How to avoid Time Machine deleting my previous backups?

I´ve been using Time Machine on my MacBook Pro with Lion to back it up in a WD My Book Live network drive. So far everything had gone smooth, and my files were incrementally backing up.
But recently I got a message that said the following (translating the attached pic from Spanish):
Time Machine has finished verifying your backup files. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new back up.
Click on "Start new backup" to create a new one. Previous back up history will be deleted.
Click on "Create back up later" to get a reminder tomorrow. Time Machine won´t be executing any backups until then.
I don´t want to lose my previous back ups, since they´ve got files that I don´t have now in my laptop but would like to conserve. However, with this message, it seems that if I don´t make a new one and subsequently delete previous back ups Time Machine won´t be making new ones - which is a pain.
Can anyone advise on how to overcome this, and have Time Machine carrying backing up my files without deleting previous backups?
Thanks in advance!!!

Not one of Apple's more direct messages. What it should say is, "your backups are corrupted."
See #C13 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

Similar Messages

HT3275 My Time Machine deletes ALL previous backups

Every so often, Time Machine deletes ALL previous backups and starts over from scratch. It has done this several times in the last year. I have not changed any hardware or the name of the computer. Why is this happening? Makes me very concerned that I now have NO backups while it chugs away rebuilding a 210 GB backup.
Just got an error message:
Time Machine couldn’t complete the backup. Time machine could not delete the backup disk image "/Volumes/Joe's iMac.purgeable"
HELP!
iMac 27: 8GB, 2.9 GHz Intel Core I5
OS X Yosemite 10.10.1
Backup volume is Western Digital MyBookLiveDuo with 2TB and 1.8TB available

Hi Joe,
Have you Repaired both drives first, then Repaired Permissions on both?
Have you looked through Pondini's extensive TM help site?
http://Pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
Can't imagine something not being covered there.

HT3275 Time Machine deleting all previous backups?

While restoring my hard drive that I recently replaced the data on time capsule seems to have been erased after a back up of the new hard drive was attempted, how can I verify that these are deleted?
My current amount of data on my new hard drive exceeded the amount of data space on the previous time machine hard drive and I believe it might have deleted backups from the previous hard drive. Is there any way to see if that is the case? The error message stated that it could not be written, but when I looked in time machine I am at half of the storage used and previous backups are not seen.
any information or help would be great.
if worst comes to worst I can just reinstall the old hard drive and back it up again, and start over, but I would like to avoid the head ache if a solution is possible.

Exactly what happened depends on what version of OSX you're running, and how you restored your data.
If you're running Leopard (10.5.x), then however you restored the data, the drive is treated as a different one, and was backed-up completely. That may have required deleting many old backups. TM would not have deleted the only remaining backup then, but might have on a subsequent backup.
If you're running Snow Leopard or Lion, and did a full system restore, or installed OSX and used either Setup Assistant or Migration Assistant to restore the data, that should have left a "trail." The next TM backup should have treated the new drive as if it were the old one, and only done an "incremental" backup, of what was new or changed since the previous one.
I put the word "should" in bold because that doesn't always work, on Snow Leopard especially, but sometimes on Lion, too. Just why not isn't clear.
If you used any other method to restore your data (drag & drop, restore from a "clone," selective restores via the TM "Star Wars" display), no "trail" was left, so the drive was backed-up completely.
If the new drive was backed-up completely, it will appear as a different one in the "Star Wars" display. Use the technique in #E3 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting to see the backups of the old one, if they haven't been deleted.

Time Machine deletes entire previous backup and then back it up from zero!

my configuration :
Time Machine : USB external HD 500G
Backing up : 1. internal 160G (90G used) 2. USB external HD 500G (290G used)
the problem is, every time I hook up the TM, it backup the internal HD smoothly but deletes its entire previous backup of the external HD and starts all over ... and naturally it takes forever to do 290G....
anybody get any idea where the problem seem to be ?
Thanks!!

Welcome to Discussions.
It could be that your drive isn't formatted correctly for Time Machine. Launch Disk Utility which is in your Applications > Utilities folder. Choose the upper icon (the one that is not indented) for your Time Machine drive. At the bottom of the window the Partition Map Scheme should be GUID for Intel Macs and Apple Partition Map for PPC Macs. Next click on the indented icon for your Time Machine drive. The format should be Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
If the formatting is not correct on your Time Machine drive you will need to reformat your drive which will erase everything on it. Copy any files you might need from your Time Machine drive. Then format your Time Machine disk following the directions in this article. People with PPC Macs should substitute Apple Partition Map for GUID when following the directions.
If your Time Machine disk is formatted correctly there might be some hints in the Time Machine log as to what has gone wrong. Launch Console which is in Applications > Utilities. Choose All Messages in the left pane of Console and type in "backupd" without the quotes in the search window. Post back any errors or complaints that you find in the log.

