Curious time machine behaviour
I bought a new MacBook pro and used the startup assist feature to move the files and programs from my old iMac to the new machine. I used my Time Machine backup hard drive to do this connecting it to the new mac by a firewire 800 cable. The transfers seems to have gone well BUT...
When I plugged the Time Machine hard drive back into the old machine, it stopped working.
Here's what happened:
First I get a message from Time Machine telling me that it can't back up my system because there's not enough room on the Time Machine hard drive. This I thought was very curious because Time Machine does one large backup initially and then only backs up the changes after that. So it normally wouldn't back up the entire system unless you told it too. I didn't. Secondly when I went into Time Machine I noticed that all the incremental back ups going back through time were gone.
So because I used it to tranfer files to the new computer I lose compatibily with the old one?
When you transferred the data to the new machine and then created a new snapshot in Time Machine, the backup history was inherited and no longer linked to the old machine. You then tried to back up the old machine, which meant that TM had to copy every file on it. There wasn't enough room on the backup volume for that.
If you intend to back up both computers to the same drive, you need a much bigger drive.
Similar Messages
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My old backups on the Time Machine disk are not accessible.
Hi everyone,
I installed a fresh OS X Mountain Lion yesterday. I tried to use Migration Assistant (in the Utilities folder) for the first time, to migrate my old data from the Time Machine back-up disk.
After almost 6 hours, my data was completely in place from the backup disk. In fact, the data was gotten from the latest version of backups as I expected. But now, when I go to Time Machine to browse my old backups, it seems that all backups are still there, detected by the Time Machine itself, but it is not possible to access any of them.
In fact, selecting one of the past backups from the Time-Line on the right edge of the screen, has no effect. All the windows behind the current finder window in the Time Machine are also dimmed, seems that no backups are there. But the Time-Line on the right edge of the screen displays several items from the first backup on my disk to the latest which was for the day before yesterday.
This is not what I expected from the Time Machine. I was so glad when the Migration Assistant read all my data from the backup disk and put them in place. But I did not expect to lose my old backups which are still there on the disk, but Time Machine behaviour is like the times where there are no backups.
It is important to note that before migrating data using Migration Assistant, I was able to browse all my backups in the Time Machine. This was also one the great features of Time Machine, since I had a fresh OS installation, and all my data from the past were accessible in the Time Machine.
I could also get my data one by one and restore them in-place using Time Machine but it was some how cumbersome.
Now is there any one to let me know why this has happened? I Appreciate your time to write.
Mani HamedaniTroubleshooting information:
Time Machine Troubleshooting
Time Machine Troubleshooting Problems -
Strange behaviour of Time Machine.
I am getting the enclosed notice from Time Machine:
Even so the backing is to 2 TB disk and the backup is about 250GB.
The Hard Drive Was empty before the backup started.
What is going wrong?
Thanks,
AmnonOpen the Time Machine pane in System Preferences. Click the padlock icon in the lower left corner, if necessary, to unlock it. Scroll to the bottom of the list of backup drives and click Add or Remove Backup Disk. Remove the problem disk, then add it back. Quit System Preferences. Test.
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Aperture and Time Machine compared to iPhoto behaviour
If I'm in my iPhoto library and enter Time Machine I get to browse my entire backup of the iPhoto library in the Time Machine window - which is great. Though I don't use iPhoto anyway so there aren't any images there anyway...! I first noticed this way Time Machine works when recovering some e-mail notes I'd lost on the iPhone - very simple way of getting individual items back.
If I enter Time Machine in Aperture I'm dumped out of Aperture and cant see any old photos in Time Machine from the Aperture interface...
Does anyone know if Apple plan to make Aperture behave like iPhoto in the near future?
I like to keep things simple and have one large drive with one Aperture library holding all of my photos and a separate large Time Machine drive to hold the backup.
Thanks.
Message was edited by: Arturus
Message was edited by: ArturusDoes anyone know if Apple plan to make Aperture behave like iPhoto in the near future?
Afraid no one outside of Apple know what - if any - plans Apple have for the future.
Regards
TD -
Just curious about time capsule plus time machine
so i was checking my time machine settings and instead of the regular time machine icons they seem to keep changing and also display the amount of space used or available:
shouldnt the drive be the same icon with the clock on it and display the amount of space left on the Timecapsule drive?
Btw Data (Time Machine) = the drive all my BackUps goto
Media (Time Capsule) = network drive attached with my media files
thanks!!Oh okay, thank you!
yeah i noticed in Snow Leopard it did that too.
same with viewing my other computers on the network in finders sidebar.
it just showed the NAME and not the Icon for the computer, very weird! -
Time Machine Lost Backups... Without Losing them!
