Backing up to a thumb drive - time machine doesn't delete older backups when it's full. I will have to erase and re-do the drive. Why?

You are both right.
Time Machine can backup FROM:
It cannot back up a USB thumb drive.
Time Machine can backup TO:
•A USB thumb drive (but most aren't large enough, and are very, very slow)

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Time machine doesn't delete old backups when disk is full

TM disk is 750GB. It tells me there is not enough room for backup…then I look into TM and find there ARE NO BACKUPS anymore. (There were a few days ago.) All backups are gone, except for one two days ago, which was when I began getting the "no room" error.
I assume I've lost everything, as the TM disk shows only the backup from 2 days ago. True?
Do I just format and start again?
Is there a fix for this "no room" message? (It says oldest backups are deleted when disk becomes full. But it doesn't do it.)
Do people rely on this?

How much data is TM backing-up? (What's shown for +Estimated size of full backup+ under the exclusions box in TM Preferences > Options?)
Note that your Time Machine disk should, in most cases, be at least twice the size of the data it's backing-up. See #1 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
It appears that Time Machine needed to do a large backup, perhaps a full one, for some reason, and deleted as many old backups as it could (but it won't ever delete the last remaining one, as that would leave you with no backup at all), trying to make room.
If in doubt, Click here to download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window. Navigate to the backup in question, then copy and post all the messages for that run here, along with the amount of data that TM is backing-up.

Time machine doesn't show older backups anymore after restoring one

After restoring a backup, my older backups are not shown anymore in my Time Machine. Although it's said that the oldest one is from 2010.
how ca i get them back?
thank you for helping!

Try right-click on the Time Machine "clock" icon on the dock
Click Browse Other Time Machine Disks
See if your old backups are there

After motherboard swap, Time Machine doesn't recognise older backups

Hello,
After I had my motherboard replaced on my MacBook Pro, my older backups are not recognised. Is there any way to access this data?
Many thanks in advance.

Hello,
Time machine uses the MAC address to identify each computer and as your logic board now sports a new MAC address TM can't see it.
I haven't tried this but Barry Sharp, posting on macosxhints suggests:
If you attempt to backup after the MAC address has been changed the TM backup will indeed fail and report it cannot found the TM backup volume. This is because the hidden file with the name of the MAC address (minus the colons) does not match the new MAC address.
All that is required here is to goto TM Pref panel and click on the "Change Disk..." button and reselect the TM backup disk and then manually force a backup via the Dock's TM icon "Back Up Now". The backup will now run and the new MAC address will be created as a hidden file alongside the old one. You can use sudo to remove this old one.
TM backup will proceed as it would have normally done without the MAC address change and without a deep traversal of all volumes that have not been excluded ...
from:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080128003716101
Note: he points out the original suggestion at the start of that hint is unnecessary.

Time Machine doesn't delete old backups

Hi,
I keep getting errors from the TM backup that the disk for backup is full. It appears that TM doesn't delete the old backups that are on the disk. Any idea why it is not deleting the backups to make space? I also checked the button to notify me when deleting....useless....I am using Lion/Mountain Lion
Thanks

When you have issues of this sort.. Pondini is your man..
See http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
There is no need for admin / Root / SU login to TM.. that will not achieve anything.
You can delete the current set of TM preferences and start over.. See A4.
You have to delete the whole existing backup to start over. Or archive it off as I said if you want historical record, and erase the disk.
You erase the TC by using Airport Utility, under disk is erase option.. that is the fastest way. A quick erase via AU takes about 1min. Do use any other erase option, as they will take several hours.
You can also delete a sparsebundle.. but it is a long and time consuming process. That is important though if you have multiple backups on the TC you do not wish to lose.
See Q12 here http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
There are many many posts about how to speed up deletion of large backups.
eg https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2224110?tstart=0

