Can I stop Time Machine from showing the little status window?

Hello,
I have Time Machine backing up successfully to an attached USB drive. I've only had it for a couple of days, but I noticed it started popping up a small "status" window whenever it's backing up. It's the same style window you get when you're downloading something. Is there an option so that doesn't pop up when TM is active? The icon on the top is enough notification for me. This one is kind of annoying!

Pondini wrote:
There is a small window with a progress bar, when Time Machine is doing it's initial full backup. Surely you're not seeing that every time?
Not every time, but definitely more than once. How could I post a screen shot here? I can if needed. I don't think it was a full backup, since it said it was only about 20 GB in size.
If it's really doing a full backup each time, something is clearly wrong. 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 most recent backup that showed the window, then copy and post all the messages for that run here.
Also tell us how much data is on your system (the +Estimated size of full backup+ under the exclusions box in TM Preferences > Options), how large your TM drive is, and how much data is on it (via +Get Info+ on the drive).
Estimated size of full backup 49.37 GB
Size of TM drive 320 GB (it's actually a 1TB USB drive, but I partitioned it)
Data on my MBP drive: 49.54 GB
As I type this it's doing another backup, but no progress bar, and it's only 18.9 MB
Anyway thanks for the tip on the TM Buddy. Here is the log from the last big one it did from when I posted the question...looks like there are a bunch of errors! FYI in the logs below "Time Capsule" is what I called the USB drive partition. It's not "the" Apple Time Capsule.
Starting standard backup
Error: (5) getxattr for key:com.apple.backupd.HostUUID path:/Volumes/Time Capsule/Backups.backupdb/Luca’s MacBook Pro
Error: (5) getxattr for key:com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress path:/Volumes/Time Capsule/Backups.backupdb/Luca’s MacBook Pro
Error: (5) getxattr for key:com.apple.backupd.HostUUID path:/Volumes/Time Capsule/Backups.backupdb/Luca’s MacBook Pro 7
Error: (5) getxattr for key:com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress path:/Volumes/Time Capsule/Backups.backupdb/Luca’s MacBook Pro 7
Error: (5) getxattr for key:com.apple.backupd.HostUUID path:/Volumes/Time Capsule/Backups.backupdb/Luca’s MacBook Pro 9
Error: (5) getxattr for key:com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress path:/Volumes/Time Capsule/Backups.backupdb/Luca’s MacBook Pro 9
Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Capsule/Backups.backupdb
Error: (5) getxattr for key:com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress path:/Volumes/Time Capsule/Backups.backupdb/Luca’s MacBook Pro 9
Error: (5) getxattr for key:com.apple.backupd.HostUUID path:/Volumes/Time Capsule/Backups.backupdb/Luca’s MacBook Pro 9
Error: (5) getxattr for key:com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress path:/Volumes/Time Capsule/Backups.backupdb/Luca’s MacBook Pro 7
Error: (5) getxattr for key:com.apple.backupd.HostUUID path:/Volumes/Time Capsule/Backups.backupdb/Luca’s MacBook Pro 7
Error: (5) getxattr for key:com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress path:/Volumes/Time Capsule/Backups.backupdb/Luca’s MacBook Pro
Error: (5) getxattr for key:com.apple.backupd.HostUUID path:/Volumes/Time Capsule/Backups.backupdb/Luca’s MacBook Pro
Error: (-36) Creating directory Luca’s MacBook Pro 2
Error: (-36) Creating directory Luca’s MacBook Pro 3
Error: (-36) Creating directory Luca’s MacBook Pro 4
Error: (-36) Creating directory Luca’s MacBook Pro 5
Error: (-36) Creating directory Luca’s MacBook Pro 6
Error: (-36) Creating directory Luca’s MacBook Pro 8
Error: (-36) Creating directory Luca’s MacBook Pro 10
Error: (-36) Creating directory Luca’s MacBook Pro 11
Error: (-36) Creating directory Luca’s MacBook Pro 12
Backup content size: 46.4 GB excluded items size: 3.3 GB for volume Macintosh HD
No pre-backup thinning needed: 52.13 GB requested (including padding), 165.78 GB available
Copied 5.6 GB of 43.0 GB, 1572 of 615842 items
Copied 17.8 GB of 43.0 GB, 1736 of 615842 items
Copied 26.1 GB of 43.0 GB, 36361 of 615842 items

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How do I stop Time Machine from backing up Aperture thumbnails?

