Is Time Machine Acting Strange ? Or ...

Hello,
Every time i plug in my external, and click the time machine icon in the top left bar, it ALWAYS says "Encrypting Back Up Disk" and its always only at 1% .. The thing is that it will give me this message BEFORE it actually starts backing up the data.
What does this mean, and how can i disable it ?
Additionally, i've already put a password lock on the external HD itself, so i don't understand why it needs to "Encrypt" every single time ?

Backup encryption by Time Machine is an option in the Time Machine preferences. Click on Select Disk button and uncheck that option.

Similar Messages

TIME MACHINE ACTING BADLY WITH THIRD iMAC

I am on my third iMac now and TM still acting strange. First iMac and using Time Machine when looking through Mail, TM would lock up the computer. A hard reboot was necessary to get things working again.
Second iMac just would shut down, power off all by itself. TM and two mail accounts did not function properly. Going to the second Mail Account I was unable to navigate forward and backwards in Time. Going back to first Mail Account would be fine, but when switching to second Mail Account, TM would stop going forward or back.
Third iMac I get the same results with TM, that is, when navigating two mail accounts TM would get stuck and not move forward or back in time. Is there a chance TM doesn't like having two accounts to look through? Anyone else have an issue like this with their iMac? My external drive is a Lacie and is formatted for Guid.

I am on my third iMac now and TM still acting strange. First iMac and using Time Machine when looking through Mail, TM would lock up the computer. A hard reboot was necessary to get things working again.
Second iMac just would shut down, power off all by itself. TM and two mail accounts did not function properly. Going to the second Mail Account I was unable to navigate forward and backwards in Time. Going back to first Mail Account would be fine, but when switching to second Mail Account, TM would stop going forward or back.
Third iMac I get the same results with TM, that is, when navigating two mail accounts TM would get stuck and not move forward or back in time. Is there a chance TM doesn't like having two accounts to look through? Anyone else have an issue like this with their iMac? My external drive is a Lacie and is formatted for Guid.

Time Machine doing strange things

Hi folks,
So I recently upgraded my hard drive, and restored from my Time Machine backup and everything came back just as it was, which was great. However, now I am having some serious Time Machine issues. It deleted all of my old backups, which I understand happens when you restore? That is kind of annoying, but whatever, I can live with it.
However, what's really strange is that now it tries to backup, and it's telling me it needs 270 GB and I only have 163 GB available. But there is already one backup on there, so I'm not sure why it thinks it needs to start from scratch basically (at least I think that's what it's doing, as my account only has 235 GB of used space total). And what's really strange is that when I check out the space on my Time Machine hard drive, when I click "Get Info" on the backups folder, it says that it's 130 GB, but when I scan the drive with DaisyDisk, it tells me that it's over 200 GB, but not hidden or anything, and I just cannot figure out where all that extra space that is being taken up is.
So what I'm actually considering doing is just deleting the backup folder all together (although I don't know if this will get rid of just the 130 GB that it says it is, or all of it), and letting Time Machine start over. Is that a good or bad idea? Any ideas as to what the heck is going on? Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance!

sbollag wrote:
now it tries to backup, and it's telling me it needs 270 GB
That means it's actually trying to back up about 225 GB (it adds about 20% for workspace), so yes, that's a full backup (less the things it skips, such as system work files, most caches and logs, trash, etc.).
And what's really strange is that when I check out the space on my Time Machine hard drive, when I click "Get Info" on the backups folder, it says that it's 130 GB, but when I scan the drive with DaisyDisk, it tells me that it's over 200 GB,
Believe Get Info. Time Machine backups have an unusual structure that cause many apps to count things more than once. See Hard Links in How Time Machine works its Magic for details.
So what I'm actually considering doing is just deleting the backup folder all together (although I don't know if this will get rid of just the 130 GB that it says it is, or all of it), and letting Time Machine start over.
Yes, but don't delete it (emptying the trash will take a very long time and may cause other troubles). Erase it with Disk Utility -- that will just take a few moments.
What's happened is, Time Machine is treating your disk as a new one (it shouldn't on Snow Leoaprd, but sometimes it does). So it deleted all but the last backup of the "old" one, trying to make room.
It sounds like your TM drive may be a bit too small. Usually, it needs at least twice the space of the data it's backing-up. See #1 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions. You might want to put a larger one on your Christmas list.
Then you can use the old one for "secondary" backups. See #27 in that same link for some suggestions.

