Back ups on external hd aren't showing as restore points in time machine

i have a 27" iMac with the i7 processor and 8GB RAM. i've been backing it up to an external HD but recently noticed that when i enter time machine, none of the back ups are available as restore points. the IT guy at work suggested trying to reformat the ext. HD which i did with the same results. am i missing something? any help is appreciated
thanks

Do you mean there are no backups shown in the Timeline on the right, or you can't click on any of them?
If there are no backups shown, but you know there are completed backups (ie, show on the Time Machine Prefs window), see #E4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
If they're shown, but you can't click on them, that means that whatever is in the Finder window wasn't included on the backups. For example, if you create a new folder, then select that folder in a Finder window and Enter Time Machine, there aren't any backups of it, so you can't select any of them. Try selecting your Computer name or internal HD first. See #15A in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions.

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Just got Prosoft drive genius 3 software, and it's telling me that the external hard drive that i am using for my time machine back up drive needs to be defragmented. is it wise to do this or should i not??

just got Prosoft drive genius 3 software, and it's telling me that the external hard drive that i am using for my time machine back up drive needs to be defragmented. is it wise to do this or should i not??

Let's hope a couple things: that you have bootable clones of your drives also; that the backup drive for TimeMachine has over 3x capacity of the data you plan and are storing. I would also switch TM backup drives so you have a 2nd.
Fragmented free space affecting performance happens when the drive is too full which may mean there isn't enough free space for a full backup set.
1.5TB for backing up 500GB, while WD Green 3TB is $140 and WD Black 1.5TB is, about the same price.
I'd be worried about the integrity and directory, and whether you can afford to lose that drive. Defragging is also a very slow operation. the ideal: to just clone a drive, or start over with another drive and wait. cloning TM volumes has not been done or has it? SuperDuper hoped to but I don't think they or Bombich's CCC made it there.
Trouble with highly fragged is when free space gets to 20% normally, 1/3 or so though for TM volumes, and finding where and a chunk of space for the file being written. Does TM use large spare image files of like 2GB?
Best would be to ask in the TimeMachine section Snow Leopard
https://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os/mac_os_x_v10.6_snow_leopard?view= discussions#/?tagSet=1009
where there are some good FAQ and tutorials, and people that know the ins-and-outs and shortcomings.

Long story short....I restored my computer to an earlier point using time machine and now all of the previous back-ups are gone. My question has to do with itunes...is it possible to restore my itunes library to the most recent backup because the restore

Long story short....I restored my computer to an earlier point using time machine and now all of the previous back-ups are gone. My question has to do with itunes...is it possible to restore my itunes library to the most recent backup because the restore that I did was in march and the latest backup was in may....the reason being is that there were app that i had downloaded that are in my most recent back-up, that were not in the backup I restored to. Is it possible to just restore one application ie)itunes?

See this post.
tt2

Restoring from a Time Machine back up: iMac can't find them

A series of set backs after initially attempting to update Pages to be consistant and usable across my devices. iMac required me to update to Mavericks to be able to download the latest Pages update. After doing this, my iMac failed to reboot - just stuck on the white apple screen. This happened again next tie I attempted a Mavericks installation. So, I tried to restore from a Time Machine back up. After restarting in recovery mode I selected Restore from Time Machine back up - message reads "Searching for Time Machine back ups" (and hard drive is plugged in and switched on) but nothing is found.
How to enable the connection to the TM back up?
How to install Mavericks in this situ?
Thanks!

