Can Time Machine be used to backup BootCamp?

I wish to use my Time Machine to backup Bootcamp. But is that of any use? My purpose is not just to backup the data. I wish to have the OS to be backed up also. So that upon restore the entire OS should be present as it was during the Last TM Backup.

Time Machine doesn't directly back up the Boot Camp volume. If you use the third-party utility "WinClone" to image the volume in a file, that file will be backed up, but it's a very inefficient way to back up your Windows data. You should do that from within Windows, using a native backup tool.

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Can Time Machine be used to backup both internal and external drive?

I have a Mac Book Pro with Lion OSX installed. I have an external fire wire hard drive connected which contains my iTunes Library. I would like to use Time Machine to backup both the internal drive and the attached external drive. Can this be done?

Yes, make sure the drive is not excluded under the Privacy tab in Time Machine.
System Preferences > Time Machine

Can time machine be used to back up one external drive to another external drive?

I use the photography program Lightroom to organize and develop digital photos. All my photos are stored on my iMac internal drive. The internal drive is almost full so I want to move my photos to a new external drive. At present, I have an external drive devoted to backing up my iMac using time machine. I have no need to change this arrangement. I would like to use a new external drive to serve as the primary location for my pictures, which I will move from the internal drive. Then I would like to backup that drive to a third external back up drive. Can time machine be used to automatically back up the second drive to the third drive as well as for continuing to provide ongoing backups to my internal drive as it is currently doing?
Thank you in advance for your assistance.

Jeffery t wrote:
Thanks for the links, but I don't see in the pondini links, the scenario I am asking about.
Time Machine can easily back up multiple internal and/or directly-connected external drives and partitions simultaneously (but Time Machine cannotback up data that's on a network).
From the first link.
Jeffery t wrote:
... Please note that my iMac internal drive is backing up to external drive number 1 using time machine. I want my pictures on external drive two and those backed up to external drive three. So are you saying that if I have 500 GB of pictures on drive number 2, I will need a third drive that is at least 1 TB?
the confusion starts in your above statement...
There should be Only One Time Machine Drive.

Can Time Machine be used to back up iTunes?

I use Time Machine to back up my computer, and recently used it to set up my new computer. But I always exclude iTunes because my current library is at 1.41 TB, running off an external drive. I would like to make a regular back up of our iTunes library, say every week or so. That's why the DVDr route is not appealing, it's not fluid enough. Can Time Machine be used in this way? If I set up another dedicated external, and set it up with TimeMachine, but told it to exclude everything except the iTunes external, and made sure I did this every week, would it work? Thanks.

I'm not sure I understand your question, but there's no reason why you should treat the iTunes library any differently than other data for backup purposes. The first TM snapshot that includes it will take a long time and a lot of space, but once that's done, the files won't change and therefore won't need to be copied again.

Can Time Machine be used as a normal router?

Sorry my ignorance on this type of Apple's products.
My question is simple:
Can Time Machine be used as a router? I know it backs up files, but I'm not sure about this function.
Thanks in advance!

Yes, it does function as a "normal router".
In addition to its ability to function as a "normal router" (ie a device to share a cable/DSL internet connection) the Time Capsule will also:
1. function as an a/b/g/n wireless access point
2. network attached storage device, for Time Machine backups as well as general purpose file storage
3. point of attachment of one or more USB printers, which can be shared with all computers on the network
4. point of attachment of an external USB hard drive, for storage space additional to the built in hard drive

How can I force Time Machine to use existing backup sparsebundle files?

I backed up both my OSX Mountain Lion MBP and MacOSX Snow Leopard iMac to the same USB Disk. I then plugged this USB Disk into my Time Capsule, and configured Time Machine in both macs to use it through the network. But Time Machine insists on creating new backup sparsebundle files, ignoring the existing ones. How can I force Time Machine to use the existing backups.backupdb sparsebundle files instead of creating new ones?

How can I force Time Machine to use the existing backups.backupdb sparsebundle files instead of creating new ones?
You can't. Time Machine works differently over a network than it does with a locally-attached drive. What you could do is delete the folder named "Backups.backupdb" at the top level of the volume, which contains the backups you made via USB. You should then be able to backup to the same sparsebundle locally and over the network. But I wouldn't recommend doing that. Certainly don't do it unless you have at least one other complete backup (which you should have anyway.)

Can Time Capsule be used for Backup of Iphone

Can Airport Time Capsule be used for Backup of Iphone & ipad

The iPhone and iPad cannot back up directly to the Time Capsule.....they only back up to iTunes on your Mac or PC....or....to iCloud.
If you are using Time Machine to backup your Mac to the Time Capsule, then all of the backups of your iOS devices in iTunes will then be backed up to the Time Capsule.
See this Apple support document for more information on iOS backups.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1766

Any way to force Time Machine to use existing backup after inheriting?