Time Machine deleted 4-5 backups...

Time Machine deleted 4-5 backups that were from a different computer to make room for the an update. How can I get back 1 or more of those backups?

Unfortunately, you can't, since they have been permanently deleted and the drive space has been overwritten with new data.

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 deleted my first backup to make space for a new one, is there anyway to recover it?!?!

So I had all my stuff backed up to December 23 on an external hard drive with Time Machine, then I deleted it all so that the next automatic backup didn't have any of these older files. Today Time Machine deleted my original backup to make space for a new one and so I lost Decemer 23, now I am screwed..HELP?? I accidently let it delete or something, I don't really know, I know this was just a series of mistakes and now I'm desparate ):

Have a look at this article http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427 and section "backup drive fills up".
It's a normal behavior that Time Machine is deleting oldest backups when drive is filling up.

Help! Time Machine Deleted My Oldest Backup!

So, time machine deleted my oldest backup (because it ran out of room)
I know it's supposed to do this -- but I didn't want it to.
On my oldest backup, I had a folder with lots of pictures and documents. Does time machine delete files that can't be found anywhere else?
I don't know what to do! Those pictures meant a lot to me!

Time Machine isn't meant to be used as an archiving utility, as you've now noticed.
If a file isn't on your internal hard drive, eventually TM will delete the copy in its backups.
If you wanted an archiving utility, you needed to look elsewhere
You may be able to use a data recovery software to get the files back--I suggest you turn off TM until you get this sorted.
Take a look at Data Rescue II here:
http://www.prosofteng.com/
~Lyssa

Time machine Deleted old computer backups

Hey,
I have been using a mac pro for about a year and a half now and as all computers get it has become slow and full of garbage. So i used my time machine back up and successfully backed up all my files. I put in the OS disk and wiped the computer clean and reinstalled the OS. I plugged the time machine back up in and began to copy over only the files that i wanted. A few days later I had not yet copied over all of the files that I needed, i was prompted me to set up this computer with a time machine back up. I began the process thinking that it would create the backups in a new file on the drive or append it to the current list of back up images. It stopped half way though saying there was not enough free disk space. on the 1 TB HD there was only 5 GB remaining. So I just canceled it and was going to finish copying over all of the files i wanted and they delete the old backups. However when I went to get my old backup files, they had all been deleted.
I was using this hard drive to store other media files as well as time machine backups. taking the HD into the local computer shop i was informed that that is a terrible thing to do and perhaps the reason that my backups have been lost. the tech said there was nothing to be done but reformat the drive and start again. I am hoping this is not the case. the drive still says there is only 5GB of free space however I can only fine 300GB of files on the drive. so i believe that the files are still there. Does anyone know a solution to this issue. There are many valuable things on this hard drive that i would hate to loose.
I have tried holding the option key and clicking on the icon to view other backups, but my original backups are not there.
Thanks in advance.

Before I make any reply, note that you are responding to a topic that has been inactive for more than two years, on a system two versions out of date. In the future, you would do better to start your own topic in an appropriate forum, specifying what system you're running and what hardware you're running it on, among other things.
this exact thing happened to me as well and I must say that I find it totally unacceptable...
Well, without more information, it's impossible to say what might have happened or how you can recover. You may find some answers on Pondini's excellent site:
http://pondini.org
However, it's important to understand that this may or may not have anything to do with Time Machine. Perhaps your backup drive is dying, perhaps its directory structure became badly corrupt, perhaps one of any number of other things could have happened. Because there is no such thing as storage that is completely stable, it's important to keep more than one backup, as noted previously on this topic.
Carbon Copy Cloner seems like a much better solution at this time.
Carbon Copy Cloner is an excellent solution. Is it better? No. It is simply different, and that makes it better in some aspects and worse in others than Time Machine. The best backup strategy will involve two different backup programs. I frequently recommend using both Time Machine and CCC. I use TM with a Time Capsule for one backup, which has certain advantages over CCC. I use CCC for a couple other backups, one of which is in a safe deposit box at all times, and that has some advantages over TM. Using both, with multiple backups, means that I'm extremely unlikely to lose much data, if any at all... unless a meteor hits and destroys both my home and my bank, in which case I've got bigger problems!
Anyway, with regard to recovery, take a look at Pondini's site. If that doesn't help, or you need assistance with something, start your own topic in the appropriate forum for your system and provide additional details that may help us better assist you.

