How to restart Time Machine?

If I eject my external drive TM, is there a way to reinstall it from within Mac? What I have to do now is to either restart the computer or, completely unplug the hard drive and plug it back in.
Thanks

That worked. Thanks very much. When ejected, the Time Machine icon showed up in Disk Utility, but it was grayed out. When I clicked on it, the "Unmount" button changed to "Mount" and a click on this loaded it onto the desktop.
I assume that this can be done for any device that is attached to the mac if it does not show up under devices, but it would have to show up in Disk Utility even if grayed out. Is this correct.

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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.

Restarting time machine

I am using Time Machine on an external disk drive subsystem (Thunderbolt) on Lion (Mac OS X 10.7). No issues at all - however, know that I'm more comfortable with its operation (it is amazing how simple it is), I would like to restart Time Machine all over to backup the complete system image and to perform its background backup operation all over again. I just want to be sure I do this right. Anybody have any experience with this?
Is it as simple as (1) Stopping Time Machine, (2) Deleting and permanently removing Backups.backupdb and all of it subdirectories on the backup drive, and (3) restarting Time Machine?

First turn Time Machine off by using the slider in the Time Machine prefs.
Then open Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.app)
Select the drive name (not the partition name), click 'erase' to wipe the disk.
Unmount /eject the disk.
Remount the disk.
Go into Time Machine Prefs, flip the slider to 'On' and then tell it the name of the (newly erased) disk you want to use.

How to transfer time machine back up to new hard drive

How to transfer time machine back up to new hard drive?

You may like to take a look at this thread... https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4207670?start=0&tstart=0

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.

My time machine backup external hard drive has failed. I have a newer external drive already connected to my MAC but can't figure out how to get Time Machine to set up on it?

My time machine backup external hard drive has failed. I have a newer external drive already connected to my MAC but can't figure out how to get Time Machine to set up on it

http://pondini.org/TM/21.html

Restarting Time Machine from scratch?

If I want to restart Time Machine from scratch after a massive rearrangement of my system and external hard disks which are being backed up, is it just a matter of removing the Backups.backupdb and private folders from the Time Machine disk and generating a new backup and going on from there?
Thanks,
doug

Doug Lerner2 wrote:
But it's only a problem if it's a problem, right?
Is there something technically a problem with what I want to do?
That's what I'd like to find out. If all the Time Machine information is in those two folders, then is wiping them the same as restarting Time Machine from scratch on a newly formatted disk?
you'll have GREAT difficulty emptying trash if you delete those folders from finder. I strongly recommend against it. first they contain millions of files. emptying trash with that many files will take a LONG time under the best of circumstances. worse, TM backups are protected by some nasty ACLs and some items are locked. they'll give you a lot of grief when you try to empty trash.
this has been tried by many people before you as this is a natural enough thing to try to do.
that's why it's best to just erase the whole TM volume using disk utility.
Does anyone happen to know?
Thanks,
doug

HT201405 how to solve time machine error-1

how to solve time machine error-1

I checked the pondini fixes and ended up doing the following - in case this could help someone else with OSX Lion and Time Capsule... http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
First, I downloaded and used Airport Utility 5.6 instead of 6.1 - BTW, I had to attempt download and installation THREE times before the program actually installed. Be persistant.
Pondini #5: It's possible some names (of all things!) may be a problem. See item C9. I had to re-name my Mac, Time Capsule, network, etc... to remove all apostrophes and spaces.
Pondini #7: If you have WD SmartWare installed on Lion, it's not compatible, per RoaringApps, and there are reports it can cause this problem as well. Use Western Digital's uninstaller, or delete the app from /Applications and the files com.wdc.WDDMservice.plist and com.wdc.WDSmartWareServer.plist from /Library/LaunchDaemons. There may also be a file in Library/Application Support.
I then had to shut down computer, unplug Time Capsule, unplug modem; plug everything in again, then reboot computer; then had to go to Apple- System Preferences- Network- and reselect my Time Capsule to connect to WiFi again.
Then opened Time Machine preferences again and attempted back up - it worked!

How does the time machine work

how does the time machine work....I need to find an older version of a document...

Hi mogburn,
Time Machine is part of the System software, not a feature of the word processing and page layout application, Pages, the topic in this community.
That said, Time Machine is pretty easy to get into.
In the Finder, open the folder containing the current version of the file.
Select the file, then click on the Time Machine icon in the menu bar and choose Enter Time machine.
The folder window will move to the center of the screen, and two arrows will appear near the lower right corner of the window.
Click the one pointing back to go back in time, and the one pointing toward the front (of the computer) to return to the present. The display will stop at each saved version of the file along the way.
Need more details? Try asking in the Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard community.
Regards,
Barry

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

What size Time Capsule - i.e. how big are Time Machine Backups

Hi all,
Just trying to decide which Time Capsule to get...my question is basically how big are Time Machine backups.
For example I have a MacBook with 100gb harddrive. At the moment about 80gb in use.
I assume the Time Capsule will immediately backup that 80gb but how big are the incremental backups. If I modify about a GB's worth of data each day, does this GB get moved to the capsule or is Time Machine cleverer than this and only backups the changes at byte level for example.
Any pointers, thoughts, etc. much appreciated.
Michael.

