Time machine hourly backups

I would appreciate any help on this and to also let me know if this can be changed. It states that a hourly backup is performed each hour. Well, the hourly backups are always shown that they start 42 to 44 minutes after the last one completes.
Why doesn't it schedule it in 1 hour after the backup completes? Can the hourly backup time be corrected and set to 1 hour?

Thanks. I didn't know a program like that existed. I set it to backup every 2 hours. It looks like it's actually works. It added an extra hour to the 42-44 minute intervals that it was doing. I do a lot of work, and this is a great safety net.

Similar Messages

Time Machine hourly backup seems a tad large

Hi all
Occasionally, my hourly Time Machine incremental backups to my Time Capsule seem a tad large. One hour the backup is a sensible size, then an hour later, when I've been doing very little on my machine, the backup is massive (as in, several gigabytes).
Not only that, but the backup seems to grow in size as its happening. the pictures below should help illustrate.
The backup is listed as being 719MB, only an hour after a more modest backup. Time Machine seems to be claiming that is has transferred all of the required backup:
!http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/4988/picture2gih.png!
But then, only two minutes later, see how the situation has changed:
!http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/3739/picture3m.png!
And the situation continues:
!http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/9339/picture5.png!
Any ideas? This issue happens intermittently (although it is happening now... that last image was taken a few minutes ago and the backup was still going - up to 3.1GB - before I told it to stop).
I'm not certain if Time Machine is actually transferring this amount of data to the Time Capsule or not.
Cheers.

Hi,
I had the same problem today as well. The last backup was done this morning at 2 a.m. When I turned my PowerBook G4 on again this afternoon, the backup size continually grew, just like on your machine, Rob. I aborted the backup a couple of times, deleted the inProgress file, but it always got bigger and bigger. After downloading Time Machine Buddy and Time Tracker, I just let Time Machnine "do it's thing". Luckily, I had enough free space on my WD MyBook 500 GB I use for the backups, because it stopped only at 24.8 GBs, after initially displaying 61,3 MB in the menu bar, and requesting 1.05 GB according to Time Machine Buddy.
Time Machine Buddy protocol:
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/My Book/Backups.backupdb
No pre-backup thinning needed: 1.05 GB requested (including padding), 32.74 GB available
Copied 139261 files (24.8 GB) from volume Macintosh HD.
No pre-backup thinning needed: 1.16 GB requested (including padding), 7.36 GB available
Copied 7042 files (2.0 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Starting post-backup thinning
Deleted backup /Volumes/My Book/Backups.backupdb/Claas Olthoffs PowerBook/2009-03-05-202501: 7.36 GB now available
Deleted backup /Volumes/My Book/Backups.backupdb/Claas Olthoffs PowerBook/2009-03-05-192342: 7.37 GB now available
Deleted backup /Volumes/My Book/Backups.backupdb/Claas Olthoffs PowerBook/2009-03-05-123736: 7.37 GB now available
Deleted backup /Volumes/My Book/Backups.backupdb/Claas Olthoffs PowerBook/2009-03-05-113526: 7.38 GB now available
Post-back up thinning complete: 4 expired backups removed
Backup completed successfully.
So I took a look at Time Tracker to see what was backed up. I was suprised to see, that the biggest chunk was my Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support folder. This folder is 23,9 GB in size, mainly because it contains Final Cut Studio media and templates. Time Machine backed it up completey. This seems weired, because none of the files I looked at in this folder were changed during the last couple of months, if not the last year, since I installed them. I don't know why Time Machine would backup all of those unchanged files.
For the sake of completeness, the external drives contains other, non-backup, files as well.
I hope this gives you some more information to work with Pondini.
Greetings,
Claas

Change Time Machine "hourly" backup to "daily"?

hourly backups are major overkill. daily or even 3x weekly would be great.
any way to change the frequency? or simply turn it off until you want to let it run?

Also keep in mind that at the end of the day, the 24 hourly backups are consolidated into a single daily backup. Similarly, after a week the daily backups are replaced with a single end of the week backup. After a month, the weekly backups are replaced with a single end of the month backup. So at any given time, you will have a series of monthly backups, perhaps some weekly ones, some daily ones, and some hourly ones. You don't end up with a zillion hourly ones in the end.

