Time machine full after restore

Hi all
I recently suffered the 'pleasure' of a HD failure in my 2008 24". An apple engineer replaced the drive and reinstated my data from time machine - all good so far. However, my mac doesnt want to relink with my existing backups and continue the save/delete old entries like before. I can still access my old backups, but It seems to want to create a new time machine on the very little space i have left on the drive for new backups.
Is there a way of relinking to the previous backup or is it a case of wipe/restart, which i'd like to avoid.
Ta.
Dezza.

Hllo:
Time machine will try to make a complete new backup as a result of the new drive.
I would (I am not you) erase and format the external drive and let Time Machine make the new backup.
Barry

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Unable to boot after Time Machine full system restore!!

I was having some serious slowdowns with my computer. I did multiple RAM and HD hardware tests, everything seemed to be working fine. I had recently deleted a bunch of files in order to free up some HD space, so I thought that may be the culprit. So I did a Time Machine backup and restored the Powerbook to it's original 10.3 software. All was fine. Then I upgraded back to 10.5 and all was fine. Then I did a Time Machine full system restore overnight and got the message "Your restore was successful, you must now restart your computer" (or something to that effect). Now I get the start-up chime and startup screen (apple logo) but then the computer shuts itself down. I have reset the PMU and PRAM to no effect. I have tried booting up in safe made, also no dice. I have tried starting it up with the time machine HD attached - doesn't help. I guess I'll need to hit the genius bar but wanted to ask the friendly discussion forum folks first. thanks in advance.

Hi coldengray
Did you try to start from your System-CD? Hold down C-key during startup, start DiskUtility from the menu and verify/repair disk and permissions there.
If the CD is not available you can also connect your TimeMachine-Disk, select it as startup volume in System Preferences/StartupDisk, restart and then run DiskUtility from folder Applications/Utilities
Good luck P

Time Machine Bug after Restore

Hi all,
I've been learning Time Machine and will share two possible bugs if it is helpful. I am working on a 2011 MacBook Pro, upgraded to Mountain Lion some months back, with 50 GB data on SSD being backed up to and restored from a LaCie SSD 80 GB partition so the speed is very nice: 14 minutes for initial backup and 7 minutes for a Reboot + Command + R restore.
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Bug #2. It appears that the first time Time Machine runs after a Cmd+R restore, it tries to rebuild an entire journal or record of what it has and, if you interrupt this initial backup, you break Time Machine. The next time you try to backup, Time Machine thinks Everything needs to be backed up (even though your disk is identical to what it just restored), and it Fails in my case with message "Time Machine couldn't complete the back to [my LaCie drive because my 50 GB of data is already there and it thinks it needs a full 50 GB more]" in so many words. APL-CARE (and its expert advisor) tried to call this a feature and sent me to your article HT3275 but that seems like a different issue. Since I did not believe Time Machine was so stupid, I ran the sequence again and carefully avoided interrupting Time Machine during its initial backup following my Cmd+R restore and, indeed, it took about 8 minutes to backup 4.5 MB (and rebuild whatever it does that first time). So this feels like a straight-up bug, Time Machine should scare me with a popup if I interrupt it while it is rebuilding its critical list for the first time after a restore. If APL-CARE were correct, it would mean everyone loses all history after a restore, everyone needs to Erase their backup disk and start from scratch, and methinks that too would be a bug.
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And this is an ERROR in time machine. I just did a test restore again, went quickly, then Time Machine is GONE, GONE, gone trying to restore 5MB, waiting over an hour when a fresh backup takes about 15 minutes.
So only solution is DESTROY all my backups, then start over. Really dumb, and this page has no option to change my post back to a question, also really dumb.
I am going to swear now: cr*p. OK. Fix your **** software please. I'll deal with workarounds till then.
-dave

Time Machine problem after restoring to a new HD (after my original HD failed)

I am running Lion 10.7.5 on a MacBook Pro Late '11
My HD was getting SMART errors, so I did a complete back up using Time Machine using a WD My Passport 1TB external, and then sent my MBP to Apple for HD replacement (under my Applecare plan).
I collected it yesterday and restored my system using Time Machine (using the data from my external HD) and everything was restored perfectly, which was great,
However, I'm now encountering a problem after plugging my external HD back into my MBP on the new system. Rather than Time Machine doing a swift 'top up' back up, it appears that TM is attempting to do a full back up. (I have 300GB and it took nearly 24hours to backup on the faulty drive) Is this normal after installing a new HD? Bearing in mind the Time Machine data is still on my external drive?
It's also appearing to be taking FOREVER to do this entire back up again. It is stuck on 'preparing back up' and when I do get some movement, it's doing a couple of KB's at a time and with no genuine back up progress.
Fundamentally, I just want to just top up my Time Machine back up without having do a complete back up, again. (which doesn't actually seem possible, viable at the min)
Any help / support would be much appreciated

AFAIK, it'll do that since the HD has a different UUID and the old TM backup won't recognize it. See Pondini's TM FAQs, for starters.

