Time machine shows larger hard drive, so never deletes old backups and maxed out my drive

So I back up my Mac Pro to a Drobo Gen 2. There is a 3tb and 3 2tb drives in it. When Time Machine backs up, it says there is a 11.88 out of 17.59 available, which isn't true. It actually ran out of room during a back up b/c it's putting so much stuff on there. There is only 238.70 left. (the 3 TB drive is not used in the Drobo system, but is there in case a drive goes bad.) My Mac Pro has 4 TB in it, and there's about 1TB left on it, so the Drobo is showing 5.19 is used, and only the 238.70 left, so all the rest is TM. TM is suppose to delete older backups when disc is getting full. But it's not b/c it thinks there is plenty of room. How do I get TM to see the proper drive space, or is there a way to have TM only do a certain number of back ups then start erasing. I'm not really tech saavy, so whoever can help and speak my language, that would be great!

To clarify, this all happened under Snow Leopard as I had said. My profile lists Tiger, since I haven't cared to update my personal profile since using that OS, and in fact I still use Tiger among other versions. I manage a lot of users. And I never got to upgrade to Mountain Lion on this system, as explained in the post above. So I don't see the confusion.
I don't think the model of Mac makes a difference for this type of problem, but in case it does, the incident was on a 2010 Intel iMac with a 4TB hard drive and 8GB of RAM. I would have mentioned that if this was a problem with hardware specific to the model of Mac. But this is more of a universal issue.
But to stay on topic, I'm guessing my old backups are toast. But if anybody has any experience with recovering from Time Machine deleting their old backups, I would be happy to hear from them. In the meantime, I am going to try to do some old fashioned file recovery, and see what I can salvage.

Similar Messages

Time Machine with multiple hard drives

I use a very large external hard drive for time machine. I back up to this time machine, the two hard drivs that are inside my macbook pro, 512GB ssd, and 250GB SSD that is in the optical drive. I then backup a 1TB portable hard drive which holds all my movies and then I backup another 1Tb portable hard drive which holds all my "reserve" files, which means they are files that are no longer important to be on my computer. Old pictures, music, etc.
Now, I can't plug all of these drive's in at once. So, let's say I have to do a backup and I have nothing plugged in but the time machine external hard drive. Will it only backup the two hard drives that are in my computer and then later somehow let me go and restore the other drives? Or will it attempt to restore all 4 drives at one time? Because if the one in my computer mess's up, the other's may not be messed up and I do not want it to restore those.
I have used Time Machine before to restore my system. But never since I have started adding extra drives for Time Machine to backup.
I am also planning on adding, yet another drive for it to backup which is a 1TB portable hard drive that I keep raw files on for photography. I'm just curious how this works when and if the time comes.

well superduper is FREE, CCC isnt.........CCC can do the daily updates etc,. Superduper DOES NOT. the CCC and Superduper CLONES are bootable.......so, if your HD crashes, you can throw in the CLONE, and youre back and running in mins, rather than hours etc .
You should NEVER consider a backup a "backup", ........2 copies is 1, and 1 is none.....always have 2 copies of important files / pics etc etc,......... DECADES of work have been lost by people who thought their stuff was safe because they had a (meaning 1) backup.
Simplicity? Yes, Simplicity is my religion. CLONE your HD with programs and settings, ......and use a 2nd HD updated daily / weekly etc (preferable 2 such 'seecond' harddrives, copies of each other) with all personal stuff / work / pics / vids/ documents.....
superficially time machine is simpler, "smack a button and everything backs up".......in REALITY however when it "all goes up in flames"................the pro method (and my method) is QUICKER and more reliable by far to get down and running.
Ive restored other peoples from total crash and burns via Time machine.......and "my" way............my way always ends up faster by a mile. Also personal / work etc files are kept autonomous to the system data / programs OS,.....as it logically should be.
Time machine is the fastest incremental backup........but its as slow as paint peeling if you need it in case of a TOTAL CRASH.......wherein a bootable clone can be thrown in , in less than 20 mins.