Time Machine hourly backup to Time Capsule takes 1 hr for 5MB

Lately our iMac (Snolw Leopard 10.6.8) seems to be constanly backing up.
I watched it carefully in the Time Macine preference window.
When starting and it says Preparing xx,xxx items with the number going above 100,000.
Then it says backng up Zero MB of 5.1 MB.
Then it takes 35 minutes to copy the first 100 KB or so. Finally it gets happy and then finishes.
Nex hour it goes through the whole sequence again.
I got frustrated and deleted the backup from the time capsule and started from scratch.
The full backup took 4 1/2 hours for 165GB. One hour later it starts the whole 1 hour to back up 5 MB process again.

That should have said next hour it starts the whole 40 minutes to back up 5 MB process again.

HT201250 Is there a way to change the intervals at which Time Machine performs backups (e.g., weekly instead of hourly or daily) past 24 hours, daily for the past month, and weekly for everything older...

Is there a way to change the intervals at which Time Machine performs backups (e.g., weekly instead of hourly or daily) past 24 hours, daily for the past month, and weekly for everything older...

You can edit the interval in Console or install a Pref Pane
called TimeMachineScheduler (Leopard or higher) free from:
http://www.klieme.com/TimeMachineScheduler.html
Good luck, Tom

Does Time Machine bundle backup sets when it deletes a month's daily sets?

I'm asking this question to find out if I can delete the all but the last week in a month, each month, in order to extend the useful capacity of my backup drive.
In some backup systems, a periodic "bundle" is made when previous sets are deleted, so for instance, the last backup of the month has the cumulative hourly changes of that month. In this way, transient files which appear and disappear within the month are retained in the monthly backup.
Is this true of Time Machine? Exactly what does Time Machine do? Does it simply wipe out the daily sets and chose the last one to be the "weekly backup?" Or something more sophisticated and useful?
Thanks for any insight!

I've devised a little experiment to discover Time Machine's behavior in this regard:
On my Time Machine's backup schedule, August 27 corresponds with the end of a week. So, on August 26 at 9:15AM, I created the following [folder]/file structure:
[Time Machine Test -Transient Roll-up]
   [Time Machine Test - 1. Hourly Transience
      A one hour lifetime file.rtf
   [Time Machine Test - 2. Daily Transience
      A one day lifetime file.rtf
   [Time Machine Test - 3. Weekly Transience
      A one week lifetime file.rtf
At 10:10AM of that day I removed
[Time Machine Test - 1. Hourly Transience
      A one hour lifetime file.rtf
At 10:10 the next day, August 27, I removed
   [Time Machine Test - 2. Daily Transience
      A one day lifetime file.rtf
On August 28 at 10:30AM, acheck today of the earliest backup of this structure reveals only the following:
[Time Machine Test -Transient Roll-up]
   [Time Machine Test - 3. Weekly Transience
      A one week lifetime file.rtf
I draw the conclusion that transient files within a time period are not subject to a "roll-up" mechanism that displays all changes after out-of-date files are deleted by Time Machine. Thus, for instance, any file that appeared and disappears during an hour will be lost in Time Machine's daily history. Similarly, files that only persist for a day will be lost in the weekly history. And, presumably, if one wanted to choose a week which represented an accumulation of transient changes during the month it would be impossible to do so.
Even so, if one wants to manage only one backup volume, rather than accumulating a stack of them over the years, one might well think about selectively deleting all but one week per month in the earliest backups available, as the projected remaining time approaches less than a few weeks. BackupLoupe's Statistics gives an estimate of remaining time left for backups on a volume, and I would suggest using that as a forecast, unless others have experience to the contrary.
Hope this is useful. It certainly is to me.

Time Machine vs Backup

I plan on reformatting my computer and would love to know if I should use Time Machine or Backup. I want to keep some of the programs and data from the computer, but not all of it. Which one will allow me to select data to "bring back"?
Thanks for your help!

