Hard Disk Data lost due to time machine back up

My external WD hard disk initially has my files in it.
After agreeing on the mac to use it as time machine backup for it,
the files got erased.
Any idea if I could get the hard disk data back???/

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How to reinitialize an external hard disk drive which serves for Time Machine?

How to reinitialize an external hard disk drive which serves for Time Machine?
Thanks for your answer.

Everything you need to know about initializing (formatting) is here.
http://pondini.org/OSX/DU1.html
Lots of useful information on TM is here in the same place.
http://pondini.org/OSX/Home.html

I am trying to get space on an external hard drive which has some old time machine back up files that I do not need but can not eliminate, even by going into the time machine, clicking on the backup file to be eliminated and using the drop down eliminate

I am trying to get space on an external hard drive which has some old time machine back up files that I do not need but can not eliminate, even by going into the time machine, clicking on the backup file to be eliminated and using the drop down menu with the gear box symbol to eliminate

I cannot find this 300GB "Backup" in the Finder, only in the Storage info when I check "About This Mac".
You are probably using Time Machine to backup your MacBook Pro, right? Then the additional 300 GB could be local Time Machine snapshots. Time Machine will write the hourly backups to the free space on your hard disk, if the backup drive is temporarily not connected. You do not see these local backups in the Finder, and MacOS will delete them, when you make a regular backup to Time Machine, or when you need the space for other data.
See Pondini's page for more explanation: What are Local Snapshots? http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
I have restarted my computer, but the information remains the same. How do I reclaim the use of the 300GB? Why is it showing up as "Backups" when it used to indicate "Photos"? Are my photos safe on the external drive?
You have tested the library on the external drive, and so your photos are save there.
The local TimeMachine snapshot probably now contains a backup of the moved library. Try, if connecting your Time Machine drive will reduce the size of your local Time Machine snapshots.

I want to know about time machine if i can use the hard drive that i use for time machine back up as a normal hard drive too or if it's only for time machine

I want to know about time machine if i can use the hard drive that i use for time machine back up as a normal hard drive too or if it's only for time machine
and if it yes i want to know if i have 1TB hard disk to use the 500gb for time machine and the other 500gb for normal use

thank you very much because i am considering to buy the porsche design hard disk 1TB and i want to have it for normal use and for time machine is a pitty to give 1TB for back up only again thanks and i know seperate the back and the working jobs are better but the i have to have 2 hardisks and i want only 1

Retriving data from an incomplete time machine back up

Hi,
I have an incomplete time machine back up. Can I retrieve data from it?
Thanks,
v8r.

v8r wrote:
It was my first time machine back up. Mid way I felt that it is stuck so I powered down my mac book pro. Now its not booting. I gave the details in a simultaneous thread "Gray screen, spinning cog and midway to first back up of time machine". I am assuming that if I have lost all the data on my harddrive, can I at least get some from the incomplete time machine back up.
well, it might be possible but it won't be in any form that you can retrieve automatically. so your first priority should be to get your computer to boot and after what you can start worrying about getting your data from an incomplete TM backup. I've done that it the past and it works sometimes but it really depends on the situation. I had to do it from terminal too as it didn't work from finder.
but it need not be that you lost all data on the main drive. boot from the SL install dvd and see if disk utility sees the drive. if so, repair the drive and try booting from it. if you have disk warrior it might help too if disk utility can not fix some errors.
Thanks,
v8r.

Can I restore my applications and data from a ML time machine back up to a machine running Lion?

Because of the horrible battery life with Mountain Lion (10.8.2), I am looking to downgrade to Lion. I have a Time Machine backup of my current machine, running ML. I do not want to restore all the way back to my last Lion backup, because that was a while ago. Basically, I want to backup my current ML hard drive, erase the computer, perform a fresh Lion install, and restore my apps/data using the ML Time Machine backup. Is the ML Time Machine backward compatiable with Lion?

jgian wrote:
Because of the horrible battery life with Mountain Lion (10.8.2)
I am unaware of any battery life problem with Mountain Lion. There are many problems with incompatible 3rd party software, but that is a different problem.
I wrote a little diagnostic program to help show what might be causing these problems. Download EtreCheck from http://www.etresoft.com/download/EtreCheck.zip, run it, and paste the results here.
Will the ML Time Machine be backwards compatiable with Lion?
No. 3rd party application may be fine. Most Apple applications and data will not work.
Disclaimer: Although EtreCheck is free, there are other links on my site that could give me some form of compensation, financial or otherwise.