Time Machine acting randomly... (Ignoring exclusions)

Hello everyone,
I've been an happy TM user since August, when I bought my 1TB Time Capsule. Everything used to work fine, until this morning when, for some reason unknown, TM decided it was time to make a 177GB backup. According to the TM prefpane, the full size of a backup for my drive is 102GB, but I let it do it anyways because I thought that it probabily knew what it was doing. I was wrong, as it successfully wasted almost 200GB on my Time Capsule.
Noticing this, I used Backup Loupe to inspect what was being backed up and to my surprise, it backed up everything on my disk, including all those folders that I had excluded. I proceeded to delete the sparsebundle on the Time Capsule (that was now over 450 and there was no way to reduce it even by deleting the backups of the excluded items) and to remove all Time Machine settings, and start anew. The thing is that TM is still refusing to consider my exclusions: it begins by saying that it is excluding 200 thousand and more items, then goes on backing up the 102GB that should be backed up, and the CONTINUES to back up, incrementing both the data transfered and the total data to be transfered (I'm now at 136GB of 136GB). I'm suspecting that it's simply ignoring my exclusions, but I don't want it to! Do anyone has any advice? I don't want to switch to a third party backup solution, it has always worked before and I see no reason why it should sto working properly now.
Thanks everyone,
Take Care
Juan
Message was edited by: juandemarco

Hello, and thank you for your reply. I managed, i think, to solve the issue. One thing at a time.
I had already read your comprehensive guide, and it was following those tips that I tried the full reset (in fact, as stated, I deleted both the preferences and the sparsebundle). Things didn't change, though. Also, I had verified my internal drive and everything was fine.
The problem was that during the first backup, I renamed the backup volume from Time Machine's Backups to Backup, since this is a feature that TM is supposed to support: it stopped, renamed and got back to work from where it left off. Only, it began to ignore the exclusions and that backup was forever tainted. I tried not renaming the volume and everything works fine. That, and also i DID NOT exclude the folder /Users/Shared. This are the only two differences from previous failed attemps.
What's not clear, though, is why, before I had to go through all this work, TM began to ignore my exclusions in the first place. I had a backup volume since august, and it always worked fine until the other day, when, without me doing anything (the computer was left untouched since the previous backup, in fact) it begun to backup the whole disk, ignoring exclusions. That is something that will probabily happen again - even if after some time - and it's very likely due to a bug in TM's code.
Thank you for your help, if you can make out something helpful from my experience please, let me know
Take care
Juan

Time Machine acting up.

I have a 500GB hardrive on my Macbook pro and a 500GB dedicated time machine backup hardrive. I have been getting on a regular basis the error that my backup drive was full. I decided to format the backup hardrive to start fresh. Now after formatting and having a fresh 500 GB back up hardrive TM is telling me that 450GB are necessary for backup, which would be fine. When I run time machine I get the error message that my back up hardrive is not big enough from my back up. That 580GB are needed (when my hardrive is only 500 and initially it was telling me that I needed 450GB) and that I only have 499GB available. Why is this happening? My hardrive is only 500GB, were did he extra 80GB come from?

How much data is on the disk that you want to back up with Time Machine? One rule of thumb is that you should have a backup drive with 2.5X as much capacity as what you want to back up.

Time Machine acting odd on new 27

I did a successful migration from my old Mac to new 27 using Time Machine. Now Time Machine spins in Finder left side panel but not in top of screen icon like it used to. Is that correct? It spins all the time. Am I supposed to do anything to "initialize the old time machine to the new 27?

Depending how you have Time Machine setup this may be just the initial backup. If your backing up your new Mac to a Time Capsule or aother Networked Time Machine volume it may take quite some time for the initial backup.
In 10.9 the menubar icon doesnt spin anymore.
Instead its stays still but has a 2nd arrow it like this.

Time Machine behaves strange

While beeing away from my home studio, I´m working with three external HDs: One containig all the sample content (1 TB Firewire), one for the Logic projects including movies (2 TB, Firewire) and I recently connected an empty 3T USB2 HD as Time Machine. All HDs are formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
The three Volumes to be backuped by Time Machine (MacHD plus the two external FW-HDs for projects and samples) contain alltogether 2.14 TB. All connections are via a thunderbolt display.
When I started Time Machine off course it took a few days (running only while I was working) to fill up it´s HD. Now it claims that the HD is full, and it promises to delete "old backups" the next time it will run. That never happens though. Instead it keeps backuping endlessly and the estimated size of the backups rises constantly while the backup runs. That way there hasn´t been done a single valid backup within two weeks ...
I know that there are discussions in this forum about likely problems, but the solutions offered are too much depending on individual surroundings or I simply don´t understand them
Can anybody help??