Hi,
My 2TB backup drive recently became full, and I became curious as to what was filling it up. I wrote a perl script to analyze the Time Machine backups, and I noticed that over 50% of my backup was filled with AP.Thumbnails and AP.Minis from the Aperture project directory. In particular, the AP.Thumbnails files in the backup consumed 737 GB of disk space!
The problem with the thumbnails files is that they are a single file that contains all of the thumbnails for all of the 40,000 photos I have in Aperture and it is now 20gb in size. Every time I add a new file to Aperture, the thumbnail file changes, and I get a new 20gb of data added to my backup. I add photos often which means that most of my backups have 20gb of Aperture files (which are easy to rebuild and don't need to be backed up).
I decided to try and stop Time Machine from backing up these files, and there seems to be no way of doing so (without telling Time Machine to skip backing up my entire Aperture project which I don't want to do). In Finder, you can do a "show package contents", but the Time Machine GUI doesn't allow this.
I tried to tell Time Machine to exclude the files via the GUI, but Time Machine sees the Aperture Library as a single package and won't let me exclude individual files from within the package.
I googled around, and found the attribute that Time Machine puts on files to exclude them from the backup. I used xattr to set the attributes:
xattr -w com.apple.metadata:comapple_backupexcludeItem com.apple.backupd <filename>
I also used this command on the iPhoto thumbnail files.
I used spotlight to find all of the files with this attribute using this command:
sudo mdfind "comapple_backupexcludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"
This command returned the iPhoto files, but did not return the Aperture files.
However, if I run "xattr" on the Aperture files, the attribute does exist!
During my next time machine backup, the iPhoto files were skipped as I wanted them to be, but the Aperture thumbnails were backed up again
I thought that maybe time machine was looking at the aperture package as an atomic unit, but iPhoto is stored as a package as well, and the attributes worked there on files inside the package.
Does anyone have any idea why time machine is still backing up these files? Is there any way I can get around this?
It seems to me to be an incredible oversight on Apple's part since both tools are Apple. The thumbnails files are very expensive to backup, and they are not necessary for backup since the are easy to rebuild from the original photos which are also backed up.
Thanks,
Ron

Shadow99999 wrote:
Hi,
My 2TB backup drive recently became full, and I became curious as to what was filling it up. I wrote a perl script to analyze the Time Machine backups,
No need to write your own script for that. there are a couple of already made nice GUI tools for this - TimeTracker http://www.charlessoft.com/ and BackupLoupe http://soma-zone.com/BackupLoupe/
and I noticed that over 50% of my backup was filled with AP.Thumbnails and AP.Minis from the Aperture project directory. In particular, the AP.Thumbnails files in the backup consumed 737 GB of disk space!
The problem with the thumbnails files is that they are a single file that contains all of the thumbnails for all of the 40,000 photos I have in Aperture and it is now 20gb in size. Every time I add a new file to Aperture, the thumbnail file changes, and I get a new 20gb of data added to my backup. I add photos often which means that most of my backups have 20gb of Aperture files (which are easy to rebuild and don't need to be backed up).
I decided to try and stop Time Machine from backing up these files, and there seems to be no way of doing so (without telling Time Machine to skip backing up my entire Aperture project which I don't want to do). In Finder, you can do a "show package contents", but the Time Machine GUI doesn't allow this.
I tried to tell Time Machine to exclude the files via the GUI, but Time Machine sees the Aperture Library as a single package and won't let me exclude individual files from within the package.
I don't have aperture but I think most people exclude the whole thing from TM backups and back it up separately. but if you want to exclude a subfolder in a package that's easy too. just select the package in finder, control-click on it and select "show package contents". in the resulting finder window drill to the folder you want to exclude and drag it to the TM exclusion list in TM system preferences->options.
I googled around, and found the attribute that Time Machine puts on files to exclude them from the backup. I used xattr to set the attributes:
xattr -w com.apple.metadata:comapple_backupexcludeItem com.apple.backupd <filename>
I was not aware of this method for excluding stuff from TM backups. could you provide a link to where you found this?
I also used this command on the iPhoto thumbnail files.
I used spotlight to find all of the files with this attribute using this command:
sudo mdfind "comapple_backupexcludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"
This command returned the iPhoto files, but did not return the Aperture files.
that's because Spotlight never looks inside packages unless you start a search inside a package directly. iphoto seems to be the only exception. I don't know how it's done.

