Get time machine to see old backups

Hi all,
recently i had a problem that resulted in having to restore from a time machine backup. Since then i have been unable to see my previous backups within time machine
The sparse bundle is still intact, i have not allowed it to backup knowing that it will more than likely nuke my old backups.
So far i have tried:
- removing and reselecting the time capsule
- removing com.apple.timemachine.plist
- inheriting the existing sparsebundle.
any help on this would be much appreciated.
Cheers

While in Time Machine, press the key combination shift-command-C. The front window will show all mounted volumes. All snapshots should now be accessible. Select the one you want and navigate to the files you want to restore.

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PLEASE HELP! How do I get Time Machine to remove old backups?

It is my understanding that Time Machine will never fill up the drive it's on because it will remove old backups to make room for new ones. It's not doing that for me. The drive Time Macine is backing up to has filled up & will not allow any more to be written to it, so I can't do backups. I don't see anywhere that I can change a setting to fix this problem. It would be VERY helpful if someone would walk me though how to fix this problem. I've had to turn Time Machine off because it's locking up my system trying to write to the drive.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR HELP!!

Thank you. I've gone there & read what's at the link. I've tried going into Time Machine & for some reason I can only see backups (in Time Machine) that go back to earlier today. However, if I actually look on the disc that I'm backing up to, I see database files that go back to April of this year. I looked earlier today & I saw files that went all the way back to October of LAST year, but I just did a big installation & that must of put things over the edge.
Anyway, I'd like to say that I saw an answer to my problem at Pondini's site, but I've been there looking around since before I wrote this thread asking for help & I just don't see anything that looks like it will specifically help me on this situation.
I'm still stuck.

Time machine cant see old backups with New Macbook

Hello, I recently migrated from an iMac to a MacBookPro6. I plugged in my externals hard drive into my Macbook and was accessing old backups from my iMac without a problem. THEN I used the hard drive to backup with time machine and now I cannot access any of my iMac files. I no longer have permissions. I no longer have the iMac. Is there any way to access these old files or retrieve permissions with my new Macbook?
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Thanks ClayG, thanks Rodrigo
I work at a university so will take Clay's suggestion to my IT guy (he suggested I post here). Im sure it will make more sense to him than me:)
To answer your querey, yes I can use the hard drive with my new computer, that wasnt the issue, it was only retreiving the old files.
Thanks again to both of you for taking the time
A

How do I get Time Machine to delete old files?

On threads for earlier operating systems I've seen similar questions, and it seems Apple hasn't resolved the problem that although Time Machine says it will delete old files when the disc is full, it doesn't do it, even though my hard drive has only ~300 GB of files on it and my external hard drive has 1.5 T, it does nothing to delete old files automatically. This hasn't always been the case. The first few entries were deleted awhile back, freeing space, but that has stopped happening. Any suggestions? Do I have to start with a fresh external hard drive?

ringoiphone wrote:
Thanks. Although the reset did nothing, by deleting enough old backups (a VERY slow process) I could get it to free enough space for another backup. It's not clear to me why it cannot do this automatically.
Time Machine will delete old backups, if it can. So something must be wrong. See #C4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
If nothing there helps, a clue may be lurking in your logs. Use the widget in #A1 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting to display the backup messages from your logs. Locate the backup in question, then copy and post all the messages here.

Time Machine deleted my old backups and crapped out midstream

I had just gotten my failing hard drive replaced, and restored from Time Machine backup. So far so good.
So a week later, I wanted to upgrade to Mountain Lion, but figured I should be responsible and run Time Machine backup again before doing the upgrade just in case something goes wrong.
The Mac has a 4TB drive, which has 2TB free. The backup drive is a 4TB external drive, which has (or had) Time Machine backups going back two years or so. It still had over a TB of space left. I clicked on Backup Now and let it run overnight. I noticed it said "Deleting old backup to make room" or something like that, which I thought was normal.
I woke up in the morning to find that Time Machine had crapped out in the middle, and said that it couldn't complete. I realized that it had deleted all my old backups. It didn't need to do that, since the only files that had changed would have been less than a GB, and it had over a TB of space to work with.
It must have thought that everything on the drive had changed since the last backup, and it wanted to backup the entire drive. As such it tried deleting all my old backups! But it failed, and stopped in the middle.
Now I have a drive that still says there is only 1.2 TB of space on the drive, but I can't see the files! Even with Tinkertool, I can't see anything beyond the one most recent backup.
Can these files be recovered? I am totally ticked that there isn't some kind of confirmation like "Are you sure you want to delete X?"
I actually need to have some of these older backups, as they include files that had been deleted before the latest backup that I may need to retrieve. Any hard drive experts out there? Any terminal commands that can make these files accessible, even if I have to retrieve them manually?