New Time Capsule: How to copy Time Machine history from previous disk?

Hi everybody,
Just got a new Time Capsule which is going to serve as my new Time Machine Back-up.
I've got a year's worth of TM back-up on my old USB disk that I'd like to pour over to the new one.
When I try to do that, it says the Time Capsule can't be changed.
If I simply select the new TC as the disc for TM it obviously starts a new "time line".
How can I either copy the old data over, or merge the two?
Thanks,
Rob

don't try copying via finder. that won't work. directly attached TM backups are stored differently from remote ones. directly attached ones
are stored directly in a folder an the drive and the remote ones
are stored in sparse bundles. the following may work. set up the TC to be the new TM drive and start a backup. as soon as it starts stop it using TM menu->stop backup. open the TC drive in finder. there should be a sparse bundle created there. double-click on it to mount it. it should be empty.
then use the "restore" tab in disk utility to clone your old TM drive to the mounted sparse bundle. make sure to check the box to erase destination. when the cloning is finished eject the mounted sparse bundle and try backing up again.

HT201250 Avoiding Time Machine Deletions?

I want to preserve my family photos and videos on an external hard drive as I am filling up my MacBook Pro storage, meaning I need to remove some videos from my MacBook so I can add more. It sounds like Time Machine will write over old files to keep more recent updates. Is there a way to mark certain files on the external hard drive as ones that should NEVER be deleted by Time Machine? Or is there a better way? Thanks for your help.

Time Machine is not designed to serve as permanent storage. It is an incremental back-up tool. As space on the volume is needed, it will, eventually, delete the oldest back-up(s) to make room for the newest one. If you have files you want to save that are no longer on the volume that you are backing up, they will, eventually, be deleted as the archive of their original storage location gets pushed further and further back. To keep them, permanently, they need to be saved to a separate partition or volume that is not assigned to Time Machine.

Time machine deleting many more backups than necessary - how to stop it?

I did something that I expected to cause a full backup and might require TM to do some cleanup. Time machine has started eating my old backups and has quite a healthy appetite. I'm quite afraid it's going to wipe out my entire backlog of backups.
So here's what I did:
- turned off TM
- defragmented my boot disk* by using SuperDuper to create a clone of my boot disk, reformat my boot disk, clone back to my boot disk
- Selected "Choose Disk" in TM
- Selected "Backup Now"
(I expected TM to do a full backup do to changed i-nodes on the file or whatnot)
TM thinned out the backups as expected by removing weekly backups for the prior month. It then proceeded to start deleting old backups.
At last count, my TM Disk had 452.87GB of 999.86GB. My boot disk is using 142.49GB free of 319.73GB. So, there would be room for a full backup even if my boot disk was completely full but it's not.
What can I do to get TM back on track without losing all my old backups?
Thanks,
Dean
* Yes, I know I don't NEED to defrag, but even Apple recognizes that if you do a lot of video work, it's possible you might actually benefit from a defrag.

Dean Thompson wrote:
I did something that I expected to cause a full backup and might require TM to do some cleanup. Time machine has started eating my old backups and has quite a healthy appetite. I'm quite afraid it's going to wipe out my entire backlog of backups.
So here's what I did:
- turned off TM
- defragmented my boot disk* by using SuperDuper to create a clone of my boot disk, reformat my boot disk, clone back to my boot disk
Any time you replace everything on a disk (or the disk itself), it's considered changed and will be backed-up in it's entirety. This even happens if you do a full system restore from TM backups: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1338
The new backup will require as much space as the data on your internal HD, plus 20% for workspace.
At last count, my TM Disk had 452.87GB of 999.86GB. My boot disk is using 142.49GB free of 319.73GB. So, there would be room for a full backup even if my boot disk was completely full but it's not.
So the backup should require about 170 GB of free space.
To confirm what's going on, Click here to download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window. Navigate to the backup in question, then copy and post the messages (but only to the first deletion) for that run here.