Hi,
The hard drive in my iMac failed last week, and a replacement drive as well as a new logic board were installed. I installed OS X onto the new drive and then used Setup Assistant to recover all data from my Time Machine backup. Of course, once everything was back in place, Time Machine wouldn't recognize the backup as its own (per Pondini's site, this is because the logic board replacement makes Time Machine think it's a whole new computer).
To resolve this, I issued the Terminal command to inherit a backup, but this wasn't enough so I also issued the command to associate a backup with the computer. This seemed to work, and I was able to kick off a new backup. Time Machine did a complete scan and determined that it needed to back up everything on the computer as new. Because there's not enough space on the Time Capsule, it then started deleting old backups, one after another, until I noticed what was going on and stopped it after a couple hours.
So my question is this: is there a way to get Time Machine to use the old backup data to do an incremental backup? I'm not sure why it thinks it has to save everything; I could see it saving a copy of the OS, since that was installed from scratch, but all the user account data has been restored from backup so it should match what's in Time Machine. If there's no way to do this then I guess I'll just delete the Time Machine archive and start over, but for versioning purposes it would be nice to have the old Time Machine archive data.
Thanks!
Here's some log data:
10/12/13 8:25:12.755 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Starting manual backup
10/12/13 8:25:12.841 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Attempting to mount network destination URL: afp://[email protected]/TimeMachine
10/12/13 8:25:14.645 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Mounted network destination at mount point: /Volumes/TimeMachine using URL: afp://[email protected]/TimeMachine
10/12/13 8:25:14.687 PM fseventsd[48]: disk logger: failed to open output file /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/.fseventsd/fc007524359f8bb3 (No such file or directory). mount point /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/.fseventsd
10/12/13 8:25:14.687 PM fseventsd[48]: disk logger: failed to open output file /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/.fseventsd/fc007524359f8bb3 (No such file or directory). mount point /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/.fseventsd
10/12/13 8:25:40.251 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Disk image /Volumes/TimeMachine/iMac.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
10/12/13 8:25:40.253 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
10/12/13 8:25:41.831 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Inheritance scan required for /, associated with previous UUID: 30DCBA86-7702-31FD-B8A5-0CFBCE325E36
10/12/13 8:25:41.923 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Macintosh HD
10/12/13 8:25:41.966 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Deep event scan at path:/ reason:must scan subdirs|new event db|
10/12/13 8:25:41.966 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: First backup after disk inheritance for / - complete scan required
10/12/13 8:41:23.297 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Finished scan
10/12/13 8:49:06.137 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Found 1059692 files (565.28 GB) needing backup
10/12/13 8:49:07.658 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: 679.85 GB required (including padding), 143.39 GB available
10/12/13 8:49:15.324 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Ejected Time Machine disk image: /Volumes/TimeMachine/iMac.sparsebundle
10/12/13 8:49:15.324 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Compacting backup disk image to recover free space
10/12/13 8:49:57.436 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Completed backup disk image compaction
10/12/13 8:49:57.437 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Starting manual backup
10/12/13 8:49:57.888 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Network destination already mounted at: /Volumes/TimeMachine
10/12/13 8:50:23.419 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Disk image /Volumes/TimeMachine/iMac.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
10/12/13 8:50:23.421 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
10/12/13 8:50:24.966 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Inheritance scan required for /, associated with previous UUID: 30DCBA86-7702-31FD-B8A5-0CFBCE325E36
10/12/13 8:50:25.022 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Macintosh HD
10/12/13 8:50:25.069 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Deep event scan at path:/ reason:must scan subdirs|new event db|
10/12/13 8:50:25.070 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: First backup after disk inheritance for / - complete scan required
10/12/13 9:06:03.024 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Finished scan
10/12/13 9:14:04.765 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Found 1059692 files (565.28 GB) needing backup
10/12/13 9:14:06.234 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: 679.85 GB required (including padding), 143.39 GB available
10/12/13 9:14:06.318 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Deleted backup /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/iMac/2013-10-12-202541.inProgress/DB2AD703-283F-42A2-8 97D-194AE5F2F23B containing 4 KB; 143.39 GB now available, 679.85 GB required
10/12/13 9:16:59.047 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Deleted backup /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/iMac/2013-09-05-000218 containing 877 MB; 144.26 GB now available, 679.85 GB required
10/12/13 9:24:37.780 PM com.apple.backupd[19003]: Deleted backup /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/iMac/2013-09-04-002732 containing 1.33 GB; 145.6 GB now available, 679.85 GB required

Thanks Linc.
What happened is I needed to retrieve something from Time Machine prior to starting a backup (the first backup after restoring everything). However, Time Machine wouldn't connect to the Time Capsule, so that is why I used the tmutil commands. Probably if I had instead started a backup then it would have asked me if I wanted to inherit.
Well, if there's no way to avoid a full copy then I guess I'll delete the archive and start over.
Thanks again for your help.