I have an iMac with a 500GB hard drive and a MacBook with an 80GB hard drive. The MacBook is nearing capacity but the iMac has around 90GB of data (the Time Machine backup is around 93GB). I will likely opt for the 1TB version as I am eligable for a Government discount bringing the cost down to £303 (£183 for the 500GB version). As it's unlikely that it will be easy to upgrade the Time Capsule HDD then I'm looking at future proofing as I do not want to have to repurchase in a few years. I'm also likely to buying a second MacBook or MacBook Pro in the coming months so it does make sense.
Secondly, you can use the Time Capsule as a shared storage area as well as for the Time Machine function.

How do work Time Machine?

So, I'm about to download OS 10.6 Snow Leopard onto my Mac, however when I read that I should backup every file onto Time Machine. How do I do that, like how am I supposed to transfer or whatever all files onto the app when it says it can't find a Airport wireless (something . . .)?
Please help!!

So I looked at the website you gave me but I'm still confused on where I should backup my files. I looked under Time Machine and it doesn't give any back up disks. I checked under Startup Disk and it gives me 2 options of either Macintosh HD or Network Startup, which do I chose to load?
In both the Macintosh HD and Network Startup it asks if I want to restart the computer in Target Disk Mode, should I?
What should I do and please don't give a website that I should just go look up, I want your opinions and how you did it!
thanks

How to manage Time Machine backups

Is there any way to manage time Machine Backups?
The things I want to do are:
* Selectively trim old backups for files I longer need
* Delete whole backups to maintain a trimmer backup disk
* Restart the whole backup process from time to time (purge and start over)
I know how the backups works (read the Ars Technica article) but the file system won't give me permissions to manually purge data. I suppose I could mess with the permissions but I'm not sure the effect on TM.
After the upgrade to Leopard, and after I setup Time Machine I started to do a purge of old files and data I just don't need anymore. But of course now there's several backups of that data. And while I know TM uses hard links so its not taking up a lot of extra space, the Gig I could recoup may be worth it for the long haul of having backups.

Not really the original point of the question, but since you mentioned it...
Couldn't time machine be used as archival as long as you have space? Its incremental, its fairly efficient since it uses hard links, and even archives have old data you don't need.
But it does beg another question. It would be nice if Apple could provide a list of directories that could be excluded in the event you want to run a clean install and then restore only files that effect a user and his/her preferences.
I suppose the Home directory would be the simplest answer, but even that includes a lot of Apps and Library files that really aren't necessary.
Maybe its just best to exclude nothing and buy a bigger backup drive. And then maybe periodically start over. Which was one of my original questions.
How does one start over? Just turn off time machine and format the backup drive?
Just pondering (and a bit of rambling) at this point.

How to restore time machine from wireless hard drive?

I backed up my data to a wireless hard drive before I wiped my hard drive. But now I'm having trouble restoring it.
Can't restore it from time machine, as it was not fully complete.
Migration assistant asks for a password to the hard drive, which I don't know. The person in my family who bought the drive entered it, but then migration asssistant greys out continue and nothing seems to happen
I opened the hard drive myself and there's a bunch of blank files named 01 349 049 984 and such. No extension.
Help?

The exhaustive list of backup devices supported by Time Machine consists of Time Capsule and locally connected and mounted volumes, period. Time Machine can use NAS devices, but there are many caveats including but not limited to the necessity for AFP to be running on the server. Wireless storage devices introduce yet another element of uncertainty.
OS X Mountain Lion: Disks you can use with Time Machine
Anything else, and you're a test pilot. Let Apple know how it works for you.

How long for Time Machine backup with USB v. 1

My hard drive might be failing. I'm going to backup with Time Machine for
the first time ever. I'll be using a 1 TB external hard drive. My Mac only
has a USB v. 1, so how long should this take? I read where someone said
that Time Machine said it would take DAYS to do it. Say it ain't so!! Any
ideas our there? Thanks!

See this for an indication of transfer rates these are theoretical speeds - real world is slower!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bit_rates
USB 1.1 runs about 1.5MB/s at full rate.
How much data is on your internal disk?
Wolfram Alpha says 1TB would take 7 days & 17 hours.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1TB+at+1.5+MB%2Fs
I would add more days to that time to account for the fact that USB 1 is slower (more like 0.7MB/s in my tests from years ago).
This is an appalling idea - your disk could easily stop working in the time it takes to copy.
Fortunately you have got the spec wrong on this iMac…
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac-core-2-duo-2.4-20-inch-alu minum-early-2008-penryn-specs.html
It has USB2 ports & Firewire - connect directly to one of those & the time will be much less (more like 1/2 a day).

How to restart Time Machine?

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