Hey you guys,
I don't know if any of you met this kind of strange behaviour (looked but didn't find...): Time Machine told me yesterday that the backup had failed. I was working rather heavily at the time, trashing folders and putting some order into the main HD. I then did a Backup now and everything went fine. My curiosity was aroused, so I went into Time Machine... and discovered that my backups prior to two days ago had disappeared.
I opened the Time Machine HD: everything was there. I checked, all the info is OK. I decided to sleep over it. Well, this morning everything is back to normal and Time Machine "recovered" what it didn't see the day before.
Understand, this is a new machine with almost new hard drives, checked regularly and apparently working fine.
Did somebody encounter this kind of problem? Is there something I should check, or modify, or whatever?
Thanks for your time, and have a good day.
RTPRTP,
I then did a Backup now and everything went fine. My curiosity was aroused, so I went into Time Machine... and discovered that my backups prior to two days ago had disappeared.
Just curious, did you attempt to launch TM while that successful backup was still going on, or had it completely finish (TM menu clock icon had stopped spinning)?
As V.K. stated, sometings TM just hiccups on one attempt, but succeeds on the next. Just for inormational purposes, the following are some other reasons why previous backups may not appear in Time Machine:
*Previous Time Machine Backups Are No Longer Visible*
There are several reasons why this might be the case. Consider the following:
If Time Machine can successfully launch into its’ “time travel” interface then the software is seeing backups. It you only have two time travel windows to chose from, “Today (Now)” and a single window behind that, then Time Machine has only performed its initial full backup. You can verify this by looking at the time scale on the right. If no dates appear other than Now and the date of your first full backup then subsequent incremental backups have not been taking place.
If it has been MORE than an 1 ½ hours since the first full backup completed, then you need to determine why Time Machine has stopped backing up. It might simply be that the Time Machine Preference has been turned off.
If, on the other hand, you look at the time scale on the right and you see multiple dates going back to the time of the first full backup, but they are grayed-out, then Time Machine knows that incremental backups have been taking place. Nevertheless, only the front most window “Today (Now)” shows content. Take a look at the Sidebar of the Finder window. Among the various Devices, Shares, and Places, what is highlighted/selected? If it is the Time Machine backup disk itself that is highlighted, then click on some other location in the Sidebar to make the former backup windows appear.
You see, the Time Machine “time travel” interface displays the historical backup state of what ever location is highlighted in the Finders’ Sidebar. Since Time Machine does not back itself up, then there will be no historical backup windows visible.
Bear in mind as well, if you have added locations and items to the Time Machine “Exclude From Backup” list, then there will be no visible history of these items either if they too are highlighted or selected.
And of course, if you are looking at a file or folder that has only recently been created, then there will not be many, or any, backup copies of it depending on how long ago it was created.
*Anti-Virus Software*
If you have anti-virus software running try disabling, launch Time Machine again, and see if you can access previously backed up data. Sometimes such programs scanning processes can interfere with Time Machine.
*File Vault*
Did that user account happen to have File Vault active?
In another thread V.K. stated: "if you start TM from a filevaulted home directory all you'll see is present. you could browse your old backups of files outside your home directory but not anything in it."
*For Time Capsule / AirDisk users*
If you are backing up to a wireless device, and you have the Time Machine backup disk image (sparsebundle) mounted on your desktop while you are trying to access it via the Time Machine "time travel" interface, you may not be able to see any files from previous backups.
You see, if the backup disk image (sparsebundle) is already mounted on the desktop (a White drive icon) then Time Machine may conclude that the disk is “in use” and fail to mount it properly. Obviously, this is not a factor when backing up to a locally connected drive.
A I said, none of it may apply to your case, but it is nonetheless helpful to keep in mind.
Cheers! -
Time Machine backup behavior erratic, now not working at all
[ Using Lion 10.7.2 on a Macbook Pro 15" with 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB RAM. ]
The Macbook is connected to our home LAN, and I have been using (since September) a Synology NAS drive on the network which is set up as the Time Machine backup drive. Most of the time for these past months it has been fine; some issues initially with connectivity which were finally solved by using a static IP address for the NAS.
Recently it did the first strange thing. It had been performing incremental backups as normal, when a message came up saying the backup was unreliable and it needed to carry out a complete new backup. Anyway - no drama - I took it up and plugged it into the router to speed up the transfer (around 200GB on the drive). It worked fine and thereafter it went back to doing incremental backups normally.
Yesterday morning I noticed it was apparently running and running without progress, clicking on the bar icon revealed that TM was "Preparing Backup"; this state continued for several hours. So I stopped the backup, restarted the machine, and then last night at 22h00 I restarted it - by 08h00 this morning, ten hours later, it was still "Preparing Backup", so clearly something is wrong.