Hi, and welcome to the forums.
You do not want to use Backup for large amounts of data. It's fine for it's original purpose: to get relatively-small amounts of data off-site to iDisk, automatically, but don't use it for anything more.
Time Machine will back-up your entire system by default. The first backup is, of course, lengthy, but thereafter it will back-up only new and changed items hourly. This gives you an excellent chance to recover things that were deleted or changed in error, or somehow corrupted. But whether you use Time Machine or some other app, use something or you can lose some or all of your data in an instant.
But the question here is, are you doing this only to get rid of some apps and files? If so, that's not the best approach. Unlike Windoze, a periodic reload is usually not needed on Macs.
Unless your internal HD is over 85% full, your best bet may be to get an external drive thats at least twice the size of the data on your Mac and let TM do a full backup. Then start identifying and deleting the things you don't want. If you delete something you shouldn't, you can easily get it back from Time Machine (for a while).
Most applications on Macs can just be deleted. Some need uninstallers. Apps will be where you put them, hopefully in your Applications folder. Most data will be in +<your home folder>/Library/Application Support,+ usually in a file or folder containing the name of the app or maker.
Unless you're very tight on space, you could make a folder named +Apps to be Deleted+ or something similar, at the top level of your home folder, and move them and their data files there, rather than delete them immediately. You could even create a sub-folder for those apps that have data files, and put both the apps and files inside them. Once you're sure they're not needed, delete them.
Doing it the other way is much riskier; if you omit things you actually need, all sorts of things may go wrong, unpredictably.
For info on Time Machine, you might want to review this Time Machine Tutorial
and this: Time Machine Features
and perhaps the Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions post at the top of the Time Machine forum.

Time Machine same backup size every time

Anyone have any idea why Time Machine would backup the same amount every time? Every hour mine backs up 1.8 GB, unless I've added more than that to my hd.
I only back up the internal drive on my macbook to a 500 GB Time Capsule via wifi (802.11n only, 5GHz). Not that I figured it would make a difference, but it still does it if backed up via ethernet.
I've also noticed that as soon as it completes the backup, it will backup all over again - and not because an hour has passed. I'm not sure if it does this every time (but I think i does), or if it does it more than twice when it happens.
Thanks in advance!