It may be that you can't do a full-system restore because system files were inadvertently excluded from your backups. But it could also be that the backups aren't usable at all. Since you don't know and can't check at the moment, you should assume the worst.
If you want to preserve the data on the startup drive, and it's not already backed up, you must try to back up now, before you do anything else. It may or may not be possible. If you don't care about the data, you can skip this step.
There are several ways to back up a Mac that is not fully functional. You need an external hard drive to hold the backup data.
1. Start up from the Recovery partition, from Internet Recovery, or from a local Time Machine backup volume (option key at startup.) Launch Disk Utility and follow the instructions in this support article, under “Instructions for backing up to an external hard disk via Disk Utility.” The article refers to starting up from a DVD, but the procedure in Recovery mode is the same. You don't need a DVD if you're running OS X 10.7 or later.
2. If Method 1 fails because of disk errors, and no other Mac is available, then you may be able to salvage some of your files by copying them in the Finder. If you already have an external drive with OS X installed, start up from it. Otherwise, if you have Internet access, follow the instructions on this page to prepare the external drive and install OS X on it. You'll use the Recovery installer, rather than downloading it from the App Store.
3. If you have access to a working Mac, and both it and the non-working Mac have FireWire or Thunderbolt ports, start the non-working Mac in target disk mode. Use the working Mac to copy the data to another drive. This technique won't work with USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth.
4. If the internal drive of the non-working Mac is user-replaceable, remove it and mount it in an external enclosure or drive dock. Use another Mac to copy the data.

Restoring iTunes from Time Machine and external HD

Hi there,
I've done some searching and i haven't been able to find the answer to this problem. I am wondering if someone can help me with this.
My HD was faulty so i had it replaced. my complete 300gb music library was backed up on an external HD. The iTunes program was running on my local HD. So i ran the local iTunes off of my ext. HD.
Now that i have a new HD and i restored everything from Time Machine, for some reason all my playlists and songs have been emptied from the new iTunes.
I am trying to restore it to its original state instead of readding everything from the external HD and trying to remember all the playlists. (and that doesn't work either as it comes up with errors.)
I have looked for the plist and or old .itl or.xml but nothing shows up.
Any ideas?
Ari

docutale1 wrote:
Hi there,
I've done some searching and i haven't been able to find the answer to this problem. I am wondering if someone can help me with this.
My HD was faulty so i had it replaced. my complete 300gb music library was backed up on an external HD. The iTunes program was running on my local HD. So i ran the local iTunes off of my ext. HD.
Now that i have a new HD and i restored everything from Time Machine,
Did you restore the entire disk from Time Machine?
Boot from your System install DVD then Restore from backup and select the Time Machine drive?
See this -> http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/14.html

I want to set up the Time Machine and I would love to use the Time Capsule but since I already have a wireless router I need suggestions on what other external disks Apple could recommend to use with the Time Machine and how to configure that disk

I want to set up the Time Machine and I would love to use the Time
Capsule but since I already have a wireless router I need suggestions on
what other
external disks Apple could recommend to use with the Time Machine and
how to configure that disk.
A complication that I need to resolve is the fact that I am using Vmware
Fusion to be able to use Windows on my Mac. Now it seems that Time
Machine is not backing up my files
on that virtual Windows without additional configuration and my question
is whether you can advise me here or whether this is only a matter for
the Fusion virtual machine.

If you want to use Time Capsule you can.. you simply bridge it and plug it into the existing router.. wireless can be either turned off or used to reinforce the existing wireless.. eg use 5ghz in the TC which is much faster than your 2.4ghz.
You can also use a NAS.. many brands available but the top brands are synology, qnap and netgear readynas series. These will all do Time Machine backups although how well always depends on Apple sticking to a standard. There are cheaper ones.. I bought a single disk zyxel which was rebadged and sold through my local supermarket. It actually works very well for TM at least on Snow Leopard. Major changes were made in Lion and again ML so do not instantly think it will work on later versions. I haven't tried it yet with those versions.
Any external drive can be plugged into the mac. Use the one with the fastest connection or cheapest price according to your budget. USB2 drives are cheap and plentiful. But no where near as fast as USB3 or FW800. So just pick whichever suits the ports on your Mac. Interesting Apple finally moved to USB3 on their latest computers.
TM should exclude the VM partition file.. it is useless backing it up from Mac OS side.. and will slow TM as it needs to backup that partition everyday for no purpose.. TM cannot see the files inside it to backup just the changes.
You need to backup windows from windows. Use MSbackup to external drive.. if you have pro or ultimate versions you can backup to network drive. But MSbackup is a dog.. at least until the latest version it cannot restore the partition without first loading windows. There are about a zillion backup software versions for windows.. look up reviews and buy one which works for you. I use a free one Macrium Reflect which does full disk backups and is easy to restore.. to do incremental backups though you have to pay for it.