The NAS drive is accessible, ie.
- The 'Time Machine Backups' icon for the drive has appeared on the desktop
' The 'Diskstation (Time Machine)' is available in Finder under 'shared'
So this seems to be something to with Lion and/or with Time Machine.
Considering the infrastructure environment has been stable for months, the IP address of the drive is static, there appear to be no network connectivity problems... I am at a loss as to why now this irritating behaviour and, more to the point, at the moment I cannot make the Mac backup. I would be happy to do another full backup but, really, should not be necessary since this only happened (due to the recently problem) a few weeks back - and anyway what's the point of automated incremental backup if (a) it doesn't work reliably and (b) every 2-3 weeks you have to manually perform a full backup anyway??!!
Thanks in advance
AlastairAlastair Mac wrote:
thanks. unfortunately a locally attached drive isn't a option that will work well for me (too long to explain, but it just won't - personal logistics rather than technology issues).
Are you sure about that? I have a Time Capsule (2nd hand) but I've switched back to a locally attached disk with Lion. Lion's new mobile backups provide some measure of backups when not connected to the backup drive. It protects against accidental deletions, but not hardware failure. Plus, the new bootable recovery partition in Time Machine and encryption tip the balance back in favor of the local drive - for me at least.
1. does it make sense to you that, until yesterday, it was working fine and then quite suddenly it stopped working?
I will say that it isn't surprising. There are some changes in Lion that affect networked Time Machine devices. The early versions of Lion got pretty annoying. 10.7.2 seemed to be better. I had to erase my Time Machine drive a couple of times and do new backups when it decided it needed to keep rebuilding the Spotlight index. Unless you connect with Ethernet, the reindexing will never finish. In your case, I would expect a 3rd party, flaky open-source product to perform even worse.
2. in my specific situation (going around and around "preparing backup" without any progress even in 24hrs of preparing, what can i do to restart the backup process? even if it means doing a clean backup i.e. junking the old one, i would live with it as at present (touch wood) my hard drive is OK and i have no historical version recovery issues.
With Time Machine, the only quick and easy way to reset things is to erase the Time Machine volume.
3. did apple / synology reach a point in previous releases of OSX and DSM which was stable and DID work, despite the need to use Netatalk? in other words, if i soldier on patiently, is it likely this will eventually get solved? or will this be a perennial problem? in the end, if twice a year i have to intervene, it doesn't really matter PROVIDED the backup itself is intact should the HD finally die. of course, if i have to intervene every couple of days, i may as well do it all manually.
I can't really answer that. I used Netatalk briefly several years ago and it scrambled my files. It has certainly improved somewhat, but obviously isn't stable. The part that really annoys me is that the change that Apple introduced in Lion wasn't really new. Apple introduced a more secure version of the AFP protocol 9 years ago. In Lion, all they did was make that more secure protocol the default and disabled the older protocols. There are a number of hacks that have been posted (sometimes by me) about how to set a flag in Lion so that it will continue to use the older protocol.
Synology seems to have better Mac support that some NAS vendors. Still, there was no reason they had to wait so long to update their software. Developers have had access to Lion for almost a whole year.
I would expect that companies would be always trying to improve their products, but the evidence doesn't support that assumption. I don't like Netatalk's shady open source extortion practices, but then no one else has stepped up to fund a stable open-source implementation of AppleTalk. People tend to blame Apple but they published the new specifications a decade ago and no one bothered to read them. Why should they care?
Personally, I think backups are too important to rely on such flaky software. I really like Time Machine but it is pretty complicated. Apple is able to make it functional over a network, but just barely. If you are using a 3rd party NAS, my suggestion would be to use NFS instead and backup with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!. Even if you want to continue to try using Time Machine, a Carbon Copy Cloner backup would be a good thing to have too. -
Replacement macpro, time machine won't back up bcs file is too large
In June I purchased a replacement macpro as the other one died. (allergic to water) When I set up the new macpro from my TC everything worked great and haven't had any issues since. However I just realized that I never turned Time Machine back on so I don't have any backups since June. I turned time machine on and it wants to back up the entire drive of the new macpro but there isn't enough room on the TC drive.
I would like to keep all the old backups on the TC but I don't know how or if I can do that. If not how can I go about clearing the TC so my macpro can get backed up?
(Full disclosure - I have only been a mac user for a few years so I am not too savy in figuring out what to do and more importantly what NOT to do!)If you are really not going to use the old TM backups.. but just want to keep them as historical record.. plug in a suitable sized USB hard drive and use the archive utility in the TC to backup everything there. You can then disconnect that drive and store it somewhere safe suitably labelled.
Then proceed to wipe the existing tc drive and start the backups again.
Note there are million variations on this.