How to use Time Machine to restore previous OS

I have a 2009 27-inch iMac, still running Snow Leopard 10.6.8. I would like to upgrade to Yosemite, but the more I read on this forum, the more terrified I get. If I try it, and then run into some of the hideous problems I read, can I use Time Machine to get back to where I am now?

or maybe do a 'baby step' upgrade to Mountain Lion. Would that make any sense?
That does not make any sense - even if you could do it which you cannot.
An easy way to revert/retreat is to make a bootable clone (SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner work well) on an external drive. If you need to retreat, you can do that from there.
but the more I read on this forum, the more terrified I get.
Incidentally, I suggest you forget the anecdotal "problems." OS X 10.10 is stable and works well. This place is like a hospital where everone is sick. Here, everyone posting has a problem. None of us post "everything is working well comments" - which would be silly in any event.
IMHO, your bigger risk is to continue to run your computer on back level and unsupported software. Sooner or later, you are going to have problems.
Barry
P.S. Like everything else, the above is my opinion

Time Machine : Deleting all local backups of one of several computers leaves files behind

Hi,
I'm in the process of transitioning my Time Machine setup. For the moment, I have a local Time Machine volume backing up three Macs to the same Backups.bakupdb folder (I had set that up two years ago before reading Pondini's Time Machine FAQ).
Basically what I want to achieve is have a partition per computer that I'm backing up. So what I did was I partitioned a second external drive into 3 partitions, and I copied my TM partition to each of these 3 temporary partitions. I did that using Disk Utility's Restore tab. My plan was then to delete the backups of two computers off each temporary partition (per question 12 of Pondini's FAQ), to get 1 computer per partition on the temporary drive, then partition my main external drive in 3 and copy back each temporary partition to the main drive.
(The second external drive is lent, I can't just switch to using it.)
From what I read on question 12 of Pondini's FAQ and this reply by Pondini to a similar thread, I thought that deleting all backups of one computer via the Time Machine interface would leave me with an empty folder for that computer under Backups.backupdb, and that I could just delete this folder via the Finder. This is * not * what happened.
After all backups for the first computer I wanted to delete off the first temporary partition are deleted, the folder for this Mac is not empty ; it still contains all the 15 dates folder of the individual backups. What's more, these date folders aren't empty either. The first 12 of them I deleted (the most recent ones) each contains a Macintosh HD folder, under which remains a System/Library/CoreServices hierarchy. The (locked) boot.efi file is alone in the CoreServices folder. The last 3 dates I deleted (the oldest backups), however, still contain an even bigger hierarchy. Applications, Library, System and Users exists in all three, with a lot of subfolders and lots of files, totalizing around 2 GB of data. Most of the files are locked, even logged into root (very diverse files : plists, dylibs, rtf files, fonts, etc) but some are not (apps, and other diverse files : colorsync profiles, dashboard widgets, bundles...). Seems like Time Machine could not delete everything. (Why ?)
Note that I deleted the backups for one computer using that same computer, first using an Admin account for the first 3 or 4 dates and then using the root account to avoid having to always authenticate. (I didn't think it would create a problem... maybe it has?)
When I go back into Time Machine for this computer, no backups remains. It's like if Time Machine doesn't see the data that it could't delete... This is all very strange.
My question is : can I delete these leftover files and folders bia the Finder without fear it's going to break the backups for the other computers on the same partition ? If not, what should I do ?
Sorry for the long post, but I hope I was clear...

Phil_6379 wrote:
After all backups for the first computer I wanted to delete off the first temporary partition are deleted, the folder for this Mac is not empty ; it still contains all the 15 dates folder of the individual backups.
It shouldn't; when you delete a backup, the date-stamped backup folder and all it's contents should be deleted.
Most likely, there was some sort of corruption, either on the original or the copies, that left some pieces. On occasion, that will happen even when Time Machine is doing it's normal "thinning:" there will be a message in the log about finding a "partially-deleted" backup, and trying again. Sometimes the second try will do it, sometimes not. In that case, you might be able to delete it after running Repair Disk; if not, sometimes you can delete it via the Finder.
Under Lion only, deleting backups via the Finder is supported by Apple; you'll get a message about how it can't be undone. But it doesn't always work, so is recommended only as a last resort. Holding the Option key while deleting may help with the locked files.
If you can't get rid of the detritus, however, I'd recommend erasing the affected partition(s) and starting over. I'd not continue backing-up to a set of suspect backups -- the way they're all linked together, there's just no telling whether you could do a full system restore successfully.
In addition, as Linc says, even if you have some things off-site, I'd strongly recommend getting another external HD for "secondary" onsite backups. Externals are getting much less expensive all the time, and if there's a problem with the old one (either the drive itself or the backups on it), you'll be in a large pickle. Plus, of course, drives don't last forever. See #27 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions for some suggestions.