Time Machine doesn't recognize past backups anymore

My Macbook pro just came back from being repaired (issue with the video display).
I think they had to replace the logic board or graphics card or both - but I'm not sure.
Everything works fine now... except for Time Machine.
Before the Macbook Pro was shipped off I would backup regularly to an external hard drive.
While my Macbook was gone I had to use some of the backup files from within the Backups.backupdb file system. So on my Powerbook G4 with Tiger I had to go in manually and copy files over. No big deal... or so I thought.
Now Time Machine does not recognize the past backups from before I shipped the MacbookPro.
It just wants to start an entirely new backup again.
Is there a way I can get Time Machine to recognize my old backup again?
I'd hate to have to go in manually from now on. It's not exactly convenient.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

OK, I didn't explain that well...
So here is what I'm typing in and what I'm getting back (the name of my computer being "Jason Argo's Computer":
Last login: Thu Jul 17 22:22:16 on ttys000
Macintosh:~ Jason$ cd /Volumes/Chubs/Backups.backupdb
Macintosh:Backups.backupdb Jason$ xattr -p com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress Jason Taylor's Computer
I don't know why but I'm getting nothing back now. Before I was getting errors saying no such directory exists. I've typed in ls as well and get nothing.
Any ideas?

Using Time Machine to restore an *older* BackUp drive

Here's my situation - I have currently been backing up my 2 computers (A Macbook Pro and a Mac Pro tower) to two separate external bootable drives (not Time Machines). I then take the drives off site in case of theft or fire, and know that if I need to I can always restore from these bootable backups.
However, because of the time and effort of bringing them in from their offsite location, I only back up once every few weeks, sometimes a month or more. So I just purchased an internal drive (separate from my system drive) to use as a Time Machine drive, for both of my computers (only one partition). Since they will be backing up every day, I will retain much more recent material in case of drive failure.
My question is this - if I have a drive failure on my current internal system drive, and the internal Time Machine is intact, is it possible for me to take my external bootable backup (say 3 weeks older than Time Machine in how recently it was backed up), make a cone of that on a new internal system drive, and then use Time Machine to restore that drive to what is most current on Time Machine?
Does this question make sense? I'm essentially trying to use a combination of external bootable drives and Time Machine in order to have peace of mind, knowing that I will have a complete, bootable restore, but it will then be able to become as up to date as the last Time Machine backup.

Daniel Greeney wrote:
So I just purchased an internal drive (separate from my system drive) to use as a Time Machine drive, for both of my computers (only one partition). Since they will be backing up every day, I will retain much more recent material in case of drive failure.
Let Time Machine back up every hour, as it's designed. That will protect you best.
My question is this - if I have a drive failure on my current internal system drive, and the internal Time Machine is intact, is it possible for me to take my external bootable backup (say 3 weeks older than Time Machine in how recently it was backed up), make a cone of that on a new internal system drive, and then use Time Machine to restore that drive to what is most current on Time Machine?
Does this question make sense?
The question makes sense until you realize that Time Machine backups contain everything you need (unless you do something silly, like exclude your system files).
Once the new drive is installed and formatted, you can restore your entire system from the TM backups faster than you can copy the clone to the new internal HD. See #14 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum. Note that you use the Snow Leopard Install disc only for the Installer on it; you don't install OSX from it.

Replaced internal hard drive, time machine doesn't recognize as same volume

Howdy,
The hard drive (call it drive "X") on my iMac (one of the 2005 models) was dying so I had it replaced. I rebuilt the new drive (drive "Y") from my most recent time machine backup (from external drive "A"). I am now having problems with one of my backup devices, in that time machine doesn't recognize that the new disk is conceptually the same thing that had been backed up before (same volume name).
More details... I rotate my backups monthly through three external drives (I store the most recent offsite). After the disk replacement and restore process, I continued to use that backup drive (drive "A") without noticing any problem. Then it came time to rotate my external drives, and time machine doesn't find enough space on the next backup drive (drive "B"). Presumably this is because it doesn't realize that the drive I am backing up ("Y") is a copy of the drive that had previously been backed up on "B" ("X").
Is there any way to convince it they are the same? Or am I in the same boat as this poster:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2770362&tstart=0
Basically I just want to verify that I am in that same boat before I remove old backup files on "B". If I do decide I need to remove those, are the instructions linked in thread 2770362 correct, or are there better ones?
Thanks for any help,
Bob H