With what hard disks cost at the moment due to short supply it is cheaper sometimes to buy a new TC.. and store the old one. Also depends on how old the original TC is and the size of its hard disk, if it wouldn't be better to make the backup as described above.. ebay the old TC and get a new one.
Read the details in Pondini's excellent knowledgebase.
Particularly about moving or storing old backups.
http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
Time Machine has some strange behaviour it what it keeps and what it wipes itself.. so it is well worth being aware of what it does and doesn't do.
Being a Mac user myself for a very short time.. and consider myself less than expert in even the most narrow field.. except that I repair TC's and have done a lot of them. So much so that I find it hard to trust them. Always have another backup.. a clone of the disk as it is right now.. backed up somewhere safe.. using a cloner software which are available even free, using a firewire drive hanging off your mac pro.. or even with all the extra space you have inside it.. shove the disk inside and do an internal backup.. but exclude it from TM so it isn't backing up the backup. -
Restoring from Time Machine doesn't work
I am attempting to restore from Time Machine on my 13" Late 2008 MacBook, but the restore stops about halfway through.
Some background information: A few weeks ago my computer started exhibiting some weird behaviour. It would turn the disk off or log me out after a few hours (I typically sleep with it on and use at as my alarm clock). Then, apps would crash and quit unexpectedly. It would kick in the HDD when I was not using anything that required it, and the fan would turn on for no reason. Then the worst thing happened: Some days I would get the dreaded "You need to restart your computer" screen multiple times. It almost seems like a virus. The problems persist after multiple PRAM and SMC resets. Sure enough, I tried turning on my computer yesterday and it just won't even start. It would give me the Apple logo, a spinny loading indicator, and then it would give me a very slow progress bar. As soon as the progress bar gets to about one tenth of the way, the computer turns off.
I have everything backed up to a very recent Time Machine. I opened the computer in Recovery Mode and verified the disk. It needed repair. So I repaired it, and it said the repair was unsuccessful and needed to be restored. So I tried restoring it. I ended up having to erase Macintosh HD and reinstalling Lion (which thankfully I could do over the Internet). After reinstalling that, I tried "Restore from Time Machine." It got to about 30% of the restoration and then took me back to the Utilities page spontaneously. It didn't give me an alert or an error of any kind. It has done this multiple times. I may try Migration Assistant and see how that works. I know that a 4-year old MacBook is a bit of a dinosaur anyway, but the machine has been very useful and powerful for the whole time I've had it, and this is not how I'd like to see it die.
I also have a lot of important data on the Time Machine and fear that whatever afflicted my MacBook may afflict the MacBook Pro I intend to get soon, which I will load my TM onto.
Any and all help is deeply appreciated.
-Sam TaylorI have always had problems restoring from my backups. I just replaced my hard drive and did a restore and now there are no icons in the dock (all ?'s) and I cannot click on my Applications folder in any finder window. (Oh, and the fans run constantly at top speed after being on for about 3 minutes.)
This is probably the 10th restore I've done in the past couple of years and I don't think one has worked for me. -
"No such file or directory" errors on Time Machine backup volume
I remotely mounted the Time Machine backup volume onto another Mac and was looking around it in a Terminal window and discovered what appeared to be a funny problem. If I "cd" into some folders (but not all) and do a "ls -la" command, I get a lot of "No such file or directory" errors for all the subfolders, but all the files look fine. Yet if I go log onto the Mac that has the backup volume mounted as a local volume, these errors never appear for the exact same location. Even more weird is that if I do "ls -a" everything appears normal on both systems (no error messages anyway).
It appears to be the case that the folders that have the problem are folders that Time Machine has created as "hard links" to other folders which is something that Time Machine does and is only available as of Mac OS X 10.5 and is the secret behind how it avoids using up disk space for files that are the same in the different backups.
I moved the Time Machine disk to the second Mac and mounted the volume locally onto it (the second Mac that was showing the problems), so that now the volume is local to it instead of a remote mounted volume via AFP and the problem goes away, and if I do a remote mount on the first Mac of the Time Machine volume the problem appears on the first Mac system that was OK - so basically by switching the volume the problem switches also on who shows the "no such file or directory" errors.
Because of the way the problem occurs, ie only when the volume is remote mounted, it would appear to be an issue with AFP mounted volumes that contain these "hard links" to folders.
There is utility program written by Amit Singh, the fella who wrote the "Mac OS X Internals" book, called hfsdebug (you can get it from his website if you want - just do a web search for "Mac OS X Internals hfsdebug" if you want to find it ). If you use it to get a little bit more info on what's going on, it shows a lot of details about one of the problematic folders. Here is what things look like on the first Mac (mac1) with the Time Machine locally mounted:
mac1:xxx me$ pwd
/Volumes/MyBackups/yyy/xxx
mac1:xxx me$ ls -a
. .DS_Store D2
.. Documents D3
mac1:xxx me$ ls -lai
total 48
280678 drwxr-xr-x 5 me staff 204 Jan 20 01:23 .