See if the following might give you some ideas as to why...
*_Incremental Backups Seem Too Large!_*
Open the Time Machine Prefs on the Mac in question. How much space does it report you have "Available"? When a backup is initiated how much space does it report you need?
Now, consider the following, it might give you some ideas:
Time Machine performs backups at the file level. If a single bit in a large file is changed, the WHOLE file is backed up again. This is a problem for programs that save data to monolithic virtual disk files that are modified frequently. These include Parallels, VMware Fusion, Aperture vaults, or the databases that Entourage and Thunderbird create. These should be excluded from backup using the Time Machine Preference Exclusion list. You will, however, need to backup these files manually to another external disk.
If you do a lot of movie editing, unless these files are excluded, expect Time Machine to treat revised versions of a single movie as entirely new files.
If you frequently download software or video files that you only expect to keep for a short time, consider excluding the folder these are stored in from Time Machine backups.
If you have recently created a new disk image or burned a DVD, Time Machine will target these files for backup unless they are deleted or excluded from backup.
*Events-Based Backups*
Time Machine does not compare file-for-file to see if changes have been made. If it had to rescan every file on your drive before each backup, it would not be able to perform backups as often as it does. Rather, it relies on a process called FSEvents. This is a system log that records changes that occur with all the directories on your Mac. Moving / copying / deleting / & saving files and folders creates events that are recorded in this log. At the beginning of each backup, Time Machine simply looks at this log to determine what has changed since the last backup. [http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14]
Installing new software, upgrading existing software, or updating Mac OS X system software can create major changes in the structure of your directories. Every one of these changes is recorded by the OS as an event. Time Machine will backup every file that has an event associated with it since the installation.
Files or folders that are simply moved or renamed are counted as NEW files or folders. If you rename any file or folder, Time Machine will back up the ENTIRE file or folder again no matter how big or small it is.
George Schreyer describes this behavior: “If you should want to do some massive rearrangement of your disk, Time Machine will interpret the rearranged files as new files and back them up again in their new locations. Just renaming a folder will cause this to happen. This is OK if you've got lots of room on your backup disk. Eventually, Time Machine will thin those backups and the space consumed will be recovered. However, if you really want recover the space in the backup volume immediately, you can. To do this, bring a Finder window to the front and then click the Time Machine icon on the dock. This will activate the Time Machine user interface. Navigate back in time to where the old stuff exists and select it. Then pull down the "action" menu (the gear thing) and select "delete all backups" and the older stuff vanishes.” (http://www.girr.org/mac_stuff/backups.html)
*TechTool Pro Directory Protection*
This disk utility feature creates backup copies of your system directories. Obviously these directories are changing all the time. So, depending on how it is configured, these backup files will be changing as well which is interpreted by Time Machine as new data to backup. Excluding the folder these backups are stored in will eliminate this effect.
*Backups WAY Too Large*
If an initial full backup or a subsequent incremental backup is tens or hundreds of Gigs larger than expected, check to see that all unwanted external hard disks are still excluded from Time Machine backups. Time Machine will attempt to backup any hard disk attached to your Mac, including secondary internal drives, that have not been added to Time Machines Exclusion list.
This includes the Time Machine backup drive ITSELF. Normally, Time Machine is set to exclude its’ own backup disk by default. But on rare occasions it can forget. When your backup begins, Time Machine mounts the backup on your desktop. (For Time Capsule/AirDisk users it appears as a white drive icon labeled something like “Backup of (your computer)”.) If, while it is mounted, it does not show up in the Time Machine Preferences “Do not back up” list, then Time Machine will attempt to back ITSELF up. If it is not listed while the drive is mounted, then you need to add it to the list.
*Recovering Backup Space*
If you have discovered that large unwanted files have been backed up, you can use the Time Machine “time travel” interface to recovered some of that space.
Launch Time Machine from the Dock icon.
Initially, you are presented with a window that represents “Today (Now)”. DO NOT make changes to file while you see “Today (Now)” at the bottom of the screen.
Click on the window just behind “Today (Now)”. This represents the last successful backup and should display the date and time of this backup at the bottom of the screen.
Now, navigate to where the unwanted file resides.
Highlight the file and click the Actions menu (Gear icon) from the toolbar.
Select “Delete all backups of <this file>”.
*FileVault / Boot Camp / iDisk Syncing*
Note: Leopard has changed the way it deals with FileVault disk images, so it is not necessary to exclude your Home folder if you have FileVault activated. Additionally, Time Machine ignores Boot Camp partitions as the manner in which they are formatted is incompatible. Finally, if you have your iDisk Synced to your desktop, it is not necessary to exclude the disk image file it creates as that has been changed to a sparsebundle as well in Leopard.
Let us know if this resolved your issue.
Cheers!

Time Machine "preparing backup" eternally upon wake from sleep

at a bit of a loss here...
iMac 24" (version which offered 7300GT as BTO option)
10.5.5 with all updates applied
LaCie 500 gig USB 2.0 drive directly attached.
Up until about two months ago, Time machine functioned fined. Then for some reason, the following started to happen. (no known reason, no software update related etc, that I know of)
scenario... Time Machine functions correctly EXCEPT when waking from sleep. If iMac wakes from sleep and attempts a backup immediately (e.g. more than one hour has passed), it gets stuck "preparing backup" forever. I've let it run overnight (actually as long as about 30 hours), it never stops. Finder and other programs become extremely non-responsive, machine is almost unusable. Literally, the only way out is to manually shut down external drive, with attendant warnings/errors.
What I've done:
1) deleted the time machine .plist file
2) erased, repartioned (as a single partition) external drive
3) started brand new time machine backup (takes about three hours)
At this point, time machine will backup up fine... I can force a successful backup, if I leave the machine running, at one hour it does a successful backup.
BUT, as soon as it goes to sleep, time machine is hosed.
The only workable method for using time machine is to turn the external drive and time machine off when not using it, and turn the whole shootin' match on to do what essentially becomes manual backups. These backup are fairly lengthy, as time machine also does lengthy "preparing backup", but they complete in about 30 minutes to one hour.
Given that time machine doesn't give mountable/cloneable backup, I'm probably going to go back to Carbon Copy Cloner. Still, I like the ease/regularity of Time Machine, and would use it if it works.
Any ideas?
thanks

