How to stop Time Machine from trying to resize a sparse bundle

With 10.8, I'm backing up wirelessly from my MacBook Pro to a sparse bundle on a Drobo connected to a Mac mini on the same network. I used Drobo's Time Tamer to create the sparse bundle. The sparsebundle is a set size and cannot be resized (this is intentional to avoid filling the Drobo which is mostly used to store non-backed up non-critical data.
Every step of the backup process works, but Time Machine spends a good 20-30 minutes during each backup "resizing" the disk image. It doesn't actually suceed in resizing the disk image, but it displays "Looking for Backup Disk" in the Time Machine menu while Console reveals that it's resizing the disk image ("Resizing backup disk image from 17.59 TB to 17.59 TB"). It doesn't cause any errors, but it does turn the backup time from a few minutes
Does anyone know of a workaround to disable this resizing step or to make it fail quickly and proceed with the rest of the backup normally?
I wasn't using Time Machine before upgrading to 10.8 from 10.7, so I don't know if this is a new issue with Mountain Lion. I suspect that this would happen in earlier OS versions too.

I'm experiencing it on a Synology NAS. Time Machine always starts by "Resizing backup disk image from 1.07 TB to 1.07 TB." In the status bar, it just displays "looking for backup disk."
I don't have any solutions yet. Would definitely be interested to hear. I think it might have to do with the fact that I increased the user's disk quota (on the NAS) after doing the initial time machine backup. While Time Machine correctly identified the extra space as available, it somehow can't get over the fact that it changed once.
Things I have done:
Manually ran hdiutil resize -size 1000g *.sparseimage. This did change the reported disk size in the disk's Info.plist, but the next backup still did the resize step.

Similar Messages

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 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 polling disks

I have shut off Time Machine in system preferences but it continuously asks if I want to use it with a disk that is attached.
The questions is simple - how can I stop this from happening?
I have already tried:
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup -bool YES
It still continues to harass me daily. Any suggestions appreciated!

I may have spoke to soon. I think I finally squashed the prompts with the terminal command I noted above.
Essentially what you are saying is let TM set up a preference file then shut it off - that would probably work. Thanks for the suggestion - if I get the prompt again from TM I will try your idea.

How to stop Time Machine from creating entirely new backup of external drive?

I've included an external drive to be backed up into Time Machine. For a few days, the drive was disconnected, however, so only Macintosh HD was getting backed up. I recently re-added the external drive. However, now it appears that since the external wasn't included in the most recent backups, it's decided to re-backup the entire drive.
Is there any way to prevent it from backing up the entire external drive and instead just backup the changes made, or is that not possible because there is a gap in the backups made for the external?

First, the amount that TM says it's going to back up is not necessarily the amount it will back up. You'll only know that when the backup finishes.
I haven't tried this myself, but it may be that after you exclude a volume, TM loses continuity with the previous snapshot. In that case, future backups should be incremental, as long as you don't exclude the volume again.

How to stop time machine from filling up trash

I've been using time machine to backup my mac and I've noticed that whenever it deletes old backups to make room for the new ones it leaves my trash bin with about 30,000 files. This takes up a lot a space and is very time consuming to empty. Does anybody know how to prevent it from sending the old files to the trash or have any suggestions period? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Fox 8991 wrote:
I've been using time machine to backup my mac and I've noticed that whenever it deletes old backups to make room for the new ones it leaves my trash bin with about 30,000 files. This takes up a lot a space and is very time consuming to empty. Does anybody know how to prevent it from sending the old files to the trash or have any suggestions period? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
That's not how it should work, and something I've never seen on this forum. We do see this when people delete backups manually, via the Finder (which can cause all sorts of troubles).
How large is your internal HD, and how much data is on it?
Where does TM put your backups (external drive, Time Capsule)?
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 a backup where this happened, copy and post the messages here, please.

How to stop Time Machine from deleting historical backups

So for the first time I encountered what happens when Time Machine runs out of room - IT DELETES THE OLDEST BACKUPS UNTIL IT HAS ENOUGH ROOM!!!
That's terrible if you rely on those backups. We've been using it like an archive and it's been spectacular. Work on a project and delete it when I'm done because I know Time Machine has a copy.
Well, I no longer have copies of my work from Arpil until July because Time Machine deleted those AUTOMATICALLY to make room. I had always thought that it would warn me it was going to delete older backups and I could just decline. Then I'd go out and get a new drive. This make Time Machine unusable for my purposes.
Is there a was to make Time Machine just stop backing up or warn you before it erases old backups? Some way where it cannot erase them on it's own? Perhaps some Terminal command or anything?
Thanks!