Time machine deleted all my backups instead of the one selected

I have a one year old Macbook Pro with 16 GB of RAM, running OSX v10.9.5 (Mavericks). I use a LaCie 2TB external hard drive for my time machine backups, and I needed to delete some of the old TM backups to make space.
Following the instructions at pontini.org (http://pondini.org/TM/12.html ), I opened TM, navigated to the external HD and selected the oldest folder in backups.backupdb, right clicked it and selected 'Delete all backups in [the oldest folder's name]'. Then I went home for the weekend, and when I got in this morning, Voila! ALL files in the backups.backupdb folder were gone! Not only that, but there was nothing in the trash to restore!
Has anyone else had this wonderful experience?
Thanks,
Casey

Wow -- thanks for all the comments, folks, I must have struck a nerve! I'll try to respond to all of them here, in sequence:
John Galt: I loved your comment about "no user serviceable parts inside"! It was echoed by etresoft, too, later in the chain; sounds like good advice if this ever happens again. You mentioned that Yosemite incorporated a lot of changes to TM, but I'm not using Yosemite (have been avoiding this upgrade, as it sounds too buggy). But apparently your advice holds with Mavericks, too.
Etresoft (3:17am): very good point -- I think that's exactly what I did. What I'm still not clear on is: are the backup files themselves (ie the actual data being backed up, as opposed to hard links) stored in the backup folder that TM creates, or are they kept in a separate file or folder? It sounds like it's the former, as I had originally thought. But pondini led me to believe that, if the data WAS stored in the folder, it would not be deleted if there were any links to it in future backup folders. From what you said, I'm thinking that's probably true IF you are dealing with a backup that's INSIDE TM, but not if its a folder OUTSIDE TM. Is that right? If so, this really is a pit that's ripe for idiots like me to fall into.
Lex Schellings (3:52am): I don't think I understand your comment -- you said "All these instructions are to delete a specific file... You should never deleted a dated FOLDER". But instruction #2 says "One or more individual backups -- it's best to use Time Machine, per the green box below" -- then, in the green box, it says " Locate the backup or item you want to delete via the Timeline or "cascade" of Finder windows". Since I was trying to delete a "backup", what was I supposed to select, if not a folder?
Etresoft (4:15am): that's an interesting thought, but I don't think I used the sidebar to navigate to the backup I deleted. When I opened TM, it showed me a sequence of Finder windows with the Star Wars background, but the external hard drive in the Finder window was grayed out and inaccessible. So I checked pondini again, and it said I could get to it by right-clicking on the TM icon in the task bar (after exiting TM), selecting 'Browse other TM Disks', and selecting the one I wanted. After I did that, I could see the external hard drive in TM was not gray anymore, and I navigated to the first backup folder. Apparently, that's what took me "outside" of TM, even though I thought I was inside it. I will definitely follow up on your suggestion to go to Apple's bug report site and file a report; thanks!
Lex Schellings (4:39am; do you guys ever sleep?): I didn't hear that pondini had died -- I hope you folks weren't close to him; sounds like he was very thorough, and trying to do the right thing. He just didn't realize there were people like me out there.
I'm surprised at your comment that "the behaviour of deleting one of the TimeMachine dated folders in Finder has always been the wrong way, leading to unhappiness." That is exactly what our tech support department (which is run by Lockheed Martin; they're supposed to know what they're doing -- at least they certainly charge JPL enough for their service) said was the approved way to delete old TM backups, and in several cases in the past, it has worked for me. In any event, I didn't think I was deleting the TM dated folder through Finder -- I thought I was doing it through TM, as pondini recommended. Silly me.
Etresoft (5:24am): It's a little scary that you said "I don't know of anyone who knows Time Machine well enough to actually update it." Were you joking? I definitely agree with your (and John Galt's) advice that "I wouldn't recommend any kind of interference with Time Machine, especially with the Finder". In the future, I think I will just set up a separate partition on my external drive for TM backups, and let TM figure out how to thin itself out.
Lex Schellings (5:43am): "a magic black box" -- that's a very good take-away from this misadventure. Thanks for your advice.

How to avoid Time Machine deleting my previous backups?

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