It could be a number of things. There are lots of things that Time Machine does in order to "manage" backups -- apart from just copying data to the backup drive.
It has to manage the transition of hourly backups into daily backups and must also transition daily backups into weekly backups. Each time it does this it has to move a lot of data around. It also has to maintain indexes of everything so you can quickly find backups should you want to perform a restore.
I've also noticed that there are circumstances that can cause TM to question whether it can trust it's existing backup database... I've caught Time Machine saying that it needs to do a "deep traversal" of the backup (basically it wants to check and see what it really has) and this can take a very long time.
Still... 30 hours is an extremely long amount of time. I'm almost wondering if there's a problem with either your USB bus or your drive when they wake up such that you may be getting a huge number of retries on something that should have happened quickly.
I'd suggest you start the "Console" utility, select "All Messages" at the left, and then watch the messages being written to your log file. Not only does Time Machine log all of it's progress messages to the system.log (in more detail than you'd see in the Time Machine UI), but so do lots of other system processes. If you're getting USB bus problems the error messages would likely show up in the same log. I'm especially suspicious about non-TM related causes since you said you've already blown away your TM backups & preferences and started from scratch and you're still getting the problem.
Try re-creating your problem with the Console log messages being displayed and see if you can't see something in the log that would let you get a little closer to the root cause.
Regards,
Tim

Time Machine says Backup Delayed After Upgrading to Lion

Time Machine says Backup Delayed After Upgrading to Lion on both my Macs. It backs up fine when ever I connect to the USB drive but now seems to want to back up hourly when before weekly was OK. When it does not compleye an hourly backup it reports a delayed backup - failure on both machines. How do it revert back to it reminding me to do weekly backups?

I'm having the same issue with Time Machine on OS X Lion!
According to this webpage: http://web.me.com/pondini/AppleTips/LionChanges.html
Backups (i.e., Time Machine, SD, CCC, etc.) will only save the current "Version" of files.
The above statement sounds like the issue @iJRB and myself are having after upgrading to Lion where Time Machine shows the following error message below within "System Preferences > Time Machine"
@iJRB: Is this the error message you are seeing?

FYI: No Sleep during Time Machine initial backup

Just an FYI - I noticed that during the first Time Machine full backup, the computer does not go to sleep.
I would also assume that if you computer is asleep, it will not wake for each hourly backup.

Hi, and welcome to the forums.
You need to know that backing-up that way is "iffy" and +*not supported by Apple.+* See Using Time Machine with an Airport Extreme Air Disk (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
Kernel panics are usually caused by hardware problems, but can be software.
Disconnect all peripherals, except keyboard and mouse. Reconnect one at a time to see if you can find the culprit.
If that's no help, run the Apple Hardware Test: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1509
And perhaps a heavy-duty memory test, such as the free Rember: http://www.kelleycomputing.com/
More kernel panic info:
Apple Support - About kernel panic messages
Mac OS X Kernel Panic FAQ
The X Lab - Resolving Kernel Panics
Apple Developer - Technical Note TN2063: Understanding and Debugging Kernel Panics
Tutorial: Avoiding and eliminating Kernel panics
|
If you still want to back up via the Airport, the first backup will be much faster if you connect via Ethernet.

Time Machine nuking backups, starting from scratch!

ok, i just received this warning:
and now i't doing a backup that is slated to take more than "several hours."
is this common? how often can i expect this?