Stopping Time Machine from backing up when running FCP

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Quite annoying. And sure, I can live with no backups made during work. (I hit Command-S every minute instead... ;-))

You may have something else going on, that doesn't seem to be a problem at other times.
First, see if the size of the backups makes sense, given the changes you've made. 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. That will show the duration of each backup at the top, and the total size in the "Copied" messages.
If that seems large, see #D4 in the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip* at the top of this forum.
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Under Time Machine Options I already excluded the following items from backups:
~/Library/Caches
/Library/Caches
~/Downloads
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oas2103 wrote:
they come from my anti-virus software
Are you sure you need that? There are no viruses that run on OSX. None. Zip. Zero.
If you're running Windoze on your Mac, that's the same as running it on a PC, so it needs all the same anti-everything stuff you'd use on a PC.
There is some "malware," such as Trojans, for Macs, though. But (unlike viruses that can get onto your system without your knowledge), you must approve their installation (via your Admin password) and/or operation (via the "This application was downloaded from the internet ..." prompt).
Appropriately enough, some of these Trojans are included in pirated versions of Apple software, such as iWork!
For the gory details, see Thomas Reed's [Mac Virus Guide|http://www.reedcorner.net/thomas/guides/macvirus].
Thanks a lot again!
You're quite welcome, and thanks for posting back.

Time Machine only shows the current copy of the file I am trying to restore. There is none of the time machine backup histories shown. I am running OSX 10.7.5. I see the backup files on my external Time Machine hard drive. Help

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How Do I Stop Time Machine From Filling Up My External Hard Drive?

Hi all -
I have a 750GB OWC external hard drive on which I back up about 100GB of data from my MacBook using Time Machine, and also store a bunch of media files for work. Currently about 650GB of that is full, and that is mostly because of two Time Machine-related files: The "Backups.backupdb" folder, which is 135.15GB, and "MacBook_001b63336000.sparsebundle," which is 233.71 GB. That means that in the nine months since I bought the drive, about 370GB, or half its available space, has been eaten by Time Machine backups.
I only back up so I have a bootable copy of all my current (not past) MacBook data if my MacBook is ever lost, stolen, or damaged. I am now very concerned that, if left unchecked, Time Machine will eat into the remaining 100GB of empty space. And my old external hard drive died precisely because it ran out of empty space. Some of my critical files were lost forever, and others I got back in pieces after several weeks of anguish and quite a bit of cash.
Apple's support page addresses this concern (incredibly) by instructing me to buy another external hard drive. That solution is expensive for me, and what's the point, when Time Machine will eventually fill that one up too?
So, my questions are:
1. Is there any point at which Time Machine recognizes it's nearly out of hard drive space, and either stops backing up, or deletes old backups, or sends me a warning, or something?
2. If not, is there a way I could designate a maximum size for Time Machine backups to take, such as 150 GB, that it cannot exceed?
3. Partitioning has been suggested, but I don't know how. Any instructions?
4. The OWC hard drive came with its own backup software. Should I just use that and shut up?
It would be mighty ironic if the software I use to save all my data got so fat, it sacrificed all my data....
Thanks in advance -

Andrew Saks wrote:
Hi all -
I have a 750GB OWC external hard drive on which I back up about 100GB of data from my MacBook using Time Machine, and also store a bunch of media files for work. Currently about 650GB of that is full, and that is mostly because of two Time Machine-related files: The "Backups.backupdb" folder, which is 135.15GB, and "MacBook_001b63336000.sparsebundle," which is 233.71 GB. That means that in the nine months since I bought the drive, about 370GB, or half its available space, has been eaten by Time Machine backups.
this is pretty confusing. have you been using it for both wireless and wired backups? the sparse bundle would only be created if you've used it for network backups. directly attached TM drives don't use a sparse bundle so it looks like you've got two separate backup lines. you should get rid of one as using both is very space inefficient.
I only back up so I have a bootable copy of all my current (not past) MacBook data if my MacBook is ever lost, stolen, or damaged.
FYI, TM backups are not bootable themselves. You can use the "full system restore from TM" utility on the leopard install DVd to restore your system from backups. That restored system will, of course be bootable.
I am now very concerned that, if left unchecked, Time Machine will eat into the remaining 100GB of empty space. And my old external hard drive died precisely because it ran out of empty space. Some of my critical files were lost forever, and others I got back in pieces after several weeks of anguish and quite a bit of cash.
Apple's support page addresses this concern (incredibly) by instructing me to buy another external hard drive. That solution is expensive for me, and what's the point, when Time Machine will eventually fill that one up too?
So, my questions are:
1. Is there any point at which Time Machine recognizes it's nearly out of hard drive space, and either stops backing up, or deletes old backups, or sends me a warning, or something?
I'm not sure of the precise point (TM need some free space on the backup drive to operate) but yes, this will eventually happen. when it does, TM will inform you of this and will give you an option of either stopping TM backups and changing the TM drive or starting to delete old backups. If you choose the latter it will start deleting old backups to create space for new ones. this is done automatically.
2. If not, is there a way I could designate a maximum size for Time Machine backups to take, such as 150 GB, that it cannot exceed?
not unless you partition the drive.
3. Partitioning has been suggested, but I don't know how.
it's an option but not right now. you have too little free space left for a successful partitioning process. If you try, the process is sure to fail due to disk fragmentation.
You need to get rid of A LOT of data if you want to try partitioning. also, fort the future, it's a very good idea to keep one partition entirely for TM and another for data. You'll avoid some of the problems you are having now.
Any instructions?
type "creating new volumes" in disk utility help.
4. The OWC hard drive came with its own backup software. Should I just use that and shut up?
don't. besides TM there are much better options out there. CCCloner and Superduper! are better than anything that OWC software has to offer.
It would be mighty ironic if the software I use to save all my data got so fat, it sacrificed all my data....
Thanks in advance -

