How to disable Time Machine from backing up to hard drive

Mountain Lion (OSX 10.8) will not install onto iMac (under OSX 10.7.4) because: "hard drive is Time Machime backup disk" error message. However, TM Preferences does not show the iMac HD as a TM backup Location Option - it only shows the LaCie External Drive - which has been the storage drive receiving the Time Machine Backup. How do I remove/prevent Time Machine from looking for and/or backing up to the iMac Hard Drive if the TM Pref does not list the iMac Hard Drive as an option? Note: The iMac HD icon on the desktop is a "Time Machine image" (blue Drive icon w/white white counter clockwise arrow). Thanks.

Check to see if you have a file called backups.backupdb on the hard drive you are attempting to update.
If the install procedure see such a file, it might think that it is a TM backup drive.
Allan

Similar Messages

How to disable Time Machine from backing up to another hard drive connect to my TC?

I have an external hard drive connected to my TC and I don't want Time Machine to backup to the external hard drive, just to the Time Capsule, how do I do that?

Open Time Machine Preferences
Click on Options
Click the + (plus) button
Navigate using the Finder interface to the External Drive and click it to highlight it
Click Exclude at the lower right of the window
The drive should now appear in the "Excluded Items" list and it will not be backed up

How to stop time machine from backing up encrypted lion partition

I am using 10.6.8 but I created a Lion partition on the same disk. I am trying out Lion and I do not want Time Machine to back it up. I was able to exclude the Lion volume until I encrypted the Lion partition using Filevault 2. Now when I'm using Snow Leopard, there doesn't seem to be a way of preventing Time Machine from backing up the Lion partition. Am I missing something?

The FAQ says Snow Leopard can't read the Filevault 2 disk which seems to imply I won't be able to keep Time Machine from backing up the Lion partition. That seems wrong. How can Snow Leopard's Time Machine see the disk to back it up, but can't see it to exclude from backup?

How to stop Time Machine from backing up Temp Files?

Hi folks!
I am trying to find out how to stop Time Machine from constantly backing up 'useless' temporary files accumulated from web browsing? Although I don't change or add large files to my HD, Time Machine backs up hundreds of MBs every hour. Those file amounts make sense when I consider that I browse a lot to YouTube, SoundCloud, etc to watch videos or listen to music - I just don't want them to be backed up.
Under Time Machine Options I already excluded the following items from backups:
~/Library/Caches
/Library/Caches
~/Downloads
But even though I did this weeks ago, Time Machine stills finds large files to be backed up every hour and my only guess is that I am still missing a location where either Safari or Firefox - the two web browsers I use - store temporary files.
Can you help?
Thanks a lot in advance!

oas2103 wrote:
they come from my anti-virus software
Are you sure you need that? There are no viruses that run on OSX. None. Zip. Zero.
If you're running Windoze on your Mac, that's the same as running it on a PC, so it needs all the same anti-everything stuff you'd use on a PC.
There is some "malware," such as Trojans, for Macs, though. But (unlike viruses that can get onto your system without your knowledge), you must approve their installation (via your Admin password) and/or operation (via the "This application was downloaded from the internet ..." prompt).
Appropriately enough, some of these Trojans are included in pirated versions of Apple software, such as iWork!
For the gory details, see Thomas Reed's [Mac Virus Guide|http://www.reedcorner.net/thomas/guides/macvirus].
Thanks a lot again!
You're quite welcome, and thanks for posting back.

How to reconnect Time machine to backup file on hard drive

How do I reconnect my Time Machine to the Backups.backupdb on a hard drive? Time Machine got set to a new drive but I want to return to the older backup.

James Macallister wrote:
How do I reconnect my Time Machine to the Backups.backupdb on a hard drive? Time Machine got set to a new drive but I want to return to the older backup.
If you want to back up to the old drive, just select that drive via +Time Machine Preferences > Select Disk.+
But if you just want to view or restore from the old backups, and not back up to them, use the +*Browse ...+* option, per #17 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).

Is it possible to use time machine to back up a hard drive?

Is it possible to use time machine to back up a 1 hard drive onto another, then periodically update the backups just like I usually do with the Mac HD onto an external?
Thanks!

kidboy wrote:
Is it possible to use time machine to back up a 1 hard drive onto another, then periodically update the backups just like I usually do with the Mac HD onto an external?
Thanks!
I don't know what you usually do but Time machine is a backup software. it does back up one (or more) hard drives to another. it's not a mirror utility though. it makes and keeps regular incremental backups and you can restore from any time point in the past you have a backup for. i suggest you consult pondini's FAQs at the top of TM forum
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1964018
also see TM 101
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427
check out this tutorial too to see it in action
http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/#timemachinebasics
Message was edited by: V.K.

Can I use time machine to back up computer hard drive AND contents of an external HD (contains only photos) onto another external hard drive (standalone HD for backups only)? PLEASE HELP!!

I keep my photo files on a separate external hard drive, separate from my laptop hard drive. And I want to be able to use time machine as the back-up system to back up BOTH the computer's hard drive AND the external hard drive.... and i want all of the "back-up" information contained on a separate standalone external HD. So in the end, I have a 250GB computer hardrive, a 1TB external hardrive, and I want to have a 2nd external hard drive that will be the location to store the "back-ups" (using time machine) which will be either a 2TB or 3TB harddrive.
I am in dire need of help....

Yes, just make sure that they are not excluded in Time Machine.