Time Machine Problem after restore

I had a hard drive crash, and after repair, I restored from a time machine back. Everything seemed fine, although a few sets of photos were missing from iPhoto. After things seemed to be fine I have started doing time machine backups again.
My problem is that they take a very long time to complete. I expected the first one or two to take a long time, but not since then. I have given it weeks to make sure that it has had enough time.
Every single time the verifcation stage shows 10s of thousands of files. Even if I have not made any changes. In my console log I see:
6/7/12 11:17:34 AM
com.apple.backupd[61578]
Node requires deep traversal:/Users/dersh/Pictures/iPhoto Library reason:contains changes|must scan subdirs|fsevent|missed reservation|
For every single backup. It seems like it is not actually fixing this. From googling around, I expect that this should take a long time the first time or two, but then should finish. It then says that it is backing up about 600 meg. The exect number seems to change with each backup, depending on what I am doing, and what changes I have made. But even if I do nothing, it still is in that range. It then appears to complete, although it takes a long time. I would guess that since it is doing the deep traverse it then has to match up a bunch of files, so doing the actual backup takes much longer then it should. For example it might sit for a good few minutes at "backing Up: 105.2 MB of 580.2 MB" Then it moves on to 107.6. Finally, the cleanup takes a very long time. So overall each backup is taking 10s of minutes. Even if I am not doing anything with the computer.
I am using a firewire drive directly connected to the computer. I have done a repair of the external time machine drive, and have done a verify of the internal drive, with no issues.
I see that I have plenty of space on the external drive.
So, it seems like what is happening is that it doesn't "know" that it has done a succesful backup of iPhoto, each time so it does a deep traverse and then backsup something like 600 meg of data from there. How can I get it to "understand" that it has done this? Can I force it to do it once correctly, so that it will take?
Any other suggestions?

UPDATE
Happen to have a QNAP NAS from work at the house which has Time Machine support and can select and initiate a backup there, no problem!
So, it's something about the Mac Mini or drive? I didn't do anything to the Mac Mini in the process other than removing the USB drive and plugging it back in.
As far as the drive, I dumped it and re-partitioned it with two partitions one for the Mini and one for the iMac. The Mac Mini is backing up to it locally, no problem.

Time Machine error after restoring all data

Sorry, I've tried to run through various trouble shooting guides on Time Machine (notably here http://pondini.org/TM/C4.html etc) but haven't been able to work out a solution.
I just had my iMac harddrive replaced and earlier did a full restore of the harddrive from my Time Machine backup drive.
Time Machine, rather than deleting the old backups on the disk, is now giving me the error message
"This backup is too large for the backup disk. The backup requires 564.63 GB but only 521.89 GB are available."
I backed up to Snow Leopard 10.6.8. I just upgraded to Mountain Lion 10.8.3 because there were a couple of comments online that suggested that might help resolve the problem (unfortunately it didn't)
It seems from articles I've read that this is a known issue that occassonally happens when a full restore happens and Time Machine can't associate the new harddrive with the old backups.
One solution seems to be to use disk utility to reformat the external harddrive and start again, but that seems slightly like using a sledgehammer to smash a nut. Is there a less dramatic solution? Is there a easy way to just associate the two drives with one another again?
Many thanks in advance for any help you can offer, and apologies if I've missed a relevant/ helpful thread somewhere else on the board.

"Reconnecting" to your backups

Does Time Machine reset after restore?

Hello,
Suppose I have Time Machine backups for the last 6 months on an external hard drive. Suppose I restore my entire system to 3 months ago using TM. Will Time Machine still keep all the backups that were made AFTER that date, Or will TM treat that date that I restored to as the most "current" date, and delete all the backups created after it? What happens when TM starts to run again after restoring? I ask because I don't want to do anything that might cause any of my backups to be inadvertently deleted.
Best,
James

It will keep the more recent snapshots.