Is a WD My Book Studio Desktop 3TB Hard Drive - FW 400/800, USB 2.0, Apple Time Machine Ready external hard drive bootable with my Powerbook G4 12" PPC 10.5.8?

Sirs or madams,
Is my Powerbook G4 12” PPC 10.5.8 'bootable' with a Western Digital My Book Studio Desktop 3TB Hard Drive - FW 400/800, USB 2.0, Apple Time Machine Ready external hard drive? Western Digital says officially no, but that it MIGHT be. I primarily live in China and bought a datastorage.com.cn Clearlight s400+ external hard drive enclosure with a 320GB disk drive a few years ago in China. My computer 'boots' fine from it, but since I got it in China all the paperwork, etc. is in Chinese; my Chinese isn't quite sufficient enough yet to read it. But there are references to something called "SATA", whatever that is.
My level of computer 'under the hood' knowledge is extremely low. I've been told that SATA has some relationship as to whether or not an external hard drive will boot a computer via the Firewire connection, something relating to 'interface', which I assume is how separate electronic gadgets work, or don't work, with each other.
I frankly don't care much for computers, the internet, or their related gadgets such as all these fancy phones. I longingly reminisce about the days when there were no such things. I use a computer & the internet because I have to, and unfortunately unlike a car where one doesn't have to have 'under the hood' knowledge to operate it, just knowledge of the steering wheel, brake, gas, etc., one seemingly must know a ridiculously great amount of 'under the hood' knowledge, including jargon, to operate computers.
So, please try to respond accordingly; thank you.
If this particular external hard drive won't, for certain, be bootable with my computer, can you advise as to what readily available brand/model would be in the 3TB range for a similar price, roughly $150ish??
Thank you very much.

Mr. BGreg,
Thank you very much. "...under the covers...". I think you meant "under the hood", as in a car. I suppose "under the covers" would be man/woman interfacing, which I am familiar with!
Actually, I'm back in the US now for a few months. I looked at the OWC web site, but only cusorily so far. I'll contact them; they appear knowledgeable about Apple computers.
As to what you wrote about Western Digital's cases, I certainly wouldn't want a poor case. In China I had over time gotten 3 different external drive cases, 3 different Chinese brands, and separately bought Hitachi brand disk drives that 'simply' plugged into the cases. The drives are roughly 80GB 120GB and 320GB. The two larger ones are in cases that have Firewire plugs/jacks, which are bootable with my computer.
So my understanding, as you wrote, has been that my Powerbook will boot from an external hard drive, provided it connects via Firewire, and the disk drive itself is 'normally' formatted with however my computer's own disk drive is formatted, (HFS OS extended (journaled) or some such??). So I was left wondering why Western Digital would indicate that even though their such-and-so external hard drive case/drive was Firewire capable, that they would then say it would not be bootable with my Apple PPC computer......
Well, anyway, since you indicated Western Digital's case quality is suspect, then I'll try OWC and disregard Western Digital.
Naturally, OWC should be able to address this, but your thoughts are also welcome. You mentioned the OWC cases are good with Apples. Would the disk drives OWC supplied with the cases also be of relatively dependable quality?? From my so far only cursory look at their web site they appear to have various options, including case only options where I could insert my own or their own drives. These sorts of options seem preferable, also along with quality components.
My Powerbook has been in use since 2004. In China I put in a 1.25 memory 'chip' in the bottom and installed the 10.5.8 operating system, which I understand are the maximum workable with my Powerbook. When I inquired with Chinese friends if my 1.33 GHz processor could be taken out and a more powerful one put in, they said it wasn't feasible because in my particular computer my processor was, as I recall them saying, soldered/'permanently' connected with the 'motherboard', that it would just be easier to get a new computer.
I would be with them and they would nonchalantly open it completely up showing me all its tightly arranged 'innards' while at least giving it a good internal dust/dirt clean job for cheap lunch and a beer (& so much dirt/dust/lint there was!)...these are the same folks who build the things of course...fast moving hands with tiny screws flying everywhere, but everything 100% all back in place when finished.
My Chinese friends also said that nowadays Apples are not as well built as when my Powerbook was built, that nowadays an Apple's life expectancy was considerably lower, so I fear that when I get a new computer that, though it will be more up-to-date and powerful, etc., it most probably won't last near as long as my Powerbook has. They also said that in an older computer the fan was often the first component to go bad, and if a new one couldn't be easily found, as they said was my case, then you're just left with having to get an entirely new computer. Part of why I dislike electronic computer gadgets generally is that they are obsolete so quickly.
So, anyway, thanks very much for your information.