How do I factory reset my Macbook Pro and then restore using my time machine back up?

Hey guys,
My Macbook Pro has slowed down & had more and more random crashed recently and a friend suggested doing a factory reset. My Macbook is about 3 1/2 years old now so it's about time I did something and this always used to work for me on PC's.
I've kept a completely up to date time machine back-up since day 1 (I'll do another immediately before the reset.) and would rather use that to restore all my files. Will I have to reinstall all my apps with this? (Thats fine if I do, it would just be nice to know first) How do I do the factory reset & how to I restore from time machine afterwards.
Many Thanks
MegaBeaker

First obtain an external hard drive to back up to. Go to your system preferences and look under Time Machine. Select your external hard drive as your backup drive then start a full backup. Then follow these steps provided by Apple:
In the menu bar, choose Apple menu > Restart. Once your Mac restarts (and the gray screen appears), hold down the Command and R keys.
Select Disk Utility, then click Continue.
Select your startup disk on the left, then click the Erase tab.
Choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from the Format menu, enter a name, then click Erase.Important: Erasing the disk removes all the information from the disk. Be sure to back up the information you want to keep to an external device.
After the disk is erased, choose Disk Utility > Quit Disk Utility.
Select Reinstall OS X, click Continue, then follow the onscreen instructions.

Using external hard drive as both a boot drive and time machine backup

My internal 1TB hard drive on my iMac is dead and I don't have the money to replace it at the moment.
I have everything backed up on an external 1TB drive using Time Machine. As a workaround for the time being,
Is there any way I can install the system on the external drive and use that as the boot drive without erasing the Time Machine
Backups? It seems to me I would have to have two partitions for the external drive, one for the system, and
one for Time Machine. But is there any way to add a partition without erasing the existing one with
Time Machine only on it?
Sorry if line breaks here are weird. Doing this from iPhone.

Neil , I have a mid 2010 27" imac running 10.6.8 and i want to install Lion , when i purchase Lion from app store will it give me any install options as I would like to be able to dual boot using SL and Lion , I have 500 gigs left on my 1 tb drive (should I do this) or would I be better of using an external bootable drive as I also want to use Ubuntu and or Linux down the line.
Any and all support , help and advice will be appreciated.
If you would like to e-mail me you can find it on my profile page.
Thanks

I bought and external usb hard disc, and i added it to time machine and now i can't use it! what do i do?

I just bought this external USB hard disc, and what I did was I put all of my pictures in there because I need space for my computer. What I did after that , is that I configured the hard disc with Time Machine, to clear some space also and to "protect" my data. But now I can't use my hard disc, I can't see my pictures I had in it and I can't use it for Time Machine either.
What can I do to get my pictures back?? Thanks!!

External USB hard disks come formatted, and unless they're specifically sold for use with Macs, they're formatted for PC's, with FAT, exFAT, or NTFS formats. Macs can read data from all three formats but can only write to FAT and exFAT formatted drives. So you could save your pictures to an external with either of those two formats. However, Time Machine needs a HD formatted and partitioned for a Mac, and if you "configured the hard disc" for use "with Time Machine," you effectively erased the pictures. However, since you "can't use it for Time Machine either," it's not clear exactly what you did, so we'd need to know that first. Also, what do you mean by "clear some space also?" On your internal or the external? And if the external, how did you do that since it already had your pictures and should still have had some empty space.
I'd suggest looking here to see if your external's format agrees with what Time Machine needs. Just look, don't actually change anything, so we have some baseline to work with. And also look at the box the external HD came in. What does it say about computer compatibility and which operating systems it's intended for (i.e., Windows, Mac, both).

Time Capsule shows with wrong name on Time Machine

I changed the name of my Time Capsule using airport. However, Time Machine still shows the old Time Capsule name, with the new name underneath. When I try to back up using this disk, it shows the following error message:
"Time Machine could not complete the backup. The backup disk image "/Volumes/Old Time Capsule name/My laptop name.sparsebundle" could not be accessed (error -1)."
I don't know how to fix this. I have looked everywhere. I deleted the NetworkInterfaces.plist file in Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration, and even made sure to do a secure empty trash. I even did a soft reset of the Time Capsule to the factory configuration, and renamed the Time Capsule all over again. I restarted the computer several times during this process, and yet no luck, it still shows the old Time Capsule name.
Does anybody know how to fix this? Thank you!