Landon White wrote:
So for the first time I encountered what happens when Time Machine runs out of room - IT DELETES THE OLDEST BACKUPS UNTIL IT HAS ENOUGH ROOM!!!
That's terrible if you rely on those backups. We've been using it like an archive and it's been spectacular. Work on a project and delete it when I'm done because I know Time Machine has a copy.
Well, I no longer have copies of my work from Arpil until July because Time Machine deleted those AUTOMATICALLY to make room. I had always thought that it would warn me it was going to delete older backups and I could just decline.
in system preferences->Time machine->options there is a check box "warn when old backups are deleted". if this box is checked TM is supposed to warn you when it first starts deleting old backups. However, that particular feature is quite buggy and TM is well known not to do that on occasion. there are also other situations when it might decide to delete old backups without warning. Therefore you should NOT use TM as an archiving utility. apart from the above issues it also thins old backups and THAT is always done without warning. TM is a backup tool not an archiving one and you shouldn't use it as such.
Message was edited by: V.K.

How to stop Time Machine from constantly asking do I want to use it.

Every time I use my SuperDuper app to backup to my external drives I get the pesky "do you want to use Time Machine to backup to that drive?" I say "Don't Use," but it never "remembers" and asks everytime I do a backup. Is there any way to convince it I really don't want to use it!

When you decline a prompt from Time Machine to use a volume as a backup destination, an invisible, empty marker file named ".com.apple.timemachine.donotpresent" is written to the top level of the volume. If that file is deleted (for example, because the volume has been erased or cleaned up somehow) or if it can't be written at all (for example, because the volume is in Windows NTFS format), then you'll be prompted again the next time the volume is mounted.
If you can't determine why the marker file is being deleted or you can't do anything about it, you have the option of disabling all automatic prompts to adopt a backup volume.
Back up all data before proceeding.
These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
Please triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup -bool YES
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.
Launch the built-in Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
Paste into the Terminal window by pressing the key combination command-V. I've tested these instructions only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, you may have to press the return key after pasting. You'll be prompted for your login password. Nothing will be displayed when you type it. Type carefully and then press return. If you don’t have a login password, you’ll need to set one before you can run the command. You may get a one-time warning to be careful. Confirm. You don't need to post the warning.
If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator. Log in as one and start over.
Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign ($) to appear below what you entered. You can then quit Terminal. The change will take effect the next time you restart the computer.
To revert the change, enter the following command in the same way:
sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup

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.

Stopping Time Machine from backing up when running FCP

Is there any way of stopping Time Machine from making backups when I have Final Cut Pro running?
Each time TM is about to prepare backup, FCP goes down in performance like an ant in maple syrup.
Quite annoying. And sure, I can live with no backups made during work. (I hit Command-S every minute instead... ;-))

You may have something else going on, that doesn't seem to be a problem at other times.
First, see if the size of the backups makes sense, given the changes you've made. If in doubt, 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. That will show the duration of each backup at the top, and the total size in the "Copied" messages.
If that seems large, see #D4 in the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip* at the top of this forum.
If the size seems reasonable, but the amount of time is not, see #D2 in the same place; any or all of the suggestions there may speed them up.

How to Stop Time Machine before Disk is Full

In the System Preferences, Time Machine will keep weekly backups "until your backup disk is full". I also use the backup disk for other storage purposes, so is there a way to stop Time Machine perhaps when the disk is 90% full or has 10 gigs left?
Does anyone know a command line trick or option to adjust this setting to backup "until your backup disk is nearly full"? I'd prefer a way to limit Time Machine from taking over the entire disk.

OK then - Create a file A on the disk that represents 10% of the disk space. When the disk fills you can then remove the file A and deal with disk full conditions as you wish.
You can create a file easily in terminal.app. Use the mkfile command.
Let's say you disk with Volume name "Big" is 300 GB in size.
In Terminal enter
cd /Volumes/Big
mkfile 30g TempFile
This will create a 30 GB file with a pathname of /Volumes/Big/TempFile
This is somewhat of a kludge but it's simple.

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

How to stop an app from trying to download to the cloud?

How do you stop an app from trying to download to the cloud?

Apps do not download to icloud, no need to stop what never happens.

How Do I Stop Time Machine From Filling Up My External Hard Drive?