I have three computers backing up onto the same Time Machine. The Hard drive of one has now failed, and I'd like to restore certain items (principally photographs) to one of the other two computers. How can I do this?

I have three computers backing up onto the same Time Machine. The Hard drive of one has now failed, and I'd like to restore certain items (principally photographs) to one of the other two computers. How can I do this?

"You can also browse the original backup disk for past backups by using "Browse other Time Machine Disks"--to see this choice, hold the Option key then click the Time Machine menu in the Finder (to see the menu, "Show Time Machine status in the menu bar" must be selected in Time Machine preferences."
Mac 101: Time Machine

Why does my iMac (with Mountain Lion) no longer recognize my external hard drive I have used as a back up via Time Machine after the hard drive was accidentally unplugged?

Why does my iMac (with Mountain Lion) no longer recognize my external hard drive I have used as a back up via Time Machine after the hard drive was accidentally unplugged?

Do you mean the external hard drive is not mounted on the iMac desktop?
Check if Disk Utility sees the drive. Applications / Utilities / Disk Utility. If the external shows up in the left column, select it and click on Mount.
If it does show up this way, I recommend using DU to Repair Disk.

Toasted my installation. Restoring from Time machine to 2 hard drives?

I just installed a second hard drive into my macbook pro. SSD is the system drive and HDD is the data drive.
When it was still working, I had my home folder on the SSD and my iTunes and Photo libraries on the HDD. Things were good.
Then I decided to move the entire home folder to the HDD.
Sys Prefs -> Users -> right-click the user -> advanced -> "move the home folder"
and again, everything was good.
Then I read something about having the user Library folder on the SSD is a good thing.
So I moved the home folder back to the SSD. Rebooted and all my prefs were now gone. Figured I messed up something and didn't want to troubleshoot.
So time for a restore.
Attempt 1
- Open Time Machine, select both hard drives, selected a past date and hit restore.
- Got a message that I didn't have enough space.
* I figure this is because time machine restores the entire contents of each drive as entire new volumes as a first step.
Attempt 2
- Go into recovery mode COMMAND+R
- Discovered I don't have a recovery partition
* I guess this is because I cloned my original system drive to the SSD using CCC and it didn't move this part.
Attempt 3
- I created a LION USB Install Key
- Booted from it, and selected 'Reinstall Lion' (because I read an article that I could recover my files after Lion had finished installing)
* Discovered that it reinstalled 10.7.0 and I would have to apply all patches on top. It didn't restore my HDD either.
* Later found out this method only restores the main system drive.
Attempt 4
- Now that I have a recovery partition, I booted from it.
- I selected "Restore from Time Machine Backup"
- Was able to select my Time Capsule, and it gave me choices on which date I would like to restore to.
- I selected and hit restore.
* It's about 25% done now. And I realize that i should've done this in the first place.
Question: Will this method restore both of my hard drives?

hsmp wrote:
Question: Will this method restore both of my hard drives?
No, only a single OSX drive. If both were backed-up, and both contained OSX, there was a (not very obvious) option to select which one you wanted.
See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #14. Section (g) shows this.
If you want to restore the "other" drive, and it contains OSX, run the restore again and select it.
If the other drive doesn't contain OSX, use the "Star Wars" display to restore it, per FAQ #15.

HT201250 i have plugged in a hard drive into my macbook, opened time machine, but my hard drive does not appear. why?

i have plugged in a hard drive into my macbook, opened time machine, but my hard drive does not appear. why?