Ok, the MacBook is backing up now. Here is what I did:
After manually changing the name of the Time Capsule Disk as above, Time Machine was still not able to back up. I kept getting the error message
"Time Machine could not complete the backup. The backup disk image "/Volumes/Old Time Capsule name/My laptop name.sparsebundle" could not be accessed (error -1)."
The problem is that "My laptop name" Time Machine was using is wrong. I had changed the laptop name in Network Perferences>Sharing before, but it still kept looking for the wrong .sparsebundle file in the Time Capsule. I don't know why, and I even deleted the NetworkInterfaces.plist file again with no success.
I entered the Time Capsule from the Finder menu, found the .sparsebundle file with the wrong name, and manually deleted it. Finally the MacBook was able to backup. However, although the MacBook name is the same as it used to be before, and even though there was already an old .sparsebundle file with the correct name, Time Machine created a new .sparesebundle with the same name, and began an entirely new backup. I am just letting it do this backup, and then I will manually delete the old backup, so it doesn't take space on the Time Capsule. I don't need the past backups (and hope I won't swallow my words), and I am tired of dealing with this, so this will be it.

After updating my MacBook Pro to yeosemite I want my old screen saver picture back. I did a full back up before the install. I found the "Settings" folder in Time machine but when I try to open it I get an error message saying "You can not open this

After updating my MacBook Pro to yeosemite I want my old desktop picture back. I did a full back up before the install. I found the "Settings" folder in Time machine but when I try to open it I get an error message saying "You can not open this folder. It is in TimeMachine".

Can you browse the Time Machine drive from Finder?
If you can and you know where the picture was stored ie on your desktop you can browse through the folder structure to the picture copy it and paste it somewhere on your new install before right clicking it and 'set as desktop background'

Can I partition my external hard drive so that one partition is for Time Machine and the other is to install Windows with Boot Camp?

I have a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1TB USB 3.0 external hard drive that I currently use just for Time Machine backups. Is it possible for me to go into Disk Utility and create a new partition on the drive so that I may install Windows 7 via Boot Camp? Or since I am already using it for Time Machine do I have to keep it only for Time Machine?

You must install Boot Camp in your internal drive because Windows can't be installed in an external disk and Boot Camp can't do that

I just purchased Time Capsule today. I ONLY want to use it as an external drive. I do not need it for Time Machine. I can see the TC in my finder, but when I click on a file or video to drag and drop, I get message that TC can't be modified. Help please

I just purchased Time Capsule today. I ONLY want to use it as an external drive. I do not need it for Time Machine. I need to free up room on my computer. As of now, I can't even load updates. I can see the TC in my finder, but when I click on a file or video to drag and drop, I get message that TC can't be modified. Help please!

I agree with Kappy.. passing files and especially via wireless is slow as slow.
Just need to be sure your TC is the new AC model??
And the OS on the computer is Lion?
Have you completed the setup of the TC via the utility? You do still need to get internet via the TC so it has to be plugged into the main router..
Give us the full picture of the network.
Then we can help you get into it.. whether you should put your files on it is another question.

Is there any way to get back my data if I had not restored it from time machine before reinstalling Mac OS X on my comp from utility. PS - My OS version has downgraded from Mountain Lion to Mac OS X 10.75 . Pls. help

Is there any way to get back my data if I had not restored it from time machine before reinstalling Mac OS X on my comp from utility. PS - My OS version has downgraded from Mountain Lion to Mac OS X 10.75 . Pls. help

Look at the blue box on this link:
http://pondini.org/TM/19.html
Ciao.

HT3764 How to reformat an external hard drive using Snow Lepard to use for Time Machine

How to reformat an external hard drive using Snow Lepard to use for Time Machine

Use the Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder to erase it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with GUID as the partition map format(or APM if you're using a PowerPC Mac running 10.5).
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Back ups on external hd aren't showing as restore points in time machine

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