Actually, the backup I deleted above was the backup for the new internal drive. Apparently TM had created the (incomplete) backup during the failed attempt that ran out of space on the backup device. Since the new internal drive had the same name as the old internal drive, I didn't initially realize that's what I was deleting. Not that deleting it causes any harm, but it didn't address the original problem of freeing up space on the backup device.
Not to worry though. I've figured out how to get at the backups for the old internal drive, and am in the process of deleting those. I was about to follow the instructions in your troubleshooting items E3 and E2, but upon attempting to enter time machine I stumbled into the right place. Since I had previously told TM to do no backups (because there was still not enough disk space), and since I'd left the backup device connected, when I pulled up the TM menu from the menu bar, the usual "Enter Time Machine" menu was replaced by "Browse Other Time Machine Disks" (or perhaps "Disks" was "Backups"). This then gave me a list of the machines that I'd backed up on this backup device (in my case machine names and internal drive names are the same). Of course one of those was for the old internal drive, and after choosing it I roughly followed the same course of action as I did a few days ago, to initiate deletion.
I also saw how I could delete each of those old backups individually, but decided against that as I did not expect it would free up enough space. My expectation is that nearly all the space is shared among all the backups for the same source drive, since relatively very little changes between backups.
Bob H

Time Machine doesn't acknowledge initial backup

I purchased a Time Capsule and quickly and happily built a new 802.11n home wireless network with it. Yay. Then I hooked up my iMac to the Time Capsule via ethernet to do my initial Time Machine backup, knowing that it would take a LONG time (~400GB). Well, it took about 3 days to complete (which seems suspiciously slow...), but anyway, it finished sometime in the middle of the night. In the morning I looked at the Time Capsule and sure enough, there was the big-*** "sparse bundle" backup. Time Machine seemed to be in the middle of doing a relatively small backup, about 140MB, which I figured were the changes since I began the initial backup a few days before. However, I wished to unplug the ethernet and let it continue wirelessly, so I did so. However, Time Machine seemed to just hang there with the backup no longer progressing. Since I could simply have it redo the backup a little later without any real data loss, I just stopped the backup mid-progress. I unplugged the ethernet cable and the world seemed well. Then I clicked in Time Machine to begin a new backup.
Of course, I expected this backup to be a rather small one, but I realized that Time Machine was about to begin another ~400GB backup! In fact, there was no information in the "Last Backup" field, so apparently Time Machine could not see the massive initial backup and was about to start all over again. Well, I am NOT about to wait another 3 days for it to do that, especially if the problem reoccurs, so I halted the backup and set Time Machine to "off."
Now, what to do? Why can't Time Machine see the initial backup? Why is it trying to do another full backup (very little data changed on my system in the 3 days)? Did my stopping the "hourly" backup somehow "break" things?
Advice? Thoughts?

I'm not sure how the sparsebundle is identified by the computer, but if it is uniquely identified by the network connection used (ethernet, airport, firewire networking, etc.) then it could very well not identify the previous sparsebundle you made via Ethernet as being the one for your computer via Airport. I dont remember this being the case for me when I had my PowerBook backing up to my PowerMac via both Airport and/or Firewire networking, but I could be wrong...it was a while ago. Even though you seem to want to lean away from this, I'd recommend remaking it and just letting it go. You can use your computer in the mean time and allow the process to run in the background. It will pause and resume as the backup disk is available until the process is complete.

Time Machine Doesn't Seem to Backup Titles and Keywords in iPhoto

Hi
I have just noticed that Time Machine does not seem to backup certain metadata attached to the photos. Do you know if I am doing something wrong here?
Using iPhoto version 7.1.5.
Thanks
Adam
Message was edited by: Adam Lippiatt

Someone was doing manual backups of their photos and I said - 'why don't you just use time machine'. I assumed it kept everything - but I thought I would check.
What I did
1. Opened iPhoto in Finder
2. Entered Time Machine
3. Found an example Photo I wanted to Restore (I chose a photo with a different Title to the 'name' of the photo (given to it by the camera) and one with a keyword).
4. In Time Machine I could see the correct Title, but not the Keyword.
5. Selected it > Restore
6. Photo restored after giving a 'Duplicate' warning. Photo restored only has the 'name' but not the Title or the Keyword.
Any thoughts on this?
Thanks
Adam

Time Machine doesn't delete previous back-ups. Why?