Time machine freezes after restore using migration assistant

after an erase/install done in an Apple Store, I restored my Mac Book from the Time Machine using the migration agent.
To do this I created a temporary admin account and performed the Restore of all users and contents in the backup.
Now logged in as my old user ID the time machine backup starts and identifies that the entire MacBook content needs to be backed up.
TM Backup runs through the prepairing stage and reaches the "Baccking up 'xxx' MB from 'yyy' GB" message.
Then it gets stuck after 120 MB has been backed up. I did run the backup for 2 entire nights in the 2nd night it got stuck after 0 kB had been backed up.
What to I need to do to get TM running again?

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
Launch the Console 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. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Enter the word "Starting" (without the quotes) in the String Matching text field. You should now see log messages with the words "Starting * backup," where * represents any of the words "automatic," "manual," or "standard." Note the timestamp of the last such message. Clear the text field and scroll back in the log to that time. Select the messages timestamped from then until the end of the backup, or the end of the log if that's not clear. Copy them (command-C) to the Clipboard. Paste (command-V) into a reply to this message.
If all you see are messages that contain the word "Starting," you didn't clear the search box.
If there are runs of repeated messages, post only one example of each. Don't post many repetitions of the same message.
When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Some personal information, such as the names of your files, may be included — anonymize before posting.

Spotlight and Time Machine broken after restore/upgrade

I've found a few similar threads to this but none of those solutions has worked for me.
Two things happened at nearly the same time, so I don't exactly know the source of my problem:
I upgraded my old MacBook Pro (approx. Oct 2010, 2.66GHz I think, 300GB-ish HD) from Lion to Mountain Lion
The hard drive on my old MacBook Pro developed a terminal fault, so I had to buy a new one (8GB, 750GB HD) and restore a month-old Time Machine backup from my external drive.
I can't remember whether my last Time Machine backup to my external drive was before or after I upgraded to Mountain Lion.
Now I'm on OS X 10.8.2 on this new machine and I have two problems that seem to co-exist for a lot of other people too:
Spotlight won't index: this is f***ing infuriating, I love spotlight and I use it all the time. When I first restored from the TM backup I think the old index restored with the backup as I did get a decent number of search results (both in spotlight and in MS Outlook), but new files didn't seem to get recognised. I tried adding my hard drive to the exclusion list and removing it again in an attempt to get it to rebuild the index, but all that did was wipe the old index without building a new one, so now I get no spotlight results whatsoever. I tried this solution and sadly it hasn't worked either. Basically I can't search for anything. Even applications (which I like to launch from spotlight) don't appear. All I get is "estimating indexing time", and it never gets any further.
Time Machine won't back up: the first time I tried to backup my new machine it got a few hundred megabytes in before stalling; then a few hundred kilobytes in the next time I tried; and now it just doesn't get anywhere at all. The external drive I'm trying to backup to is recognised fine, I can see all the other files on it, and Time Machine seems to know that it's there, but the backup gets nowhere.
There are reports of this kinds of crap all over the Apple Support forums, but no definitive answer, especially for 10.8.2.
I could really do with some help on this. I need a backup before I screw another laptop, and I need spotlight to survive day-to-day life.
Thanks,
Craig

Hi Craig - I had the exact same problem - I'm using an old early 2009 MacBook Pro upgraded to 8 Gb Ram, 1 TB internal Hitachi HD, 10.8.2 - tried the fixes suggested - got it to work with these steps- everybodies mileage is different but hopefully it works for you as well.
a) I repaired disk permissions with Onyx (free utility) and then started up with Command-R using Disk Utility to repaired/check the Volume (harddisk checked out fine but the volume needed some minor repairs )- Onyx repair disk permission seems to go deeper -had to reinstall some apps - don't know if this solved it-seems to bring it back to the default state - you might get away with doing all from Disk Utility (but starting up with Command-R)
b) restart from my internal hd
c) downloaded the 10.8.2 combo update ( not the incremental shell update or whatever you call it which automatically gets installed with software update - combo update installs everything fresh from the .0 version)
d) with Onyx I deactivated spotlight and erased the spotlight index
d) restart
e) started TM backup - prep took pretty long 30 minutes but then 450 GB got backed up in 6 hours to my external HD which is fast enough for me
f) activated spotlight and 450 Gb were indexed in 9 hours or so
g) for 2 days everything runs fast and very responsive
best,
Franz

Time Machine Full HDD Restore not recognizing Login Password

Hi, my old G5 had Leopard running on it, the Logic Board failed so I got another, I decided to upgrade the HDD, Installed Leopard, connected my Lacie Firewire 800 External Drive to install the previous files/settings from Time Machine, All went fine until the Login password shook around saying it was incorrect. Its without a doubt the right password, no question about it. Tried another keyboard incase it was faulty, it wasn't. Had to put old HDD back in, works fine but I'm concerned, if this HDD fails, are my hourly backups rendered useless as I cant access them on a new install??
Please help, Im still a little out of my comfort zone as fairly new to Mac.

