How do I tell Time Machine to do a backup now?

I thought there was a way to tell Time Machine to make a backup now. However, I can't find a place to tell it to make a backup. Any suggestions?

Hey Eric,
Aah, there it is!
Thanks for helping me find that again,
Charlie

Similar Messages

How can i tell Time Machine to make a backup right away?

By the hour Time Machine wants to make the backup my computer was asleep. Don't there is a back-up NOW button?

Click and hold Time Machine icon in the Dock, then choose "backup now".
-mj

How do I tell Time Machine to add a new external drive to be backed up?

How do I tell Time Machine to add a new external drive to be backed up? I have an external drive with data I need to add to my overall back up with what's on my mac. I have a separate drive already active as the Time Machine backup disk. I can see how to EXCLUDE disks, but how do I ADD that new external drive to regular backups?
I have 10.8.5 system on my Mac laptop.

Remove the drive from the list of items set to be excluded. It needs to be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for this to be possible.
(110504)

HT3275 I received this message and I'm unsure how to fix it "Time Machine couldn't complete backup to Time Capsule the backup disk image"/Volumes/The Vision Board/Alex Parry.sparsebundle" is already in use

I received this message and I'm unsure how to fix it "Time Machine couldn't complete backup to Time Capsule the backup disk image“/Volumes/The Vision Board/Alex Parry.sparsebundle” is already in use

Look at the more like this on the right column of the web page.
This is the most common error here.. we answer it 5-10times every day.
Simple method.. pull out the TC power cord .. count to 10.. plug in the TC power cord.
Look at the other references for more info.

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.)

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.

How can I prevent Time Machine from deleting a backup?

I just want to make one particular backup immune to Time Machine's auto-delete function. It's the one I used to migrate from my old computer to my current one. I tried to just drag-copy it on to a different drive, but apparently I don't have permission to copy my own computer's backups... weird.
Anyway, there's got to be a way to lock this particular backup. I going to have to keep Time Machine off until I can find out how.

Explodey wrote:
There's always a way, with a little ingenuity. I just went to Get Info for that backup and changed the system privilege to "read only." And if that doesn't work, I'm sure something else will.
I am sure of one thing that you are going to end up breaking Time Machine which in all likelihood you will not discover until you need to recovery data from it.
Agreat source of information on Time Machine can be found at http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html

HT3275 How do I convince Time Machine that my last backup IS an restore option.

My local Genius Bar replaced a dead hard drive yesterday. A faithful user of Time Machine, I expected there to be no problem restoring to the new drive. However, when I try to do that, my last two years of backups don't appear as options. Help? I was running Mavericks

That is correct, you haven't been on Mavericks for 2years.. so only since mavericks will appear.
But that should still include whatever was current on the previous hard disk.. that is the idea of TM.. you don't need to plough through 2 years of backups.. just restore and it will restore what was on the disk.
If it is failing badly.. highly possible with Mavericks.. since it seems to completely misbehave with TM..
Mount the sparsebundle and you can manually select items to restore.
See Q15 here.
http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
Or try doing a restore to alternative location.. Q16.

How do I tell time machine to put data back on the disk?

xx

see "restoring data" under "learn more" near middle of page:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427

How to restore a Time Machine Backup onto two Hard Drives?

Hey guys,
configuration as following:
I got a SSD, which contains all system stuff as well as apps. Further there is a HDD on which all kind of Multimedia is stored. I've put a symlink from my Home Folder to that Multimedia-HDD: Users/IceThunder -> Volumes/Multimedia.
Before my Mac crashed - I still don't know what was causing that - i backed up everything, so now I find two folders (System and Multimedia) in my .backupdb folder. If I use Time Machine to restore the state before it crashed it only offers to restore everything(?) on one specified disk, which is not what I want to.
Is there a way to get back an exact copy of the former state? How can I tell Time Machine to restore folder "System" on my SSD and folder "Multimedia" on my HDD?
Thanks in advance
IceThunder

Time Machine should restore to the disks from which the backups were made as long as each has the same name as before. For more help on this see Pondini's Time Machine FAQ for help.

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

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

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

How to use airport time machine

i am from germany an i dont know how i have to install the time machine

I presume you are talking about Time Capsule (TC) since this discussion area is the hardware Time Capsule.
Time Machine (TM) is the backup software on your computer. The two are not actually related.. TC is a target backup location for TM.
Read the setup guide.
http://support.apple.com/manuals/%23airport
The airport utility is supposedly automatic now.. I never believe in automatic because there will always be 10% of cases it gets wrong at least.
Reset the TC to factory if it doesn't show up and start over.
You must be using wireless in your MBP and please remember to set ipv6 in wireless section of network preference to link-local.
Let the airport utility make the choices for you.. they are generally correct.. start with the TC plugged into your main router by ethernet.. WAN TC to LAN modem/router.
If you cannot figure out how to setup the TC after that normal routine, tell us exactly what you are using for modem router and where you get to in the setup so we can help you with manual settings.

How do I restart Time Machine back-up from scratch?