To clarify, this all happened under Snow Leopard as I had said. My profile lists Tiger, since I haven't cared to update my personal profile since using that OS, and in fact I still use Tiger among other versions. I manage a lot of users. And I never got to upgrade to Mountain Lion on this system, as explained in the post above. So I don't see the confusion.
I don't think the model of Mac makes a difference for this type of problem, but in case it does, the incident was on a 2010 Intel iMac with a 4TB hard drive and 8GB of RAM. I would have mentioned that if this was a problem with hardware specific to the model of Mac. But this is more of a universal issue.
But to stay on topic, I'm guessing my old backups are toast. But if anybody has any experience with recovering from Time Machine deleting their old backups, I would be happy to hear from them. In the meantime, I am going to try to do some old fashioned file recovery, and see what I can salvage.

Time Machine is Deleting Old backups

Disconnected my MacBook Pro from its hard drives for two days. Re-connected, and ran Time Machine. It backuped up as normal. I walked away, seeing "49.8GB free of 499GB" on that external hard drive. I come back and Time Machine is "Deleting Old Backups ... " - and now 135GB free, and still deleting.
I realize that TM auto-deletes ... but does this sound "normal" to start its own deletions when there was 49GB remaining on a 500GB drive?
It's still deleting ...
Clint Bradford

If I said I connnected two disks, I apologize. One 500GB external hard drive is dedicated to just being a Time Machine backup for my 17" MacBook Pro.
Not sure what has happened ... but Time Machine cleared up space, and is now performing a 110GB backup ... kinda like it doesn't know it's the same computer attached to it.
This is NOT a critical problem ... I have full backup elsewhere. Just a little weirdness today ...
Clint Bradford

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Hello! I have a 13' Black Macbook pro which had a faulty hard drive so I had it replaced. Ever since then, all my old backups in Time Machine have been grayed out. I have no idea how to fix this and have tried almost everything on the web.
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Hi, and welcome to the forums.
The problem is, you have a different HD. Even if it has the same name and contents as the old one, it's still a different HD, and Time Machine treats it as a different one.
There's no way to fool it into thinking it's not.
Technically, it has a different UUID (Universally Unique IDentifier); that's what OSX uses to keep track of drives, not their names.
As you do new backups, you'll be able to access them just as you did with the old drive.

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In my Time Machine preferences it says "The older backups are deleted when your disk becomes full." Well ... my disk is full but Time Machine is not deleting its old backups to make more room.
So now TM is failing to backup.
Any suggestions for freeing up some disk space and getting back to getting backed up?
Thanks.
Ramone

ramonekalsaw wrote:
In my Time Machine preferences it says "The older backups are deleted when your disk becomes full." Well ... my disk is full but Time Machine is not deleting its old backups to make more room.
So now TM is failing to backup.
What message does it send? See #C2 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
It will show you how to locate the message(s) that describe the problem, then help you fix it. If that doesn't help, post back with details, including all the messages, your setup (especially the destination for the backups), what you've done, and the results.
Any suggestions for freeing up some disk space and getting back to getting backed up?
Do you have other data on the disk, in the same partition? If so, that's not a good idea, and may be the source of the problem. See #3 in [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).

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.disk_label                         749b
BaseSystem.chunklist       2KB
BaseSystem.dmg              454.6MB
boot.efi                              864KB
com.apple.Boot.plist          431b
kernelcache                       24.1MB
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See C18 in the first linked article. Also, your backup drive should be 2-4 times your hard drive capacity.
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Hello,
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I am having a similar problem and do not understand the solution. I have a new Macbook and transferred my data from my Powerbook G4. However, I cannot access anything! There is a no entry sign on the folders and if I click them I get this message: 'The folder “Pictures” can’t be opened because you don’t have permission to see its contents.'
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I am trying to set up a Time Machine backup through my AEBS USB Disk.
The USB disk is formatted GUID with a single partition (1TB Fantom) and appears in the shared menu and mounts in the finder on all three of my computers on the AEBS.
I just cannot get it to show up in Time Machine as an available drive to back up to.
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Firmware version 7.4.1
File Sharing Tab: Enable File Sharing is checked
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Directly connect the drive to your computer, and do your first Time Machine backup.
Disconnect from the computer and connect to the AEBS. I have mine shared as With Airport Extreme password and guest read/write enabled
Go to Finder.
There you will see
your network name icon
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Now start up Time Machine preferences, and you can select the AEBS drive. Note Without navigating to the drive through the finder the drive does not seem to mount to the system.
You should be working now.
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Now all I need is to find a way to auto mount the drive 8), and fix the can't login to the network icon... Challenges make the world go 'round.

Time machine not deleting old backups...

I am on Mavericks 10.9.1 and get the following error:
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Time Machine cannot see original backup

I had to change my router and with it all network settings. As a result I could not "see" my time capsule in airport. So I reset it.
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So now if I look at the time machine backup it can see all my previous backups. BUT when I enter the utility to continue with backups, it refuses to let me use my "previous drive" (original backups) and asks me to use a "new drive" that it has set up - which says no existing backups on it.
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Did you reset Time Machine?
A4 here. http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
Are you seeing double instance of the TC in finder? You need to delete the older and now no longer existant TC so only the TC with the new name is available.
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Get time machine to see old backups

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