Stop time machine from renaming my external hard drive?

im sorry if this is a repost but i couldnt find the answer to this anywhere
maybe im just being a bit thick here, but every time my time machine backs up data onto an external hard drive, it just changes the name of that external hard drive to "time machine backups", is there a way to stop this?
thanks in advance

I've never seen such behavior and TM certainly should not do that. I would not have thought it possible, actually. try resetting TM preferences. delete the file /library/preferences/com.apple.timemachine.plist. then go to TM system preferences and set it up again. if you had any folders/drives excluded from backups make sure to add them back to the exclusion list as it will be wiped out too.

Time machine not backing up entire hard drive on initial back up. Why?

I bought a new 2TB desktop hard drive to use in backing up my 27" iMac (2011, OSX 10.7.5) and performed the initial backup today. The backup went smoothly but I was perplexed with something I saw.
Disk Utility tells me that my internal hard drive (Macintosh HD) contains 173.95GB of data but the initial backup that TM did contains only 94.2GB. So, why is there such a large (~80GB) discrepancy between the two drives?
I did not elect to exclude any items from the backup in the TM preferences.
Many thanks,
Bob

If it wasn't clear, I used Time Machine to perform this initial backup. Sorry.....

Time Machine and backing up external hard drives

Time machine will not back external hard drives I have connected to my Mac Pro. It works fine with the 3 hard drives mounted in the computer. Is this the way Time Machine is intended to work or am I doing something wrong? Thanks in advance for your assistance.

According to Disk Utility, GUID and AFP are both ok for a non-bootable drive with either CPU. The difference is when you want to make a volume bootable.
Since TM volumes are not bootable, it shouldn't matter UNLESS you have some other bootable system installed on the drive.
Right now, the drive on my Intel iMac is partitioned AFP and the one on the PPC powerbook is GUID. They both appear to be behaving themselves. The iMac has had one instance (since the last partition job) of a massive backup which occurred right after I changed the exclude list and the PPC has had no massive backups (other than the initial one). On that one, I built the exclude list BEFORE the initial backup.
- gws

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.

HT3275 Has anyone come across the red "i" message saying "The backup disk image "/Volumes/Chris...(the last bit being) iMac.sparsebundle" is already in use? This has prevented my time machine from backing up from this morning (5th Dec 2012).

Has anyone come across the red "i" message saying "The backup disk image "/Volumes/Chris...(the last bit being) iMac.sparsebundle" is already in use."?
As of yesterday (4th Dec 2012) everything was fine, no trouble or problems at all. Wake up this morning, turn on the computer and when it came time to backup itself, the message occurred above and this has prevented my time machine from backing up from this morning (5th Dec 2012) ever since then.
Everything on my computer is up-to-date but this problem still persists displaying this message practically every hour, on the hour and nothing is getting backedup!
If you know what is going on and more importantly, how to fix this, I would be indebted to you for sharing your knowledge with me on this subject.
Thank you.

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities
See > http://pondini.org/TM/C12.html

How to use time machine to back up

how to use time machine to back up files

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities
See > http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427
To set up Time Machine, open System Preferences > Time Machine > Select Disk, and choose the external disk you want to use to make the backups. Time Machine will start making its first backup just after selecting your external drive.
If you have more questions about Time Machine, see this website > http://pondini.org

TS1338 I have 4 Trojan Horse viruses on my external drive I use for Time Machine. My MacBook Pro hard drive is clean. I have eased the external drive 3 times using Disk Utility and it still has the 4 Trojan Horse viruses. How do I get rid of them. Wayne

I have 4 Trojan Horse viruses on my external drive I use for Time Machine. My MacBook Pro hard drive is clean. I have eased the external drive 3 times using Disk Utility and it still has the 4 Trojan Horse viruses. How do I get rid of them. I am using 10.8.3 Wayne

ksu62 wrote:
The infection names are: classload.jar-719ef6a5.zip
                                          classload.jar-5db452le31.zip
                                          ar3.jar-6ce3b2f-45l483f.zip
                                          classload.jar-lef99412-63bsd3fl.zip
Those look alot like file names and not infection names. I don't find any reference to anything like that on Norton or VirusTotal. Since you said these were Trojans, I would expect to see "Trojan" as part of the infection name.
".jar" files are executable Java applets. The random alpha-numerics would seem to indicate a cache file, likely from a browser with Java enabled. And we all know what ".zip" means.
Worst case is that you had Java enabled in a browser and were infected by one of the late variants of the Flashback Trojan over a year ago or one of a couple of other attacks using the same vulnerability but targetted against a small number of political sympathizers. Much more probable is that thes were Windows only Trojans. Hopefully you have a fully up-to-date OS X, including Java, and have disabled Java in all your browsers by now.

Re Time Machine I have an external hard drive with files I backed up manually over the past 2 years 1TB of memory. I am finally taking the leap to use Time machine to back everything. will I have to reformat that drive, thus wiping my previous bac

Re Time Machine
I have an external hard drive with files I backed up manually over the past 2 years 1TB of memory.
I am finally taking the leap to use Time machine to back everything.
will I have to reformat that drive, thus wiping my previous back ups?
can I split it the drive in two partitions?
Also
as I have two separate Macbook Pro's- one older than the other.
OSX 10.68
the other is
OSX 10.75
can I back them up separately?
or even synch and merge files and folders etc? between the two?

You CAN use a drive with files already on it to store Time Machine backups. But long term, that is not recommended. You do not need to reformat or re-partition the drive to do this. Once Time Machine Backups are established, you could remove the old files.
But do not delete Time Machines files with the Finder -- that can cause it to lose its place and lose everything.
With the cost of backup drives under US$100, it might be a better idea in the long run to get another drive. Best results from Time Machine is a drive about 3 times larger than the drive(s) you are backing up.

How to disable Time Machine from backing up to hard drive

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for