How do I restart Time Machine back-up from scratch? I have a MacBook Air that was my wife's - now given to my daughter for school. My wife never used Time Machine to back up (she simply copied files to an external drive), so before clearing her files off the Mac HD, I tried using Time Machine for the first time with an external HD. However, the Time Machine back up repeatedly failed after about 2GB of 28GB of files. I manually copied my wife's 28GB of files to another external HD and deleted all the files off the Mac HD. I then reformatted the external Time Machine drive. But when I try to use Time Machine to back up the MacBook Air as it is now with my daughter's files on the Mac HD to the external TM drive, Time Machine acts as if the 28GB of my wife's deleted files are still on the Mac HD and fails back-up after counting to about 2GB, even though there aren't even 2GB of files on the Mac HD now and nothing on the external TM drive. I don't need to save any back-ups of how the MacBook used to be - I just need to start from scratch with how the computer is now. Can anyone please tell me how to get Time Machine to think the MacBook is a brand new computer and act as if it's a first time ever back up? I tried updating to Yosemite, and tried renaming the computer in System Preferences>Sharing, plus (as noted above) deleting all the old files off the Mac HD and reformatting the external Time Machine drive - none of that worked. All I can do at the moment is manually copy my daughter's files to an external HD - very frustrating.

Hmmm.. Office is not hard to restore.
You have something major wrong (Yosemite being the primary one).
Do a verify of the source drive.. to do that you will need to boot to the recovery.. and run the disk utility from there.. it sounds like your main disk is corrupted.
Once that is complete, delete the current setup of TM and try again.. use the widget to find out why it is failing..
See Troubleshooting.
A1, A4 and A5 for further info.
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
Good luck with it..
I would also download carbon copy cloner.. it is $40, but you can use it free for a time.. forget if a week or a month??.. to try out.. and make a proper backup before you start.. CCC is far more reliable than TM.. and in fact you might decide to simply forget about TM if it works and pays the $40.. because you can produce a bootable clone on the external drive which is a heck of a lot easier to use than TM.

HT201250 How do you let time machine know that a restored drive does not need a brand new backup set and just append to the old one?

I had an external drive failure and had to buy a brand new drive. I was able to restore my info onto a new drive, about 1.5 TB of data. When I go to launch time machine now with the new drive connected and my backup connected, it treats the new drive as if it had different data and wants to create a whole new backup set when it should just append. How do I get around this?
I could just reformat the backup drive and start fresh again but would rather not do that if I can avoid it, just in case there were errors in copying etc.

Hi
I should have been more clear, sorry. I work from a laptop. I have 2 external drives - one for my projects which failed but has since been replaced and restored from a backup. My 2nd external drive is the time machine backup drive.
When my project drive crashed, I bought a brand new drive and restored it using my time machine backup drive.
Now the data exists on 2 drives - the time machine backup drive, and the new drive. When I connect the backup drive now, it thinks my new drive has new data, probably since it is a new device/drive, and wants to do a brand new backup, when in fact the data already exists on that very drive. It shouldn't have to back up all 1.5 TB when nothing has changed!
Unless there is a way to tell time machine to simply append to the old backup, I think it will try and do a new backup (1.5 TB). I'm thinking maybe I should just initialize my time machine backup drive now and start over so it is only one backup set of 1.5 TB instead of (2) sets of 1.5 TB!

How to set-up Time Machine after Restore

After having restored an entire system back from Time Machine, it looks to me as Time Machines wants to completely backup all data already held on the hard-disk. With this effect, the harddisk is not big enough. I do not want to buy another disk. Is there any way how to persuade Time Machine that it should use the existing data on the disk?

Hi Aulia,
I don't believe that you will be able to have Time Machine understand that you only want it to continue with the same data : once it has detected that a file changed, it makes another copy, even if you know that it's the same file : it's based on messages telling it that a file has changed, not on files comparison.
I think that the "inprogress" file will be replaced by another one if you let TM do it's job : it won't make a third copy of your data. If there is enough space on the disk, you can let TM continue, and try to manage with the following trick, with patience and much care.
Make sure that the "Action" menu is visible in a Finder's window (it is if you did not customize the toolbar to remove it), and dive into Time Machine. Select a item in the window : the Action menu now has an item that should read "delete all backups of this element" (or something like that : I'm translating my French version). Take care that "all" here really means ALL versions in the backup : the only copy left would be on your main disk.
The next backup may not make a fresh copy unless you help it a little : after all, there was no message telling TM that the original was changed, since it was not ! Just do anything in the folder containing the item that you deleted from the backup (like creating and immediately deleting a folder there) : this will tell TM that something has happened there, the next backup will check the folder, detect the missing element and make a fresh copy.
Having only one copy of a really important folder may not suit you, even if it's only for the short delay until the next backup. You can make a copy of it, and run TM to backup the copy (a right click on the icon in the dock shows a "backup now" item). You now have a backed up version, you can delete the original, and all the backup copies of the original with the previous method. But if you rename the copy back to it's original name, it will be saved again... just iterate one more time !
I hope that this can help you, but please do not hesitate to try and validate your method on small copies before you delete something in your backup !
PS : I just tested my proposals with my 33Gb iMovie Events folder : a new copy of an event folder is created in the backup each time you rename an event, and I gained more than 40 Gb by deleting all previous redundant versions.
At least, it works for me !

How do I tell Time Machine to do a backup now?

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