282780 drwxr-xr-x 12 me staff 442 Jan 17 14:03 ..
286678 -rw-r--r--@ 1 me staff 21508 Jan 19 10:43 .DS_Store
135 drwxrwxrwx 91 me staff 3944 Jan 7 02:53 Documents
729750 drwx------ 104 me staff 7378 Jan 15 14:17 D2
728506 drwx------ 19 me staff 850 Jan 14 09:19 D3
mac1:xxx me$ hfsdebug Documents/ | head
<Catalog B-Tree node = 12589 (sector 0x18837)>
path = MyBackups:/yyy/xxx/Documents
# Catalog File Record
type = file (alias, directory hard link)
indirect folder = MyBackups:/.HFS+ Private Directory Data%000d/dir_135
file ID = 728505
flags = 0000000000100010
. File has a thread record in the catalog.
. File has hardlink chain.
reserved1 = 0 (first link ID)
mac1:xxx me$ cd Documents
mac1:xxx me$ ls -a | head
.DS_Store
.localized
.parallels-vm-directory
.promptCache
ACPI
ActivityMonitor2010-12-1710p32.txt
ActivityMonitor2010-12-179pxx.txt
mac1:Documents me$ ls -lai | head
total 17720
135 drwxrwxrwx 91 me staff 3944 Jan 7 02:53 .
280678 drwxr-xr-x 5 me staff 204 Jan 20 01:23 ..
144 -rw-------@ 1 me staff 39940 Jan 15 14:27 .DS_Store
145 -rw-r--r-- 1 me staff 0 Oct 20 2008 .localized
146 drwxr-xr-x 2 me staff 68 Feb 17 2009 .parallels-vm-directory
147 -rwxr-xr-x 1 me staff 8 Mar 20 2010 .promptCache
148 drwxr-xr-x 2 me staff 136 Aug 28 2009 ACPI
151 -rw-r--r-- 1 me staff 6893 Dec 17 10:36 A.txt
152 -rw-r--r--@ 1 me staff 7717 Dec 17 10:54 A9.txt
So you can see from the first few lines of the "ls -a" command, it shows some file/folders but you can't tell which yet. The next "ls -la" command shows which names are files and folders - that there are some folders (like ACPI) and some files (like A.txt and A9.txt) and all looks normal. And the "hfsdebug" info shows some details of what is really happening in the "Documents" folder, but more about that in a bit.
And here are what a "ls -a" and "ls -al" look like for the same locations on the second Mac (mac2) where the Time Machine volume is remote mounted:
mac2:xxx me$ pwd
/Volumes/MyBackups/yyy/xxx
mac2:xxx me$ ls -a
. .DS_Store D2
.. Documents D3
mac2:xxx me$ ls -lai
total 56
280678 drwxr-xr-x 6 me staff 264 Jan 20 01:23 .
282780 drwxr-xr-x 13 me staff 398 Jan 17 14:03 ..
286678 -rw-r--r--@ 1 me staff 21508 Jan 19 10:43 .DS_Store
728505 drwxrwxrwx 116 me staff 3900 Jan 7 02:53 Documents
729750 drwx------ 217 me staff 7334 Jan 15 14:17 D2
728506 drwx------ 25 me staff 806 Jan 14 09:19 D3
mac2:xxx me$ cd Documents
mac2:Documents me$ ls -a | head
.DS_Store
.localized
.parallels-vm-directory
.promptCache
ACPI
ActivityMonitor2010-12-1710p32.txt
ActivityMonitor2010-12-179pxx.txt
mac2:Documents me$ ls -lai | head
ls: .parallels-vm-directory: No such file or directory
ls: ACPI: No such file or directory
... many more "ls: ddd: No such file or directory" error messages appear - there is a one-to-one
correspondence between the "ddd" folders and the "no such file or directory" error messages
total 17912
728505 drwxrwxrwx 116 me staff 3900 Jan 7 02:53 .
280678 drwxr-xr-x 6 me staff 264 Jan 20 01:23 ..