Hi all -
I have a 750GB OWC external hard drive on which I back up about 100GB of data from my MacBook using Time Machine, and also store a bunch of media files for work. Currently about 650GB of that is full, and that is mostly because of two Time Machine-related files: The "Backups.backupdb" folder, which is 135.15GB, and "MacBook_001b63336000.sparsebundle," which is 233.71 GB. That means that in the nine months since I bought the drive, about 370GB, or half its available space, has been eaten by Time Machine backups.
I only back up so I have a bootable copy of all my current (not past) MacBook data if my MacBook is ever lost, stolen, or damaged. I am now very concerned that, if left unchecked, Time Machine will eat into the remaining 100GB of empty space. And my old external hard drive died precisely because it ran out of empty space. Some of my critical files were lost forever, and others I got back in pieces after several weeks of anguish and quite a bit of cash.
Apple's support page addresses this concern (incredibly) by instructing me to buy another external hard drive. That solution is expensive for me, and what's the point, when Time Machine will eventually fill that one up too?
So, my questions are:
1. Is there any point at which Time Machine recognizes it's nearly out of hard drive space, and either stops backing up, or deletes old backups, or sends me a warning, or something?
2. If not, is there a way I could designate a maximum size for Time Machine backups to take, such as 150 GB, that it cannot exceed?
3. Partitioning has been suggested, but I don't know how. Any instructions?
4. The OWC hard drive came with its own backup software. Should I just use that and shut up?
It would be mighty ironic if the software I use to save all my data got so fat, it sacrificed all my data....
Thanks in advance -

Andrew Saks wrote:
Hi all -
I have a 750GB OWC external hard drive on which I back up about 100GB of data from my MacBook using Time Machine, and also store a bunch of media files for work. Currently about 650GB of that is full, and that is mostly because of two Time Machine-related files: The "Backups.backupdb" folder, which is 135.15GB, and "MacBook_001b63336000.sparsebundle," which is 233.71 GB. That means that in the nine months since I bought the drive, about 370GB, or half its available space, has been eaten by Time Machine backups.
this is pretty confusing. have you been using it for both wireless and wired backups? the sparse bundle would only be created if you've used it for network backups. directly attached TM drives don't use a sparse bundle so it looks like you've got two separate backup lines. you should get rid of one as using both is very space inefficient.
I only back up so I have a bootable copy of all my current (not past) MacBook data if my MacBook is ever lost, stolen, or damaged.
FYI, TM backups are not bootable themselves. You can use the "full system restore from TM" utility on the leopard install DVd to restore your system from backups. That restored system will, of course be bootable.
I am now very concerned that, if left unchecked, Time Machine will eat into the remaining 100GB of empty space. And my old external hard drive died precisely because it ran out of empty space. Some of my critical files were lost forever, and others I got back in pieces after several weeks of anguish and quite a bit of cash.
Apple's support page addresses this concern (incredibly) by instructing me to buy another external hard drive. That solution is expensive for me, and what's the point, when Time Machine will eventually fill that one up too?
So, my questions are:
1. Is there any point at which Time Machine recognizes it's nearly out of hard drive space, and either stops backing up, or deletes old backups, or sends me a warning, or something?
I'm not sure of the precise point (TM need some free space on the backup drive to operate) but yes, this will eventually happen. when it does, TM will inform you of this and will give you an option of either stopping TM backups and changing the TM drive or starting to delete old backups. If you choose the latter it will start deleting old backups to create space for new ones. this is done automatically.
2. If not, is there a way I could designate a maximum size for Time Machine backups to take, such as 150 GB, that it cannot exceed?
not unless you partition the drive.
3. Partitioning has been suggested, but I don't know how.
it's an option but not right now. you have too little free space left for a successful partitioning process. If you try, the process is sure to fail due to disk fragmentation.
You need to get rid of A LOT of data if you want to try partitioning. also, fort the future, it's a very good idea to keep one partition entirely for TM and another for data. You'll avoid some of the problems you are having now.
Any instructions?
type "creating new volumes" in disk utility help.
4. The OWC hard drive came with its own backup software. Should I just use that and shut up?
don't. besides TM there are much better options out there. CCCloner and Superduper! are better than anything that OWC software has to offer.
It would be mighty ironic if the software I use to save all my data got so fat, it sacrificed all my data....
Thanks in advance -

How to PREVENT Time Machine from switching disks

I have two USB drives. I use one for iTunes and the second for Time Machine backups. Problem is, when I plug in the iTunes disk, if the Time Machine disk is not connected then Time Machine switches to this disk and initiates a backup. I have specified in Preferences that the other disk is for TM; also tried 'locking' the preferences screen. But, still TM continues to start backups onto this iTunes disk when I plug it in (assuming, as above, that its regular disk is unavailable).
How can I prevent TM from doing this; and force it to wait until its own drive is available? Have checked forums and found no answer. Any help appreciated. Thank you.

BordeauxQuill wrote:
If it is useful to anyone else, these are Western Digital My Passport Studio 640GB drives.
Yup, you're the 3rd or 4th to report it with various models of WDs (one fellow had 3 of them!), and a few weeks ago someone had some Iomegas, I think, too.
This confusion may well also explain some weird stats in Get Info I noticed last week (such as the drive apparently having used more bytes than its capacity, as I recall).
Quite likely.
Thank you for your support. I shall come back and mark the thread resolved when I have reformatted the drive.
Cool. Also double-check the contents of the one you don't erase; you may find some extra stuff there.

How to stop Time Machine from trying to resize a sparse bundle

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