External Hard disk has space problem for Time Machine

Im not sure this is the right place to post this, but I've just got OSX.5 so Time Machine is new to me. I've got a 500Gb Firewire Lacie Drive which I now have, as far as I can see, about 110GB of stuff in. I have a bout 300Gb to back up. Currently my mac can only see 260GB free, which means theres about 150GB that isnt explained. I have run Disk Inventory, which shows the dot files on the drive. There seem to be hardly any. Is there anything else that could be taking up such a large amount of disk space? Theres one movie file of 28GB that I cannot move off the drive.

Tim Whelan2 wrote:
Im not sure this is the right place to post this, but I've just got OSX.5 so Time Machine is new to me. I've got a 500Gb Firewire Lacie Drive which I now have, as far as I can see, about 110GB of stuff in.
Let's see what Disk Utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder) says. When it starts, click the top line for your drive in the sidebar (should have size and make), then the Partition tab. Towards the bottom is a *Total Capacity* line, followed by two different numbers: one in GB, the other in bytes. The first will be about 465 GB, the second roughly 500 billion. This is the different way of counting: decimal vs. binary.
There's also a *Partition Map Scheme* line. This should be followed by GUID or +Apple Partition Map.+ If your drive isn't one of those, you're going to have a problem using it with Time Machine. Report back what this says.
In the center part of the display is a diagram showing all the partitions currently on the disk. Each is represented by a box, with a name in the center, and the amount used represented by light blue shading.
If there's only one partition, it's total size and amount available will be in the center, shown in GB.
If there are 2 or more, click each one in turn to see it's sizes. The Total of the sizes should be almost the same as the total at the bottom (the Partition Map takes a bit of space).
It sounds like you may have 2 partitions, one for TM backups, one for your "other stuff". If so, each partition is treated separately for most purposes: there should be two icons on your desktop and/or Finder sidebar, for example.
Report back what you find, and whether it makes sense to you or not. Then we can figure out what's going on and what you need to do.
But note this: This drive is a bit small to use with Time Machine. TM works best if it has 2-3 times the space of what it's backing-up, so it can keep a few months of your backups. See item #1 of the Frequently Asked Questions post at the top of this forum.
Even if you could use the entire 465 GB or so, that's less than twice the 300 gb you want to back up. That would work, for a while, but depending on how you use your Mac, TM may not be able to keep your backups for very long.

How to stop Time Machine backing up on a specific external hard drive?

I work on a iMac 2.66 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, with Mac OS X 10.6.8. I use two external hard drives that are the exact same model, 2 TB WD My Book 1110 Media: one is intended for back-up, the other for storing video editing files. They're both connected through USB 2.0.
I set the "back-up" hard drive as back-up disk for Time Machine, through the Time Machine preferences. Now, everytime I connect the "video" hard drive, Time Machine recognizes it as a back-up disk, and starts backing up on it. I could delete the "Backups.backupdb" file that Time Machine had created by connecting the "video" hard drive to another Mac and moving it to the Trash, but as soon as I reconnect the "video" hard drive to my iMac, Time Machine backs up on it again.
Is there a way to "de-select" a hard drive from Time Machine's list of back-up disks?
Note: I should mention another thing that might indicate a conflict. When both hard drives "back-up" and "video" are connected to my iMac, if I open Final Cut Pro X, I can only see my "back-up" hard drive. To access the files I am working on, I need to eject the "back-up" hard drive, and suddenly the "video" drive appears.
If you have any idea of how to solve this conflict... I am a bit lost.
Thank you!