I'm using a 500gb external drive for backing up.
Every time TM tries to do a backup, it says it failed because there isn't enough disk space. Before, TM used to delete old backups to make space for the new one but now it doesn't seem to do it automatically.
I've checked everything I can think of and the preferences window does state that "the oldest back-ups are deleted when your disc becomes full".
It seems to be working if I reduce the size of my backups by excluding more.
Is there a built-in "preference" that Time Machine has to store at least two back-ups?
I'm happy to simply store one backup if I can adjust the setting to do so?
Any suggestions/advice please?

It will never delete the only backup if only one complete backup remains, no. If it needs to make a new full backup for any reason, it will only remove the exisiting backup once the new one is complete and in place, so for at least a short period, it would need double the normal backup space.
Without knowing the full history and details of backups on that drive, I would say you are pushing things quite a bit with so little available space. Depending on just how much changes in any one backup cycle, or if anything needs to be replaced because something gets corrupted, you could get warnings or outright errors. Basically anything that causes TM to need to make a larger than usual backup could cause you problems.
As Pondini mentions elsewhere in his FAQ, a good rule of thumb is to have a backup drive at least 2x-4x the size of the drive being backed up. External 1TB drives are pretty cheap these days - you could avoid a lot of headaches if you got and used a larger drive.
An alternative for that drive you have now is to use something like Carbon Copy Cloner (Bombich software) or SuperDuper (Shirt Pocket software) and make a full bootable system clone, then use the incremental option in those tools to keep it up to date. If you setup the incremental to basically always keep the clone to just a true single snapshot in time of what your boot drive has on it, then the clone will never take up more space than your boot drive. A cloned drive is itself a bootable complete copy of your entire current internal boot drive and system. The downside of such a clone is that it only includes copies of everything from the most recent incremental cloning operation, so you cannot go back in time to multiple previous versions of a file as you can in TM.
In an ideal world, you could get a bigger drive and start using it for TM, and also use your existing drive for a clone. Redundant backups are an asset (I keep 3 on hand at all times - a TM, and two clones).

Time Machine doesn't show any backups even though the data is being backed up

Time Machine is set to backup my Mac regularly and it seems to be doing so since the backups are being written to my backup disk.
However, when I enter Time Machine, none of the backups in the past show up on the Time Machine screen.
Is there a way to have Time Machine recognize the data it has backed up?

I restarted my Mac and all's well. Odd.

Time Machine doesn't recognize my backups now that I restored from it.

After installing Lion 7.1 from the app store overy my Snow Leopard, my mid-2009 2.8 GHz MBP (15") started acting wonky . . . Would freeze up randomly, need to be hard-reset, would open up windows on boot-up that I DID NOT have open before (even if I unchecked the option to "re-open windows when logging back in"), would not remember certain preferences, etc.
Called Apple tech, all he could suggest was format/reinstall using the fun, new recovery feature in Lion, if the 7.2 update didn't somehow magically fix my problems. It didn't, so I made sure my time machine back-up was complete, booted into recovery, wiped the Macintosh HD, and re-installed Lion from the web. Took forever, but no problems, so I get to the part where I want to recover from Time Machine, and say to restore everything expcept my settings (in case something from settings before was causing the issues). It does all of this, no problem, and I log into my Mac and everything looks the same as before.
NOW, Time Machine wants to back-up, as usual, and I think it will look at the system and say, "Oh, yeah, I've got all this . . . I mean, you just restored from me, so I'll just take a few snapshots or whatever and back up every hour (or whatever I do)." But Time Machine ain't saying that. Time Machine says," Oh, you have a bunch of crap on this hard drive already, but I need more room to back up your computer." And I'm saying, "No buddy, that's not a bunch of crap, that IS the back-up of this computer. Just reference that!"
Except, see, I'm SAYING that to my computer . . . But it can't hear me, obviously. How do I get my computer to understand that I don't need a new back-up from scracth, that the hard-drive I restored from IS the TM backup?
Sorry for not being able to explain this problem more efficiently. Thanks in advance.