Look in the Utility folder which is located inside the Applications folder.
You don't want to do anything with the disk on a PC if you want it to work on the Mac. They both use different formats.
Allan

Restore using Time Machine to new hard drive, but last "full" backup was 2012. how do I restore the rest of the Time Machine backups, particularily IPHOTO libraries for each user?

Restore using Time Machine to new hard drive, but last "full" backup was in 2012. How do I restore the rest of the Time Machine backups, particularily IPHOTO libraries for each user?
I entered Iphoto for my user and only photo up until 2012 were in the library. I thought the restore would do the incremental Time Machine backups too.....
Running 10.8.2

It usually means you are running Mavericks but have an earlier version of iPhoto. Open the App Store and upgrade your version of iPhoto to the Mavericks version.
The iWork apps are free with a new iOS device since 1 SEP 2013. They are free with a new Mac since 1 OCT 2013. They are also free with the upgrade to OS X Mavericks 10.9 if you had the previous version installed when you upgraded.The iWork apps are free with a new iOS device since 1 SEP 2013. They are free with a new Mac since 1 OCT 2013. They are also free with the upgrade to OS X Mavericks 10.9 if you had the previous version installed when you upgraded.
iWork and iLife for Mac come free with every new Mac purchase. Existing users running Mavericks can update their apps for free from the Mac App Store℠. iWork and iLife for iOS are available for free from the App Store℠ for any new device running iOS 7, and are also available as free updates for existing users. GarageBand for Mac and iOS are free for all OS X Mavericks and iOS 7 users. Additional GarageBand instruments and sounds are available for a one-time in-app purchase of $4.99 for each platform.

Folders locked in Time Machine after changing hard drive

2008 iMac running Lion 10.7.5
I have had a larger hard drive installed on my iMac and all the data migrated to the new drive.
Time Machine has done a complete new backup but I can't access any of the older backups on Time Machine from the old hard drive.
The error I get trying to open any folder in TM prior to today is (Movies is an example)
The folder “Movies” can’t be opened because you don’t have permission to see its contents.
My local Apple expert states that - "The backups get protected using the Hardware UUID of the hard drive. In your case, your old backups are protected using the UUID from the old hard drive. OS X is supposed to 'adopt' the old backup once it confirms that the data is the same as what is on the new drive. However, it doesn't always work."
I have since found a workaround on techsurvivors - by changing the permissions in Finder/Get Info on the Time Machine Drive ie
Open Time Machine drive in Finder
Do get info on any locked folder for specific backup date.
Unlock it but do not close the Get Info window.
Click on the black plus sign in the lower left corner of the Get Info window.
Click on the administrators or your account if it is bolded, then the Select blue button.
Click on the little arrows to select "Read and Write" for the account.
After doing this on one folder - Movies - for one backup ie June 11 2013 I was able to restore some movie files using Time Machine as normal.
I don't really want to have to repeat this for all the locked folders for every backup.
Is there an easier way to change the protection of the backups on the Time Machine drive? Or am I stuck with this workaround.
Thanks

Uhhh...
The "Family Pack" is not for sharing among friends. It is for family members in the same physical household. Read the license agreement.
You need the DVD. This might be a great opportunity to go buy one for yourself, and to get legitimate, and stop stealing software.

Restoring from Time Machine after 1T hard drive replacement

I am a super computer novice. I picked up my computer yesterday after having the recalled Seagate hard drive replaced. I backed up my computer using Time Machine before I took it in on a Seagate "Backup Plus" portable hard drive.
Now, when I have tried to use the restore start up, the computer recognizes that my drive is connected, but says there are no files on that drive it can use to restore the system.
I can see that there are 50GB on the disk, and when I look in it, there are files called "Macintosh HD" so that makes me think that my stuff is in fact on my external drive. why can't my computer see it?
Do I need to get a FireWire cord to connect to my computer? I'm using the USB 3.0 that came with the hard drive.
My computer had Mountain Lion when I backed it up. I think it is back to whatever OS it came with originally. Do I need to update to Mountain Lion? If I do, how do I do so without having to pay for it again? My app store is empty since my computer was wiped.
Thanks for the help, I really need it!