Welcome to Apple Support Communities.
Give them unique volume names using Disk Utility.
Then set Time Machine back up to that unique volume name.
For example, I regularly use 4 external drives (though they're not all the same model).
The descriptions quickly tell me which drives I have connected to my MacBook when open Finder:
My Time Machine backup volume is named 'Time Machine 1TB'.
My iPhoto backup volume is named 'iPhoto Backup 320GB'
My iTunes backup volume is named 'iTunes Backup 120GB'
and the last is 'Windows 7 Backup 250Gb' but since it's a Windows volume, it is formatted NTFS.
This likely means that you will have to erase and repartition one of your drives to name it.
You MIGHT be able to rename it using Finder, right-clicking on the volume, and selecting Rename (current volume name).
WARNING: I can't be certain of what just renaming it that way could screw up in the way of permissions and file links.
Within Disk Utility, it seems it is absolutely not possible to change a volume name without clicking the Partition tab, and that involves erasing.
Given the choice, I'd probably choose to rename (erase and repartition) the Time Machine drive. A current backup or two on Time Machine, and I'm good. I don't really need to go 'way back' to recover files, because I really don't ever erase anything. I just keep buying bigger drives!
And I still burn the 'absolutely critical, priceless, can't ever be without this stuff' files to DVD or CD at least monthly or quarterly, in case one of my TM or backup drives fails at the same time as my primary hard drive. Call me paranoid, but I worked in Information Technology for many years: Murphy was an optimist!
Message was edited by: kostby

Can I switch external hard drives and still access old Time Machine backups?

I have a Mac Book Pro linked to 2 1TB external hard drives, one used as my Time Machine Back up, the other used as a manual ad hoc back up and to store even older files.
The TM back up drive is now full. If I just unplug it/switch it off and plug in and set up a new 2TB hard drive as my TM back up, will I still be able to access the back ups on the original TM drive if necessary, through TM?
Wil it be a start over situation with the new drive, performing a complete back up to begin with?
Or would you advise me to transfer the old back folder to the new drive, given that it will be larger?

Hi den.thed,
Thank you for this - I think the easy option by far appears to be to leave existing backups on disk 1, and plug in disk 2 and start over.

Time Machine Back Up 3rd Hard Drive to 4th Hard Drive

Hey All Geniuses . . . .
I have a third internal hard drive that I want to back up to a fourth internal hard. I already have my Time Machine backing up my first hard drive (with the OS) to the second hard drive. I can't figure out how to separate the "back ups" out. Just to be clear: the date on hard drive three will be different from hard drive one and two, and have to backed up to hard drive four exclusively. Cheers, mate

Hi, and welcome to the forums.
Lyssa is correct.
TM can back-up multiple drives/partitions, and each source volume is shown separately in the TM interface, but it's destination must be a single volume. It is possible, of course, for that single volume to be a concatenated Raid set, but that doesn't seem to be what you want.
CCC can do this, however. It's donationware, so you can try it out free (but do send some $$ if you keep it, so they can keep it up to date). I think SD can do it also, but you'll need the paid version (about $30 I think) for it to do updates instead of replacements.
You'll probably want to continue with TM on your OSX drive, as it's incremental backups of many files and folders are much faster than either CCC's or SD's will be.
Either is available via Google, VersionTracker.com, or MacUpdate.com.

How do I prevent my hard drive being used for time machine back ups?

I want to install Snow Leopard but it tells me that the OS cannot be installed because the disk is being used for Time Machine back ups. I don't recall setting up my hard drive to be used this way (why would I?!) but now I can't seem to

Did you have TM turned on at any time? If so, and if you had no external hard drive attached, could it be that it created its own backup on a portion of your hard drive? I don't use TM, but I believe I read that this may be possible. Take a look at Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities) and report what you see on the left - under the top heading, is there more than one partition showing, such as here:
(I have two partitions: one for Snow Leopard, the other for Lion) - what does yours show?

How do I copy old Time Machine back-up data onto my new (second) back up drive?

I recently bought a second back-up drive for use with my MacBook Pro (running 10.9.4).
I'm successfully backing up my computer to both drives on a regular basis using Time Machine. (a Seagate drive and a Western Digital drive respectively)
I was wondering if there's an easy way to add the old back-up files from the old drive to the new drive as well. That is to say, I wish I had all the data that precedes my new back-up drive on BOTH drives. There's plenty of space on the new drive.
Again, I'm already running Time Machine successfully to both drives, is it perhaps as easy as connecting both drives to my computer and copying the older dated back-up files over to the newer drive within the Backups.backupdb folder for my profile?
Thanks for any help!