Hello,
Should you click “Start New Backup”? Not yet! If you see the dialog above, your existing Time Machine backup is corrupt, and you might not be able to recover data from it. But you can save a copy of the corrupt bundle and, perhaps, extract some data from it if needed.
Ask yourself if Time Machine has saved data you might need before deciding what to do next:
If you are sure you won’t need anything backed up before today, click “Start New Backup” and let Time Machine do its thing.
Otherwise, click “Back Up Later” and save a copy before letting Time Machine start a new backup. Just look for a file called “computername.sparsebundle” (for network backups) or “Backups.backupdb” (for local ones) and create a copy with a different name. You can open sparsebundle files with DiskImageMounter and browse them like any other disk. More information is available here.
There you go. If you click “Start New Backup” when you see this dialog box, Time Machine will erase all of your old backup data and start a new bundle. It won’t be corrupt, but it will be empty.
Note that you can manually initiate a Time Machine backup integrity check by option-clicking the “Time Machine” icon in the menu bar and selecting “Verify Backups.”
http://blog.fosketts.net/2010/08/11/time-machine-completed-verification-backups- improve-reliability-time-machine-create-backup/
According to This Time Machine resource “This appears only on Snow Leopard, and started with the Time Capsule Backup Update 1.0 in mid-May of 2010. It also seems to have been included in the 10.6.3 v1.1 update and 10.6.4.”
So, what can you do about it? Grin and bear it, it seems, until Apple fixes it.
One thing you can do to make the backup take less time is to connect your machine to your Time Capsule or other backup drive via Ethernet for the duration of the initial backup.
http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/the-dreaded-time-machine-has-completed-a-verifi cation-of-your-backups-to-improve-reliability-time-machine-must-create-a-new-bac kup-for-you-message-and-why-you-are-seeing-it/
Time Machine: About "Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you."...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4076

Maverick and Time Machine and backup

I moved to maverick. My time machine indicator at the top right of my imac does not spin when it is backing up. It used to with Lion. Is this normal.
When adding Maverick. Is it normal my external hard drives seem to view the first back up and a new one, and is taking more than an hour to back up?
thanks,

Hi John et al,
Update: Finally...
At least for the Promise Pegasus R4... but I noticed on other threads that WD drives are also acting up too so this might work with them too.
I turned off Time Machine, and deleted that pesky .plist file, again. I unplugged the R4, power and thunderbolt, then played whack the gopher with the drives swapping them around randomly. I reintalled Mavericks from a fresh download, yet again, then set Time Machine to backup on a fast USB 3TB drive (which it did in 6 hours or so). Then I turned off Time Machine, deleleted that .plist file again, rebooted the iMac, plugged in the R4, reformatted it again with Disk Utility, then hooked it to Time Machine, said a few slightly heretic prayers to whatever demons came with Maverick, and 2 minutes later Time Machine started to backup and report 1 hour to complete... the hour isn't up yet, but I'm crossing everything I have 2 of...
I've noticed a few other 'didn't copy over or mesh well' things with Maverick, but that's a different thread and 2 updates from now once we all suffer through this extended beta-test by Apple.

Time Machine everytime backups everyting!