The first thing to do is upgrade back to ML, which you can easily do. Just redownload ML from the app store with the same AppleID you used the previous time you purchased the ML upgrade. Your purchase is tied to the AppleID you used when buying, so you can download it again (as many times as you wish) without payment as long as you use the same AppleID.
Once you have upgrade it to ML, then try the restore from the backup (which I gather was made when while running ML before).

Time Machine with 3 hard drives + Dual boot Leopard vs Tiger questions

My situation began with two 160GB HDDs that I have been using under Tiger. One is the boot drive and the other is a data drive. I bought Leopard and also installed a new 320GB HDD but as yet I have not done the OS upgrade or even formatted the HDD. I need to gain some understanding before I proceed. My first choice is just to clone Tiger onto the new (bigger) HDD and then upgrade it to Leopard. (Note that this post is not meant to be a discussion of the best way to get the OS upgrade completed.) After that I could wipe the two 160 giggers to serve as backup space for the 320, but can anyone tell me: Is Time Machine compatible with using multiple HDDs for backup data? It may not be as relevant if the first answer is positive, but I also would like to know: Does Time Machine requires use some kind of special hidden partition for storage (or is just any empty space on an HFS drive sufficient)? If any HFS space will work, will Time Machine preserve the other files that are already there? And lastly, if I reboot into Tiger, mount the drive that has the Time Machine archive on it, and write/delete/edit the non-Time-Machine data there, will Time Machine freak out the next time I use it in Leopard?

...snip...
After that I could wipe the two 160 giggers to serve as backup space for the 320, but can anyone tell me: Is Time Machine compatible with using multiple HDDs for backup data?
Yes this will work AOK. Have done this myself so can confirm.
It may not be as relevant if the first answer is positive, but I also would like to know: Does Time Machine requires use some kind of special hidden partition for storage (or is just any empty space on an HFS drive sufficient)?
No special 'hideden' partition required. It simply creates a specially named folder to keep/manage its data backups.
If any HFS space will work, will Time Machine preserve the other files that are already there?
Yes it will.
And lastly, if I reboot into Tiger, mount the drive that has the Time Machine archive on it, and write/delete/edit the non-Time-Machine data there, will Time Machine freak out the next time I use it in Leopard?
No it will not.

Time Machine deleted my old backups and crapped out midstream

I had just gotten my failing hard drive replaced, and restored from Time Machine backup. So far so good.
So a week later, I wanted to upgrade to Mountain Lion, but figured I should be responsible and run Time Machine backup again before doing the upgrade just in case something goes wrong.
The Mac has a 4TB drive, which has 2TB free. The backup drive is a 4TB external drive, which has (or had) Time Machine backups going back two years or so. It still had over a TB of space left. I clicked on Backup Now and let it run overnight. I noticed it said "Deleting old backup to make room" or something like that, which I thought was normal.
I woke up in the morning to find that Time Machine had crapped out in the middle, and said that it couldn't complete. I realized that it had deleted all my old backups. It didn't need to do that, since the only files that had changed would have been less than a GB, and it had over a TB of space to work with.
It must have thought that everything on the drive had changed since the last backup, and it wanted to backup the entire drive. As such it tried deleting all my old backups! But it failed, and stopped in the middle.
Now I have a drive that still says there is only 1.2 TB of space on the drive, but I can't see the files! Even with Tinkertool, I can't see anything beyond the one most recent backup.
Can these files be recovered? I am totally ticked that there isn't some kind of confirmation like "Are you sure you want to delete X?"
I actually need to have some of these older backups, as they include files that had been deleted before the latest backup that I may need to retrieve. Any hard drive experts out there? Any terminal commands that can make these files accessible, even if I have to retrieve them manually?

To clarify, this all happened under Snow Leopard as I had said. My profile lists Tiger, since I haven't cared to update my personal profile since using that OS, and in fact I still use Tiger among other versions. I manage a lot of users. And I never got to upgrade to Mountain Lion on this system, as explained in the post above. So I don't see the confusion.
I don't think the model of Mac makes a difference for this type of problem, but in case it does, the incident was on a 2010 Intel iMac with a 4TB hard drive and 8GB of RAM. I would have mentioned that if this was a problem with hardware specific to the model of Mac. But this is more of a universal issue.
But to stay on topic, I'm guessing my old backups are toast. But if anybody has any experience with recovering from Time Machine deleting their old backups, I would be happy to hear from them. In the meantime, I am going to try to do some old fashioned file recovery, and see what I can salvage.