144 -rw-------@ 1 me staff 39940 Jan 15 14:27 .DS_Store
145 -rw-r--r-- 1 me staff 0 Oct 20 2008 .localized
147 -rwxr-xr-x 1 me staff 8 Mar 20 2010 .promptCache
151 -rw-r--r-- 1 me staff 6893 Dec 17 10:36 A.txt
152 -rw-r--r--@ 1 me staff 7717 Dec 17 10:54 A9.txt
If you look very close a hint as to what is going on is obvious - the inode for the Documents folder is 152 on the local mounted case (the first set of code above for mac1), and it's 728505 in the remote mounted case for mac2. So it appears that these "hard links" to folders have an extra level of folder that is hidden from you and that AFP fails to take into account, and that is what the "hfsdebug" shows even better as you can clearly see the REAL location of the Documents folder is in something called "/.HFS+ Private Directory Data%000d/dir_135" that is not even visible to the shell. And if you look closely in the remote mac2 case, when I did the "cd Documents" I don't go into the inode 135, but into the inode 728505 (look close at the "." entry for the "ls -la" commands on both mac1 and mac2) which is the REAL problem, but have no idea how to get AFP to follow the extra level of indirection.
Anyone have any ideas how to fix this so that "ls -l" commands don't generate these "no such file or folder" messages?
I am guessing that the issue is really something to do with AFP (Apple File Protocol) mounted remote volumes. The TimeMachine example is something that I used as an example that anyone could verify the problem. The real problem for me has nothing to do with Time Machine, but has to do with some hard links to folders that I created on another file system totally separate from the Time Machine volume. They exhibit the same problem as these Time Machine created folders, so am pretty sure the problem has nothing to do with how I created hard links to folders which is not doable normally without writing a super simple little 10 line program using the link() system call - do a "man 2 link" if you are curious how it works.
I'm well aware of the issues and the conditions when they can and can't be used and the potential hazards. I have an issue in which they are the best way to solve a problem. And after the problem was solved, is when I noticed this issue that appears to be a by-product of using them.
Do not try these hard links to folders on your own without knowing what they're for and how to use them and not use them. They can cause real problems if not used correctly. So if you decide to try them out and you loose some files or your entire drive, don't say I didn't warn you first.
Thanks ...
-BobThe problem is Mac to Mac - the volume that I'm having the issue with is not related in any way to Time Machine or to TimeCapsule. The reference to TIme Machine is just to illustrate the problem exists outside of my own personal work with hard links to folders on HFS Extended volumes (case-sensitive in this particular case in case that matters).
I'm not too excited about the idea of snooping AFP protocol to discover anything that might be learned there.
The most significant clue that I've seen so far has to do with the inode numbers for the two folders shown in the Terminal window snippets in the original post. The local mounted case uses the inode=728505 of the problematic folder which is in turn linked to the hidden original inode of 135 via the super-secret /.HFS+... folder that you can't see unless using something like the "hfsdebug" program I mentioned.
The remote mounted case uses the inode=728505 but does not make the additional jump to the inode=135 which is where lower level folders appear to be physically stored.
Hence the behavior that is seen - the local mounted case is happy and shows what would be expected and the remote mounted case shows only files contained in the problem folder but not lower-level folders or their contents.
From my little knowledge of how these inode entries really work, I think that they are some sort of linked list chain of values, so that you have to follow the entire chain to get at what you're looking for. If the chain is broken somewhere along the line or not followed correctly, things like this can happen. I think this is a case of things not being followed correctly, as if it were a broken chain problem then the local mounted case would have problems also.
But the information for this link in the chain is there (from 728505 to the magic-135) but for some reason AFP doesn't make this extra jump.
Yesterday I heard back from Apple tech support and they have confirmed this problem and say that it is a "implementation limitation" with the AFP client. I think it's a bug, but that will have to be up to Apple to decide now that it's been reported. I just finished reporting this as a bug via the Apple Bug Reporter web site -- it's bug id 8926401 if you want to keep track it.
Thanks for the insights...
-Bob -
Time Machine Taking a Long Time to Index / Back Up
Hi everyone.
I noticed this on the latest backup to my Time Capsule device. I'm backing up over a WiFi connection to a time capsule device. It is taking a long time to index the backup. Here's the code from the latest backup.
10/17/12 9:43:03.799 PM com.apple.backupd: Starting standard backup
10/17/12 9:43:04.091 PM com.apple.backupd: Attempting to mount network destination URL: afp://Michael%20Payne@Extreme%20Pleasantville._afpovertcp._tcp.local/Time%20Mac hine%20Backups
10/17/12 9:43:12.657 PM com.apple.backupd: Mounted network destination at mountpoint: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups using URL: afp://Michael%20Payne@Extreme%20Pleasantville._afpovertcp._tcp.local/Time%20Mac hine%20Backups
10/17/12 9:43:34.015 PM com.apple.backupd: QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN
10/17/12 9:43:37.440 PM com.apple.backupd: Disk image /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Michael’s MacBook Pro.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups 1
10/17/12 9:43:37.459 PM com.apple.backupd: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups 1/Backups.backupdb
10/17/12 9:45:23.296 PM com.apple.backupd: 500.1 MB required (including padding), 3.27 GB available
10/17/12 9:46:48.844 PM com.apple.backupd: Copied 1436 files (3.4 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.