My main system disk "Macintosh HD", 500 GB
Media disk is exernal disk named "Media", 1000 GB.
My Time Machine disk is named "DeLorean" and its external 1,500 GB.
I have about 340 GB more free space in the Time Machine disk than my data currently uses up.
My problem is that the Time Machine VERY often starts its backup FROM THE SCRATCH!
Doing FULL BACKUP! Deleting over 800 GB of data. If you see my logs, you will see it doesnt like something about the external "Media" disk.
It does this thing called "Deep event scan at path:/Volumes/Media reason:must scan subdirs|"... * see logs later.
Funny thing is, if i delete/erase the backup, or let it do the FULL backup when it wants, it usually after that does the normal smaller backup just fine.
BUT if I unmount the Media disk even once and do one incremental backup(which it does fine), then after i mount the Media back, next time it does this FULL backup and says in the logs about the Deep even scan.
All my disks are encrypted via FileVault2. Shouldnt time machine still work or is this setup fine?
Here are the logs. Yesterday i even shuffled all my disks and erased the Media and the time machine disk and encrypted them again.
You can see the first full backup starting at 2 am, then ONE succesfull incremental backup while both disk were still mounted. When i woke up at (13:20 pm) I did one incremental backup without the Media (ummounted it) and then again new one with media mounted (13:29 pm) and BAM ! It started FULL backup (deleting 800+ GB of data). Nothing has been changed on the media disk during that time. Weird !
Logs showing fresh first new backup stuff:
Dec 18 01:03:48 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Copied 81.9 GB of 1047.6 GB, 1469 of 1156879 items
Dec 18 02:03:49 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Copied 172.8 GB of 1047.6 GB, 1516 of 1156879 items
Dec 18 03:03:50 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Copied 264.8 GB of 1047.6 GB, 1563 of 1156879 items
Dec 18 04:03:50 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Copied 357.1 GB of 1047.6 GB, 1615 of 1156879 items
Dec 18 05:03:51 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Copied 449.1 GB of 1047.6 GB, 1666 of 1156879 items
Dec 18 06:03:51 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Copied 541.5 GB of 1047.6 GB, 1696 of 1156879 items
Dec 18 07:03:52 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Copied 633.6 GB of 1047.6 GB, 1741 of 1156879 items
Dec 18 08:03:52 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Copied 725.6 GB of 1047.6 GB, 1786 of 1156879 items
Dec 18 08:10:55 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Copied 1796 files (736.3 GB) from volume Media.
Dec 18 09:03:53 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Copied 773.9 GB of 1047.6 GB, 621723 of 1156879 items
Dec 18 10:03:54 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Copied 803.6 GB of 1047.6 GB, 936589 of 1156879 items
Dec 18 11:03:54 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Copied 878.4 GB of 1047.6 GB, 1019840 of 1156879 items
Dec 18 12:03:54 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Copied 951.6 GB of 1047.6 GB, 1107382 of 1156879 items
Dec 18 13:03:54 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Copied 1034.6 GB of 1047.6 GB, 1110125 of 1156879 items
Dec 18 13:13:49 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Copied 1140722 files (1041.4 GB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Dec 18 13:13:58 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: 1.72 GB required (including padding), 341.53 GB available
Dec 18 13:13:58 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Copied 6 files (0 bytes) from volume Media.
Dec 18 13:14:15 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Copied 6665 files (1.7 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Dec 18 13:14:17 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Copying Lion Recovery set
Dec 18 13:14:42 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Backed up Lion Recovery to /Volumes/DeLorean/Backups.backupdb
Dec 18 13:14:45 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Starting post-backup thinning
Dec 18 13:14:45 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: No post-back up thinning needed: no expired backups exist
Dec 18 13:14:45 imac com.apple.backupd[95130]: Backup completed successfully.
Ends.
This backup i Initiated after i woke up, with both system disk and external "media" mounted:
Dec 18 13:22:02 imac com.apple.backupd[5781]: Starting standard backup
Dec 18 13:22:02 imac com.apple.backupd[5781]: Backing up to: /Volumes/DeLorean/Backups.backupdb
Dec 18 13:22:05 imac com.apple.backupd[5781]: 1.70 GB required (including padding), 340.96 GB available
Dec 18 13:22:05 imac com.apple.backupd[5781]: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
Dec 18 13:23:05 imac com.apple.backupd[5781]: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
Dec 18 13:23:48 imac com.apple.backupd[5781]: Copied 6 files (0 bytes) from volume Media.
Dec 18 13:23:55 imac com.apple.backupd[5781]: Copied 1780 files (8.6 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Dec 18 13:23:56 imac com.apple.backupd[5781]: 1.37 GB required (including padding), 341.39 GB available
Dec 18 13:23:56 imac com.apple.backupd[5781]: Copied 6 files (0 bytes) from volume Media.
Dec 18 13:23:59 imac com.apple.backupd[5781]: Copied 1596 files (268 bytes) from volume Macintosh HD.
Dec 18 13:24:00 imac com.apple.backupd[5781]: Starting post-backup thinning
Dec 18 13:24:00 imac com.apple.backupd[5781]: No post-back up thinning needed: no expired backups exist
Dec 18 13:24:00 imac com.apple.backupd[5781]: Backup completed successfully.
Ends.. This seems to work like it should.
Now, see the time stamps, i just toke some coffee and came back....
This next backup is done while "Media" drive has been umounted:
Dec 18 13:28:00 imac com.apple.backupd[5962]: Starting standard backup
Dec 18 13:28:00 imac com.apple.backupd[5962]: Backing up to: /Volumes/DeLorean/Backups.backupdb
Dec 18 13:28:01 imac com.apple.backupd[5962]: 1.37 GB required (including padding), 341.39 GB available
Dec 18 13:28:04 imac com.apple.backupd[5962]: Copied 1455 files (78 KB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Dec 18 13:28:04 imac com.apple.backupd[5962]: 1.37 GB required (including padding), 341.39 GB available
Dec 18 13:28:05 imac com.apple.backupd[5962]: Copied 115 files (93 bytes) from volume Macintosh HD.
Dec 18 13:28:05 imac com.apple.backupd[5962]: Starting post-backup thinning
Dec 18 13:28:05 imac com.apple.backupd[5962]: No post-back up thinning needed: no expired backups exist
Dec 18 13:28:05 imac com.apple.backupd[5962]: Backup completed successfully.
Incremental backup seems to finnish ok, without the "Media" drive.
This backup is the third one done just after couple minutes after i mounted the "Media" drive back on:
Dec 18 13:31:49 imac com.apple.backupd[6025]: Starting standard backup
Dec 18 13:31:49 imac com.apple.backupd[6025]: Backing up to: /Volumes/DeLorean/Backups.backupdb
Dec 18 13:31:49 imac com.apple.backupd[6025]: Deep event scan at path:/Volumes/Media reason:must scan subdirs|
Dec 18 13:31:49 imac com.apple.backupd[6025]: Finished scan
Dec 18 13:31:51 imac com.apple.backupd[6025]: 884.92 GB required (including padding), 341.39 GB available
Dec 18 13:31:51 imac com.apple.backupd[6025]: No expired backups exist - deleting oldest backups to make room
Dec 18 13:31:52 imac com.apple.backupd[6025]: Deleted backup /Volumes/DeLorean/Backups.backupdb/imac/2011-12-18-131415 containing 8.7 MB; 341.40 GB now available, 884.92 GB required
Dec 18 13:31:52 imac com.apple.backupd[6025]: Removed 1 expired backups so far, more space is needed - deleting oldest backups to make room
Dec 18 13:32:02 imac com.apple.backupd[6025]: Deleted backup /Volumes/DeLorean/Backups.backupdb/imac/2011-12-18-132359 containing 736.30 GB; 1.05 TB now available, 884.92 GB required
Dec 18 13:32:02 imac com.apple.backupd[6025]: Deleted 2 backups containing 736.31 GB total; 1.05 TB now available, 884.92 GB required
Dec 18 13:32:02 imac com.apple.backupd[6025]: Backup date range was shortened: oldest backup is now Dec 18, 2011
Dec 18 13:35:02 imac com.apple.backupd[6025]: Copied 526 files (4.3 GB) from volume Media.
Dec 18 13:35:03 imac com.apple.backupd[6025]: Backup canceled.
I canceled that scan(it would take about 12 hours again
OK. Couple questions:
- Why time machine does this deep scan? What does it actually mean?
- Why time machine thinks that it needs to do a 800GB worth of new backup. Those data have not changed a bit (they are movies).
- How its related to the unmount/mounting the Media drive?
I would really hope some answers from somebody. I have strugled with this issue almost a month now.
Thanks!