Time machine problems on clean-install, doesn't recognize old backups as such/permissions issues

My iMac had been pretty slow, and never received a clean install since I'd gotten it. With the security that I'd just restore whatever I wanted from Time Machine afterward, I used the recovery partition to format the hard drive and install Lion.
Everything's fast now! It's remarkably like it was when it was brand new with Tiger, which is pretty good for a nearly-six-year-old computer running today's OS. I'm having problems with the Time Machine part, though. Even after ensuring that my username is the same as it was before and making all the permissions my own in both Finder and with chmod, it throws me permissions errors when restoring some, but not all files, with no pattern about it. This isn't a big deal for restoration because I've just used sudo cp to put everything back where I wanted it, but now I have issues with backups. Even though TM sees my old backups and can restore the ones that don't give permissions errors, it still wants to take new backups of things I've manually restored, such as my iTunes folder of about 50GB. That's the big conflict now; I don't want to take up all that space for files that are already backed up. Can anyone offer a fix? Thanks!

coldcaption wrote:
Yes, the other drive was backed up before. If it was previously associated then perhaps something was messed up trying to re-associate.
As long as you pointed it to the backups of that disk, it should be fine. If not, or if in doubt, just run the command again.
It changes whether or not I have the previously-backed up external drive added to the things to back up (unless it's supposed to do delete the old ones in this case?),
I don't quite follow that. The Estimated size of full backup is just the total data on the drives that are included (unfortunately, there's no display of them), less any exclusions of files/folders on them.
Finally, though, the size of a backup if I were to take one right now would be 363 GB;
How do you know that? The only way to tell what Time Machine thinks is new or changed is to actually start a backup, and see what the display ("xxx GB of yyy GB") and/or log messages (". . . xxx MB/GB requested (including padding), yyy MB/GB available.") say. See #A1 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting for a handy widget to display the log messages.

My Time Machine (TM) is taking way longer "Cleaning up old backups" if i haven't even backed my computer up for that long.

I havent backed up my computer in almost 2 years due to a complication with the Time Machine (TM)
But now it is fixed and it spends hours on "Cleaning old backups"
And when it comes to backing up computers I am always scared to fix it blindly because our Time Machine backs up 3 other computers.
Is there something I'm doing wrong or do I just need more patiences?
HELP!!!

Cancel the backup.....unless you want to wait a few more days to see if it might work.
Erase the Time Capsule drive using AirPort Utility
Start over again with a new backup
Ethernet will be 4-5 times faster than wireless for the first backup

Removed disk in Time Machine, now can't reselect to get my old backups back

I accidently clicked Remove Disk in Time Capsule on my MBA. Now when I try to reselect it in Time Machine (using the Time Capsule disk listed) it doesn't find my old backups.
I don't want to start again as there is all my old backups sitting on the Time Capsule taking up space. Any advice to get my backups back?
One thing I have noticed is the icon for the Time Capsule used to be the Wi-Fi 'fan', but now it's got the people holding hands icon instead. Sorry if they have correct names for the icons but that's the best description I can use. I also have no idea if this is important or not.
Thanks.

Sfem wrote:
I accidently clicked Remove Disk in Time Capsule on my MBA. Now when I try to reselect it in Time Machine (using the Time Capsule disk listed) it doesn't find my old backups.
If you mean the TM Preferences window shows "None," it just hasn't updated the window yet. See #B3 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting
One thing I have noticed is the icon for the Time Capsule used to be the Wi-Fi 'fan', but now it's got the people holding hands icon instead. Sorry if they have correct names for the icons but that's the best description I can use.
I'm not sure what you mean. Can you post a screenshot?

Time machine shows larger hard drive, so never deletes old backups and maxed out my drive

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for