10/17/12 9:46:51.897 PM com.apple.backupd: 448.1 MB required (including padding), 3.27 GB available
10/17/12 9:46:51.898 PM com.apple.backupd: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
10/17/12 9:47:53.681 PM com.apple.backupd: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
10/17/12 9:48:55.642 PM com.apple.backupd: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
10/17/12 9:49:56.511 PM com.apple.backupd: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
10/17/12 9:50:56.564 PM com.apple.backupd: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
10/17/12 9:51:57.643 PM com.apple.backupd: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
10/17/12 9:52:57.903 PM com.apple.backupd: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
10/17/12 9:53:59.341 PM com.apple.backupd: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
10/17/12 9:55:01.281 PM com.apple.backupd: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
10/17/12 9:56:03.171 PM com.apple.backupd: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
10/17/12 9:57:03.966 PM com.apple.backupd: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
10/17/12 9:58:33.083 PM com.apple.backupd: Copied 824 files (1.2 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.
10/17/12 9:58:40.359 PM com.apple.backupd: Starting post-backup thinning
10/17/12 9:59:51.851 PM com.apple.backupd: Deleted /Volumes/Time Machine Backups 1/Backups.backupdb/Michael’s MacBook Pro/2012-10-16-213620 (5.6 MB)
10/17/12 10:00:17.440 PM com.apple.backupd: Deleted /Volumes/Time Machine Backups 1/Backups.backupdb/Michael’s MacBook Pro/2012-10-16-113505 (1.6 MB)
10/17/12 10:00:30.046 PM com.apple.backupd: Deleted /Volumes/Time Machine Backups 1/Backups.backupdb/Michael’s MacBook Pro/2012-10-16-103509 (1.6 MB)
10/17/12 10:00:43.781 PM com.apple.backupd: Deleted /Volumes/Time Machine Backups 1/Backups.backupdb/Michael’s MacBook Pro/2012-10-16-093513 (1.3 MB)
10/17/12 10:00:43.781 PM com.apple.backupd: Post-back up thinning complete: 4 expired backups removed
10/17/12 10:00:45.207 PM com.apple.backupd: Backup completed successfully.
10/17/12 10:00:56.988 PM com.apple.backupd: Ejected Time Machine disk image.
10/17/12 10:00:57.550 PM com.apple.backupd: Ejected Time Machine network volume.
I am just curious as to why this is, and what I might do to fix it. I did see one suggestion in another website suggesting diabling spolight indexing of the backup image with sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/Time Machine Backups, but don't know where to type that in. It then states to reenable it, but don't know where to type that in, either. Any advice would be helpful. I did run a verification not too long ago, and here's that code.
10/14/12 3:44:14.289 PM com.apple.backupd: Backup verification requested by user.
10/14/12 3:44:41.503 PM com.apple.backupd: Running backup verification
10/14/12 4:04:31.602 PM com.apple.backupd: Backup verification passed!
If any of you have or had a similar problem, I'd appreciate your help. For the time being, I may just disable time machine during the evening, and only have it run during the day when I'm at work.Is your sig still current (10.7.3)? Or did you update to 10.7.5? Because 10.7.5 had a Spotlight/Time Machine bug that slowed down a lot of backups. If that's what it is, there's now a 10.7.5 Supplemental Update that fixes the slow Time Machine problem.
If it isn't 10.7.5, I don't know what the problem might be. -
10.5 Time Machine backup not visible in 10.6 Migration Assistant
Hello everyone,
Helping my not-so-tech savvy auntie move over from her old 5,1 iMac to a newer 8,1 MacBook. Her old iMac has a Time Machine backup on OS 10.5.8. I plugged in the Time Machine to the new MacBook (which is on a clean install of OS 10.6.8) and for some reason the Migration Assistant is not picking up the Time Machine in the "Select Your Disk" section. All I can see is the MacBook's internal HD. The Time Machine backup is showing up in Finder, however the disk's icon is yellow, not Time Machine green.
I'm a bit stumped - can someone please advise? By all indications, a 10.5 Time Machine backup should be able to restore to a 10.6 system. We are visiting for the weekend and I really would like to get her up and running before we leave tomorrow.
Thanks!
VIkkiYes, that's option B as she still has the IMac but I'm curious as to why the TM backup isn't working - just in case I need to do this on another machine down the road, it would be nice to know what's going wrong with the more convenient TM restore option.... Thanks!
-
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,
RonShadow99999 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. -
How do I recover another computer's time machine backup to an external drive
I did much searching on this and came up dry on how to clone a new drive on one computer (A) from a Time Capsule backup from another computer (B) for the purpose of installing on that other computer (B).