Can Time Machine be used for extra drives?

I have a Mac Pro and currently have two drives in it, a system drive that's using as the startup disc and for most of my use. The 2nd drive is more like a server drive which is used on that system but also shared with all computers on my home network. i use it for things like clipart, backups of itunes from the laptops, media files, etc.
I just installed a 3rd hard drive and have been planning to set it up as a Time Machine drive for my Mac Pro. I have several questions though.
I assume when I do this it will just work as a Time Machine drive for my main system/startup drive, correct?
Is there a way I can use Time Machine for the 2nd drive in my system? In a sense setting up two Time Machine backups, one from the main drive to this new backup drive and the 2nd from the server drive to a 4th drive I can add in the future?
If the 2nd question is a No, is there a way I can set it up so that Time Machine simply backs up both the main drive and that 2nd, server drive, to the Time Machine drive? I really prefer not to use this option since both drives are 1TB and the hard drive I have just gotten as the time machine drive is 1.5TB. I think that should be okay for my main drive since it is only 30% used or so but with backing both onto it I don't think I have enough space to do it well.

Time Machine will back up all and any Mac-formatted drives connected to the system. You can tell it not to (in TM Preferences - Options), but by default it will back up all drives. You can't customise the destination for individual drive backups - they'll all go to one drive (so make sure your TM drive is large enough for all sources - 2 or 3 times as large as the total data usage, preferably).
If you don't want to use TM in this way, you can limit it to one source drive, and back up the other drive to a 4th HD another way - for example, using SuperDuper. This is a clone backup rather than a versioned solution, though.
Matt
Message was edited by: Matt Clifton

Permissions are badly messed up on any disk Time Machine has used to backup

*The Short Version:*
After using an external disk as a Time Machine target, disk permissions are forever and always utterly ignored which causes huge problems when said disk is supposed to share publicly and privately accessible files/folders over the local network.
Said disk is no longer used for Time Machine, but permissions still refuse to work after the "Ignore ownership..." option is disabled, ACL's are cleared, and more.
*The Long Version:*
So, I'm trying to share some folders off of an external disk I temporarily used for a week as a Time Machine backup disk.
Because I have both "public", and private documents on the disk, I need to use disk permissions, to disallow access to some folders. Enabling file sharing works great, except any and every user get full read/write access to everything.
I have another external aswell, which is identical, just it's never been used as a Time Machine target volume, and permissions are obeyed perfectly.
Originally I think the Ignore ownership option was enabled, but the checkbox wasn't showing up on the Get Info panel. After some messing around, I realized it's not displayed if there's a folder called "Backups.backupdb" on the root of the disk.
Now, a few hours later, after renaming "Backups.backupdb" to "Backups.backupdb_OLD", clearing ACL permissions from the disk, unmounting, mounting, restarting file sharing, and lots more, IT STILL IGNORES ANY AND ALL PERMISSIONS?!
Is there some kinda super secret disk flag option or something I'm missing which causes OSX to still ignore permissions no matter what?
I hope someone here knows what's going on, 2 hours of Googling hasn't helped at all.

UPDATE
I seem to have gotten file sharing to obey the permissions, to some degree. It included removing the share from system preferences, using TinkerTool System to change the permissions to anything (didn't seem to work via normal Finder, as I'd already tried that), and then adding the volume back in sharing preferences.
This doesn't really seem very reliable tho, so I'm hoping someone can come with a technical reason/solution for this.

After installing 10.5.2 can Time Machine be used to restore 10.5.0 ?

If I install 10.5.2 and then decide to go back to 10.5.0 - can I do a clean installation of Leopard from the DVD, and then use Time Machine to restore data onto the 10.5.0 clean instal. Or does Time Machine back up elements that are specific to the current Leopard update, i.e. 10.5.2 ?
I ask this beforehand, in case the upgrade to 10.5.2 goes awry, whereas I am having no problems with 10.5.0

The reason why I'd possibly need to go back to 10.5.0 is that, according to macpolls survey, 8.39% of people who installed 10.5.2 either had major problems or worse. As I see it, 8.39% is pretty close to 10%. That's a whopping big number. You're probably among the 91.6% who had no problems. For me, I use my iMac for my business, and I literally cannot afford for things to go wrong. As I see it, a risk of 8.39% is pretty huge in terms of the entire business shutting down if all computer records cannot be accessed on a critical day, e.g. when there is a critical deadline for submitting documents. Hence, before I install 10.5.2, I need to know how to get back to 10.5.0.
In your answer, you said that if I backup certain folders, I cannot go back to 10.5.0. Can you be more precise, because it doesn't actually tell me how I can ensure I can go back to 10.5.0. Right now, I have no control over what Time Machine backs up. It just backs up everything. If I don't back up the folder you referred to, will that adversely affect my reinstallation ?