Although the documentation says you can copy Time Machine backups in the Finder, it's very slow and sometimes doesn't work at all.
This technique will only work if the volume you're copying to is the same size, or larger than, the one you're copying from.
First, open the Time Machine preference pane and click the Options button. You may have to unlock the settings first by clicking the padlock icon in the lower left corner of the window. Authenticate as an administrator.
Delete the volume you're going to copy from the list of backup destinations. Then turn Time Machine OFF.
Launch Disk Utility, open the built-in help, and search for the term "Duplicate." Follow the instructions. All existing data on the destination volume will be erased.
If the volume you're copying was encrypted by Time Machine, you may have to unlock it first. Click the Unlock button in the toolbar of the Disk Utility window.
Turn Time Machine back ON and select the new volume as a backup destination. You can also continue to use the old volume, if you wish. The two will be alternated when both are available.
CAUTION: If the volume you're copying is corrupt, as shown by Repair Disk or Verify Disk in Disk Utility, then that corruption will be copied to the new drive. Don't copy data from a corrupt volume on a malfunctioning drive. Put the drive aside and don't use it until you're sure you'll no longer need the data. Then securely erase it and take it to a recycling center. Do the same if the Restore operation fails with "disk errors."

Can I make one iphoto library from two time machine back-ups?

Hi
I have recently purchased a new Mac Book. I previously had two MacBooks, which I backed up with time machine onto two separate external hard drives.
I did a straight transfer of all data from one of these time time machine back-ups to my new laptop. I'd like to migrate select data from the second time machine back-up to my new Mac Book, and I'd like to start by transferring photos.
My laptop has an iphoto library, so I would like to know if I can import select photos from this second time machine back-up, and how do I do that?
many thanks
Linda

First you need to restore the second Library from the back up. You need to restore the whole library, you can't just gather bits of it, I'm afraid.
Once that's done you have two Libraries. The easiest way to do what you want is to merge the Libraries with the paid version ($20) of iPhoto Library Manager This can be set to avoid duplicates. See the Help on it for more.
This is the only way that will get all the versions and all the metadata.
Other than that you'll need to export from one Library and import to the other.
Regards
TD

Running a time machine back-up of a HD in target mode

Hi guys
Wondering if anyone can offer me some advice. My macbook pro won't start up and gets stuck in grey screen with apple logo. I have tried various troubleshooting tips as per apple support documents but cannot get it to start. Before I get to install and archive, and then maybe install and erase I wanted to update the time machine backups. I do try and keep on top of it regurlary and did a full time machine back-up end of August, however there are some things that were updated since then, which is why i want to run one now.
I can access the Macbook HD in target mode using my imac but am unsure how to proceed from here. Can I plug-in the external hard-drive which is used for time machine back ups into the imac and then run a full back up on the Macbook in target mode? If so, I'd be grateful if somebody could point me in the right direction of how to do this.
Thanks

Welcome to Apple Support Communities
OS X can only restore data to the drive where Time Machine backed up files from.
If you want to restore files from the Time Machine backup onto an external drive, your only option is to access to the Time Machine drive manually (open a Finder window and choose your Time Machine drive in the Finder sidebar), navigate through its folders and copy the files you want to the external drive

Problem Emptying Trash filled with Time Machine Back Up Files

I have needed to create more space on an external hard drive that I use for TIme Machine back up of my hard drive. I took some of the Time Machine back ups [2011 and 2012] and dumped them into my trash. I have gone into my Preferences and removed the check mark beside the "empty trash securely" so that I can get rid of the folders faster. I have a Mac X snow leopard operating system 10.6.8.
However, it takes about 1o hours to have the trash "preparing to empty trash" identify about 175,000 files. I don't know how many I have in their but it has got to be over a million.
What can I do to get rid of all of these files from my Time Machine back up? I don't want to wait five or six days before the trash starts to empty. Appreciate any help you can give. Thanks.

http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/trash.html

Hard Disk Data lost due to time machine back up

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