ECONOMAN wrote:
Time Machine Incremental Backups S...L...O...W and seem to bog down things so as to make the machine unusable. Why doesn't it simply backup changes, not the entire drive (less exclusions)?
Normally, that's exactly what it does. So start by calming down.
And, it gobbles processing power so I can't even check mail.
Can you schedule the frigging thing or do I just stop it all the time in order to get anything done?
It's cute, but kind of worthless.
First, are these backups larger than you think they ought to be? If so, that's likely at least part of your problem. See #D4 of the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum, for some possible causes and a way to find out just what's going on.
If that's no help, or they're still slow, try all the things in #D2 of the Troubleshooting Tip.
If that doesn't help, post back with details, including all the messages, your setup (especially the destination for the backups), what you've done, and the results.

Time Machine deleting backups from several months ago (but not the oldest)?

During its "Cleanup" phase, Time Machine has recently been deleting backups from several months ago—even though these aren't the oldest backups, and my backup drive isn't full.
My backups go back to January 2012, yet just today, Time Machine deleted backups from May 21, June 11, July 2, and July 23 (all in 2012). And plus, my Time Machine drive still has 200 GB free.
Why's it doing this? Shouldn't it just either delete my backups from January 2012 first (if it needs the space), or just delete the expired backups in the past 24 hours or 30 days (based on its normal rules)?

See Pondini's TM FAQs for starters.

Time machine hourly backups

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