups.trash</string>
                    <string>/.MobileBackups.trash</string>
                    <string>/.Spotlight-V100</string>
                    <string>/.TemporaryItems</string>
                    <string>/.Trashes</string>
                    <string>/.com.apple.backupd.mvlist.plist</string>
                    <string>/.fseventsd</string>
                    <string>/.hotfiles.btree</string>
                    <string>/Backups.backupdb</string>
                    <string>/Desktop DB</string>
                    <string>/Desktop DF</string>
                    <string>/Network/Servers</string>
                    <string>/Library/Updates</string>
                    <string>/Previous Systems</string>
                    <string>/Users/Shared/SC Info</string>
                    <string>/Users/Guest</string>
                    <string>/dev</string>
                    <string>/home</string>
                    <string>/net</string>
                    <string>/private/var/db/com.apple.backupd.backupVerification</string>
                    <string>/private/var/db/efw_cache</string>
                    <string>/private/var/db/Spotlight</string>
                    <string>/private/var/db/Spotlight-V100</string>
                    <string>/private/var/lib/postfix/greylist.db</string>
                    <string>/Volumes</string>
                    <string>/Network</string>
                    <string>/automount</string>
                    <string>/.vol</string>
                    <string>/tmp</string>
                    <string>/cores</string>
                    <string>/private/tmp</string>
                    <string>/private/Network</string>
                    <string>/private/tftpboot</string>
                    <string>/private/var/automount</string>
                    <string>/private/var/folders</string>
                    <string>/private/var/run</string>
                    <string>/private/var/tmp</string>
                    <string>/private/var/vm</string>
                    <string>/private/var/db/dhcpclient</string>
                    <string>/private/var/db/fseventsd</string>
                    <string>/Library/Caches</string>
                    <string>/Library/Logs</string>
                    <string>/System/Library/Caches</string>
                    <string>/System/Library/Extensions/Caches</string>
                    <string>/private/var/log</string>
                    <string>/private/var/spool/cups</string>
                    <string>/private/var/spool/fax</string>
                    <string>/private/var/spool/uucp</string>
          </array>
          <key>systemFilesExcluded</key>
          <false/>
          <key>userExclusionPaths</key>
          <array>
                    <string>/Users/USERNAME/Pictures/cam_in</string>
                    <string>/Users/USERNAME/Epsilon</string>
                    <string>/Users/USERNAME/Desktop</string>
                    <string>/Users/USERNAME/Pictures/cam_out</string>
          </array>
</dict>
</plist>

Time Machine not backing up all data

Hello All,
I just bought a Time Capsule 2TB and have Macbook pro early 2011 (running Lion OSX). I wanted to do to a time machine backup. Everything went well. I got it connected good and the backup started very weel. My HDD is about 400 GB and when the time machine started back up it started with data and the progress bar showed the total data to be back up (400GB), but then it backed up only 30 GB out of 400 GB.
I have most of my files in iphoto and ivideo. Is this normal? Why didnt TIme machine did not back up all 400GB?
Any idea?

Then there are two possibilities:
The backup failed, but you didn't see the message. See #C2 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting. It will show you how to locate the message(s) that describe the problem, then help you fix it. If that doesn't help, post back with details, including all the messages.
Or, some things didn't get backed-up. A partial explanation could be iPhoto -- if the iPhoto app is open when a backup runs, Time Machine may not be able to back up your iPhoto library. It will attempt to "catch up" the next time, but in the meantime you may not have any backups of it.
That's unlikely to be the whole difference, though. Does the figure of 400 GB seem reasonable to you -- can you account for most of it?

HT3275 time machine preparing back up

My time machine is stating "Preparing backup" for a very long time but it has not back up any information in 2 months. What can I do to get my time machine to back up again?

I had the same problem. Time machine would do a few backups successfully, but then it would continuously display "Preparing Backup". . .and would never progress to the backup itself. Even after a full day or more.
I found the answer buried here under another discussion of this seemingly frequent problem:
Open SYSTEM PREFERENCES. Go to HARDWARE/ENERGY SAVER.
UNCHECK the checkbox next to "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible.
Having done this, my Time Machine backups run on time and correctly!

Time machine constantly backing up very little

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