How to stop Time Machine from trying to resize a sparse bundle

With 10.8, I'm backing up wirelessly from my MacBook Pro to a sparse bundle on a Drobo connected to a Mac mini on the same network. I used Drobo's Time Tamer to create the sparse bundle. The sparsebundle is a set size and cannot be resized (this is intentional to avoid filling the Drobo which is mostly used to store non-backed up non-critical data.
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Can you use time machine without using the airport router

Can you use the time machine and not the airport router?

Time Machine is software on your Mac computer that allows it to back up the data on the Mac to another hard drive.
More detals here: Mac Basics: Time Machine backs up your Mac - Apple Support
A Time Capsule is a wireless router with a built-in hard drive that is desgined to store Time Machine backups from a Mac computer.
More details here: AirPort Time Capsule
Please provide more details on what it is that you want to do.
What devices will connect to what other devices on your network? How will they connect? Wireless? Wired?

Can Superduper and Time machine write to the same external volume.

I just setup a 750 GB external drive single partition using firewire 800. Any problem with superduper and time machine writing to the same volume?
Ron

Can Superduper and Time machine write to the same external volume.
Yes, they can write to the same partition.
I am doing this, and can report no problems so far. TM still backs up and SuperDuper is bootable.

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Does it behave that way in [[Safe Mode]] ?
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Fox 8991 wrote:
I've been using time machine to backup my mac and I've noticed that whenever it deletes old backups to make room for the new ones it leaves my trash bin with about 30,000 files. This takes up a lot a space and is very time consuming to empty. Does anybody know how to prevent it from sending the old files to the trash or have any suggestions period? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
That's not how it should work, and something I've never seen on this forum. We do see this when people delete backups manually, via the Finder (which can cause all sorts of troubles).
How large is your internal HD, and how much data is on it?
Where does TM put your backups (external drive, Time Capsule)?
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 a backup where this happened, copy and post the messages here, please.

How to stop Time Machine from polling disks

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The questions is simple - how can I stop this from happening?
I have already tried:
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup -bool YES
It still continues to harass me daily. Any suggestions appreciated!

I may have spoke to soon. I think I finally squashed the prompts with the terminal command I noted above.
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Can't stop Time Machine

Can some iGenius please help?
I've only been using a mac for 2 days and just plugged in a new hard drive that I bought for the specific purpose of transporting large video files.... SOMEHOW I accidentally elected to use my WD as a Time Machine backup disk, and now I can't make it stop! Its trying to back up 200+GB... I have no idea how to reset/wipe/reformat the hard drive so this won't happen anymore... I tried deleting backup folder and renaming the drive, but it doesnt work... Have no idea how to go into settings etc to kill it.. Any advice please?
Sorry, i'm also kind of a technical dunce as it is! :-/

You can now use Disk Utility (from your "Go" menu in Finder choose Utilities > Disk Utility. Choose your new drive and erase tab in Disk Utilities.
Just make sure you don't choose it as startup disk for Time Machine.
-mj

Stop time machine from renaming my external hard drive?

im sorry if this is a repost but i couldnt find the answer to this anywhere
maybe im just being a bit thick here, but every time my time machine backs up data onto an external hard drive, it just changes the name of that external hard drive to "time machine backups", is there a way to stop this?
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I've never seen such behavior and TM certainly should not do that. I would not have thought it possible, actually. try resetting TM preferences. delete the file /library/preferences/com.apple.timemachine.plist. then go to TM system preferences and set it up again. if you had any folders/drives excluded from backups make sure to add them back to the exclusion list as it will be wiped out too.

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