Oh yeah, and the other thing is, now I CAN'T go back in time using my Time Machine back-up . . . It says I've never backed up now (I guess because this is a fresh install that's TECHNICALLY correct), but I restored from this Time Machine file . . . Surely I've done something wrong that can be fixed. Help, please?

Time Machine doesn't finish its backup

I have just started noticing that the Time Machine icon on the menu bar keeps spinning indefinitely. The "Backing Up" status bar in the Time Machine preference panel is hung at whatever the size of the backup was, e.g. 21.6 MB of 21.6 MB, and the backup does not finish.
If I cancel the backup by clicking on the small "x" to the right of the status bar, i get the spinning beach ball forever. I have let it sit for hours.
I cannot find the process to kill in the Activity Monitor either.
I ended up just turning off the external hard disk and of course get the warning message telling me I can corrupt the drive, etc.
I've tried looking in the console for backupd entries but I don't see anything that would indicate what the problem could be.
Can anyone give me an idea to identify the cause of this problem? I don't know if it's the internal system hard disk or the external time machine hard disk. i've cloned my system disk onto another external disk so i can format either or both disks and start fresh but i was hoping to avoid that.
thanks

bensenise wrote:
I just checked activity monitor again just to make sure. I have selected All Processes and Backupd was not listed.
Are you sure it's not listed? It's easy to miss when scrolling while it's refreshing. Try sorting the display alphabetically, by +*process name.+*
So it must be ending itself but something else is not ending since the icon is still spinning, the status in the pref panel is still not showing that it has completed, and most of all because something else is accessing the external hard disk. i can hear it and see the activity light flickering.
Exclude the external from any anti-virus scanning (better yet, turn it off entirely).
Also exclude it, at least temporarily, from Spotlight indexing, via +System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy.+
I did a repair permissions AND a verify disk yesterday. there were quite a few permissions errors and disk utility said the disk needed repairing so i booted off the snow leopard install disk and did a disk repair which was reported as successful.
the backups worked for a while, just like they are now. but then after a while, they'll have the same problem of not ending.
Once you get backupd stopped, check both disks again.

Time Machine doesn't recognize old backup after logic board replacement

I recently had my logic board on my MacBook Pro replaced and when I tried to backup, Time Machine did not recognize the old backup on the drive and tries to create a new one. The drive is mounted fine.
Is there a way to continue using my old backup, or do I need to delete it and create a new one?

lissy-loo wrote:
Hi there I've just had this problem on my computer too but is there a possibly easier way to explain what is on this site...
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080128003716101
I read through but got lost about half way down when it says:
"The last bit of information needed is the old MAC address. Open Terminal and change directory to the root of the Time Machine backup database, then get the old MAC address:...."
I was in terminal but couldn't work it out. Is this not a good idea to stumble around in if i have no idea what I'm doing? Seems difficult but I really wanna work it out because my Time Machine hard drive is full so I can't just get to back up everything from scratch and don't wanna delete what is already on there. Any help would be much appreciated!!
Hi, and welcome to the forums.
If you're not comfortable with the procedure, I'd advise against it. Mucking about with Terminal can cause all manner of problems.
But you can find your Mac's Ethernet Address via the *System Profiler* app. Click the Apple logo in your menubar, then +About This Mac,+ then +More Info+ to start it.
Select Network in the sidebar, then Ethernet in the upper panel. Near the bottom of the lower panel, under Ethernet, you should see *Mac Address.* It's 6 hex numbers (12 characters), separated by colons. Omit the colons when you type it into Terminal.
As noted in the Troubleshooting Tip, it's easy to do this wrong, get no error message, and have it not work (been there, done that!).
If it doesn't work, your only choices are to erase the drive and start over, or get a larger one and transfer your backups to it (see item #18 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip* at the top of this forum).
How big is your TM drive, vs. how much it's backing up? TM usually needs 2-3 times the space of what it's backing-up (see item #1 of the FAQ Tip).
Are you so concerned about not losing your backups because you've been deleting things from your internal HD, relying on TM to keep it's copies? If so, post back -- that's a terrible idea.

Backing up to a thumb drive - time machine doesn't delete older backups when it's full. I will have to erase and re-do the drive. Why?

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