Specifically, I want to replace the drive in my wife's MacBook Pro (Snow Leopard 10.6.8) with an SSD. I have a drive Dock that can be attached to the iMac (Mavericks 10.9.3) with FireWire 800 (and also to the MBP using a much slower USB2). I wanted to allow her to use her MacBook Pro (browsing only, no new documents or emails) while I used my iMac to create her boot drive from her Time Capsule backup, but couldn't figure it out. Migration Assistant assumed I was migrating to my own Mac or to a remote Mac running MA. I couldn't figure out how to get CCC to just see one backup on Time Machine as input rather than the entire volume with all the backup versions. Everything I found with Google assumed I was using the MBP for the restore. CCC won't clone to a remote drive either--local only.
This is academic at this point as I connected the dock to the MBP over USB and am now using CCC to the attached drive, which will take several hours during which I assume we shouldn't be using the MBP. Maybe that was the only way all along? I suppose another way would have been to install the SSD in the MBP and boot from a DVD and use Migration Assistant. I'm just curious for the future as I help friends upgrade from time to time.Since you don't really have a question, I will give you a very broad information source for the next time you have a Time Machine question.
Please visit Pondini's Time Machine FAQ for help with all things Time Machine.
Oh, you cannot use a computer whose only disk drive is the target of a an OS X cloning operation regardless of what software is used for the clone. You can, however, use the source drive except if you try to clone using Disk Utility. -
Time Machine repeatedly does full backups, including FileVault while logged in
So let me preface this - for months I'd hoped for a way that Time Machine could backup my FileVault encrypted account without logging out. Last night Snow Leopard spontaneously started doing this. I know many may think that I'm looking a gift horse in the mouth, but read further and hopefully someone can help me make sense of this.
Last night I attached my external 1TB USB hard drove to my 15" MBP (spring 2010 model) running OS X 10.6.7. It started doing a Time Machine backup automatically, as usual. Since I was logged into my account that uses FileVault (a massive home folder - 220GB) I expected a fast backup of things only outside my home folder. As i looked at the details, however, i quickly realized that it was backing up all 270GB of data on my hard drive - including my FileVault account while still logged in!
At first i thought i just got lucky - i'd been craving this feature for years and it just happened to me without even doing anything. Curious guy that i am, i logged out of my acct with my USB drive still attached to see what would happen. After FileVault cleared out space in my home folder, it did _another_ backup, that took about 10 minutes to complete. This seemed strange so i logged back in and started another backup manually. To my utter shock, it started doing the whole 270GB over again!
I even cleared out my TM drive, erased, reformatted, checked permissions, etc etc and did the same on my system drive, hoping that it was just a matter of broken permissions. No change.
So there's two things going on here and i'm pretty concerned about both:
1) Why is TM backing up my entire encrypted home folder while i'm still logged in??? Apple has clearly designed TM and FV to NOT work this way for data integrity reasons and the fact that it's happening has me freaked out a bit over the reliability of my backups.
2) Why is TM doing full backups after each time i login to my account? If i stay logged in, it appears to only do incremental (normal) backups but if i logout, then re-login and allow the hour to pass and let a backup start on its own, it starts the whole 270GB again.
I'm getting to the point of wiping the system and starting from scratch but since i presently live in a country with no Apple store and extremely poor internet access, that prospect horrifies me
any ideas?
many thanks,
-TimThanks for the input Pondini -
I tried deleting the file as mentioned in #A4 and it still had the problem. Last weekend i finally got a brand new hard drive and reinstalled OSX 10.6.3 from scratch, then promptly applied the 10.6.7 combo update. I purposely chose to NOT import my old user from backup and instead set up everything again manually (royal pain, but the only way i could be sure that i wouldn't bring the problem with me). Today i whipped out my TimeMachine drive and set it up for backups. I crossed my fingers and it AGAIN started backing up all 250+GB of my system from within my FileVault protected account.
My wife's MBP is still running 10.6.4 and i'm beginning to wonder if his is an issue with 10.6.7 since i'm relatively certain i didn't experience this before that upgrade.
I've checked my wife's exclusions under Options and her home folder is NOT in that list, yet her TM is not attempting to backup everything until she logs out of her FV acct.
In response to Linc Davis, _yes_ it was backing up my info into a sparsebundle file, not just the raw unencrypted data, which is extremely strange.
If i DO add my home folder to the exclude list, will it still be backed up when i log out?
At this point, i'm thinking my next steps are:
1) try a different TM backup drive, even though i've wiped and checked my current drive numerous times
2) downgrade to an older version of Snow Leopard to see if 10.6.7 is the culprit
Any other ideas?
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