richeyf wrote:
Hi, thanks for your post, so I can assume from this that, if my current HDD failed, if I followed the instructions in item #14 of the Frequently Asked Questions, all would be well.
Yes, it should, unless you'd excluded important things from TM, and as long as your backups aren't corrupted.
Also, since I started backing up using TM on my new machine, my external drive now has 2 sets of back ups, one from the old machine and one from my current one.
TM started a whole new "sequence" of backups, since it thinks you got a new Mac. It uses the +Ethernet Address+ of your Mac, not it's name or serial number, to distinguish one from another. Unfortunately, that address is embedded in the hardware of the logic board. (Small consolation: in Snow Leopard, you get a prompt allowing TM to continue using the old set of backups.)
Should I just delete the old one to create more space as Im rapidly running out, or will it mess things up?
If you're going to try a full restore, obviously not until it's complete and everything checks out. So, as mentioned in #14, immediately turn TM off until you're sure. Then erase the TM disk with Disk Utility.
If you're not going to do the full restore, then you have two unattractive choices:
Manually delete backups from the old set, but *+not via the Finder+*. Use the +*Browse . . .+* option (see #17 of the FAQ Tip), then delete them one at a time via #12 there.
Erase the drive with Disk Utility and let TM start fresh.

Time Machine: Full System Restore On New iMac...

I currently use Time Machine on my 24" iMac with a 500GB external hardrive. If something were to happen to my current iMac (i.e. My kid knocks it off the desk and it breaks), and I was forced to buy a new one, would I be able to use Time Machine to restore the new iMac to the last Back-Up of the old iMac? If so, would it automati ally transfer all of my pictures, movies, music, etc. to the new iMac as well? Thanks for any help y'all can give me on this subject.

J Double DuBB wrote:
I currently use Time Machine on my 24" iMac with a 500GB external hardrive. If something were to happen to my current iMac (i.e. My kid knocks it off the desk and it breaks), and I was forced to buy a new one, would I be able to use Time Machine to restore the new iMac to the last Back-Up of the old iMac?
not using full system restore utility on the leopard install DVD. your current system lacks hardware drivers that would be needed for a newer computer and if you do a full system restore of your current computer onto a newer computer using the restore utility on the leopard DVD it will most likely not even boot.
however, during the original computer setup you'll be given an option to transfer user data, settings and applications from a TM backup of your old computer. that option does not transfer system files but it does transfer everything else including your pictures, movies, music etc.
You can also do the same thing later using Migration Assistant (it's in /Applications/Utilities).

Time machine full after clean install of snow leopard

I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard by doing a clean install. I just connected my external HD to backup Time Machine, and it's telling me the disk is full and there's not enough space to backup, even though it spent some time deleting files. I'm guessing that it's not deleting files from before I installed Snow Leopard? I'm not sure of the best way to manually clear the earlier backups. (in case it matters, my external HD is partitioned with Super Duper backups on one half, and TM on the other).
I tried looking at the TM troubleshooting tips, but wasn't sure of the best way to deal with this - rather safe than sorry!
Thanks for any advice.

The "proper way" is while in time machine, go to the specific backup you want to delete. Then click the gear shape or the settings on the menu bar. There is an option "delete backup".
When opening your time machine HD and open "Backups.backupdb" are there two machines appearing or just one? If there are two, go to the time machine icon in your doc and control click on the icon. Select the option "Browse Other Time Machine Disks" and select the older machine to access and/or delete backups.
I believe at times I've also just deleted the specific backups when accessing the time machine HD in the finder.

How can I access old Time Machine backups after restoring from Time Machine?

Just restored my iMac and I can only see "Now" when I enter Time Machine. How can I see all the backups and dates I had before I restored?

While in Time Machine, press the key combination shift-command-C. The front window will show all mounted volumes. All snapshots should now be accessible. Select the one you want and navigate to the files you want to restore.

No permission to access my time machine backups after restoring.

I reinstalled osx mountain lion on my macbook pro and restored my computer from a time machine backup. Now when I try to access my old backups time machine tells me that I have no permission to access those files. How can I regain access to my old backups?

See Pondini's Tips, for starters.

Time Machine Backup after Restore

I have been using Time Machine for months without a hitch. I also put some other files on the external that I am using for Time Machine. Recently I decided to sell my brother my old Macbook so I can get a new computer.
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Try right clicking on it and mounting it.

Time machine full after restore

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