Can Time Machine do two different backups for me?

I've got Time Machine nicely backing up my main HD to a 1TB external ESATA drive. It does it's thing. That backup on the external drive shares space with my main iTunes library which is now about 280 GB and growing. Would Time Machine also be able to make a backup of that iTunes library to another HD that I would buy for the purpose?
TM was so easy to set up and use I don't remember the choices. That wonderful bonus from Apple brings me here to ask this question.
Thanks all.

You could do it, but it would take some work. First, as I think you currently have things set up, TM backs the main HD to the 1TB drive.
To perform an independent backup of the itunes folder on the 1Tb drive, you must exclude the main HD, and the TM folder that holds the main HD backup. Then "change disk" (TM preferences) to the new HD you will buy. Do a manual backup.
When done, undo all these settings and go back to the setting of backing up the main HD to the 1TB disk (undo the excludes I mention earlier). Now you can go back to "normal" backups of the system drive.
When you are ready to do another backup of the itunes folder, repeat my second paragraph. Like I said - it's a bit of work. You can't have TM do both sets of backups automatically, you must do the manual stuff each time.

Can Time Machine be used to back up my server?

I've got 10.6 Server running on an Xserve. I was told that Time Machine can't be used on a Server, but I do have the TM icon on my dock. Does TM work with server or not - are its backups flawed in some way for Server?

Michael
Whoever told you that you can't use Time Machine on OSX Server was not wholly wrong or wholly correct. As ever it all depends on what roles you want your Server to perform. It is not recommended to use Time Machine to back up OSX Server if it's an OD Master and/or a Mail Server and/or running a SQL Database. This is because those databases are more likely to be constantly changing - think about it. Most people would say the 'sensible' thing to do is to stop the Services - or curtail in some way access to those databases during the backup - effect the backup and then re-start the Services or allow access to the databases again. This is something Time Machine does not know how to do. As ever it's not so much backing up that's the problem. The problem generally arises if you have to recover data after a Server or Drive failure. More often than the recovered databases exhibit all sorts of problems and corruption. Probably because the databases were 'mangled' by Time Machine when they were backed up.
If all you want from your server is simple file sharing, iCal, iChat and Web Services then you can use Time Machine and safely recover from the backups. In my experience this works for me consistently well. As ever YMMV.
HTH?
Tony

Can Time Machine Be Used to Back Up Files from An External Hard Drive?

Please let me provide a little more information to clarify the question.
The hard drive on my computer is not large enough for all my photo and video files so I am planning to purchase a new external hard drive and move my "Pictures" and "Movies" folders to the new external hard drive as a way of freeing up space on my computer. A different external hard drive is now used for backup of the computer's hard drive.
My question is about how backups will be handled if I upgrade to Snow Leopard.
I understand that Time Machine will take the place of the software now being used to back up the MacHD, but back up is still needed for the photo and video files which would be moved off of the MacHD. Will Time Machine back up those files too? That is, will Time Machine back up specified folders which are being stored on one external hard drive and place the backups on a different external hard drive? And, will Time Machine do that in addition to backing up the MacHD? If so, are separate partitions needed for the MacHD and the Photo/Video backups, or will Time Machine put everything in the same partition?
Any advice and/or suggestions for handling this in would be most appreciated.
Thanks for your help.

As captfred says, yes (as long as the drive is formatted for a Mac, not Windoze).
You might want to review the [Time Machine Tutorial|http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/#timemachinebasics] and perhaps browse [Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/FAQ.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

Can Time Machine be used to restore system after format?

Hi,
I need to format my Macintosh HD because Boot Camp Assistant cannot partition it. Now I have it all backed up with Time Machine, can I just format and then restore from the Time Machine drive and everything (Leopard, apps, settings & files) will be back to normal?
Thanks

I've just done it and it works faultlessly, the problem is, that after the restore, Time Machine wants to do a complete full backup for it's first backup, rather than realising that it already has a backup folder and continuing on from where it was. Consequently it tells me that I have insufficient space on my hard drive.

Can Time Machine be used to backup BootCamp?

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