These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
Launch the Console 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. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
In the top right corner of the Console window, there's a search box labeled Filter. Initially the words "String Matching" are shown in that box. Enter the word "Starting" (without the quotes.) You should now see log messages with the words "Starting * backup," where * represents any of the words "automatic," "manual," or "standard."
Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Note the timestamp of the last "Starting" message that corresponds to the beginning of an an abnormal backup. Now
CLEAR THE WORD "Starting" FROM THE TEXT FIELD
so that all messages are showing, and scroll back in the log to the time you noted. Select the messages timestamped from then until the end of the backup, or the end of the log if that's not clear. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressingcommand-V.
☞ If all you see are messages that contain the word "Starting," you didn't clear the text field.
If there are runs of repeated messages, post only one example of each. Don't post many repetitions of the same message.
☞ The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
☞ Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

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.

Time machine is acting strange

I bought an external hard drive just for backing up with Time machine and when I did my first back up a few days ago it seemed to work fine. Then yesterday I wanted it to back-up again, so I connected the external hard drive and then asked it to make a back-up. It did but the thing is that it backed up files of 8 gb and since the first back up I haven´t changed or created files of more than 150 mb so I am quite puzzled as to where these 8 gb comes from. If it takes up so much space every time I ask it to do a back-up then my external hard drive it will be filled up in no time. Is it normal for it to back up so much data without any apparent reason?
Next thing is that to prevent it from taking up to much space I asked it to exclude my iTunes music and my iPhoto library, and then Time machine added a third thing to exclude, which is "Time machine-back up" it takes up 75 gb and as far as I can see it is pretty much everything that it could back-up that it has now decided to exclude. Since it decided to exclude that part back ups only take a few seconds and I fear that it is actually not backing up anything. Have any if you experienced anything like this?

WhatSize works fairly well to track down large files and is Leopard compatible.
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/21149
Common culprits are any program that stores it data in a single database like Parallels, VM Fusion, Entourage and Outlook that was previously mentioned.

Time Machine - strange behavior while deleting old backups

Not sure if this is the right place, because this is actually not on Time Capsule, but on a Time Machine on an external USB drive.
In any case, I searched the web for "time machine delete old backups" and found many discussions of various aspects of this task. My objective is to clean up a partition on a the external drive that I no longer use for active TM backups, but to retain a small set of backups in case I need to go back to them. The partition now has other uses and I need the space. My main TM backup is now on a separate Time Capsule.
So again my objective is not to remove all backups, but just most of them.
It appears that the well-discussed procedure is the following:
Go into Time Machine.
Select the Macintosh HD.
Go back to one of the oldest backups.
Click on the Gear > click Delete Backup.
This procedure will remove one Backup at a time, and it seems to take 5 - 10 minutes for each backup.
Here is what I noticed that was "strange":
You could delete a selected backup using the above procedure.
For the first selected backup so deleted, there is a confirmation dialog with a warning message that it is not undoable.
After clicking OK on the warning message, the display backs up to the "Present" backup, and the administrative password is requested.
After the administrative password is entered, the backup starts but control is passed back to the user interface, and another backup can be selected to be deleted.
However, after the second backup is selected and deleted, there is no warning dialog, and no request for the administrative password. At this point the user interface is busy and nothing more can be done until the backup delete is completed. Except that the Time Machine can be exited by first pressing Escape, then Cancel on the lower left of the screen.
If the time machine is exited, there is a Delete Backups progress dialog with a progress bar for each backup so far requested. If the second backup was requested, as in the steps above, there would be two backups.
I discovered by playing around that either you had to wait within Time Machine for the deletion to complete, or alternatively exit Time Machine. While I was not sure what was going on, I kept starting one backup, then exiting Time Machine and re-entering Time Machine and requesting another delete operation. Each time after entering Time Machine, the warning/admin password sequence occurred and I was able to exit. And then immediately re-enter Time Machine and request another backup. Only by exiting and re-entering could another delete request be made.
When out of Time Machine, I thus saw the Delete Backups dialog with any number of concurrent "Delete One Backup" progress bars.
Because of the nature of the hard links used to indicate backups, I was wondering if these multiple delete operations could possibly be hung in a deadly embrace, so I decided to only do one at a time. Some further study to see if the multiple delete operations were all able to complete would be needed to know if this would be a good way to "queue up" multiple delete requests.
Bottom line: seems like kind of an odd implementation. Would be really nice if you could select many (say 30) individual backups and delete them all at once, rather than taking 5 - 10 minutes each. Again, this is because I am trying to reclaim disk space, but not delete all the backups from a Time Machine backup set that is not in active use.
Also, the method of "queuing up" backup delete requests is kind of odd, but seems to work, with the proviso that I have not yet confirmed that doing more than one at a time actually works.

Heinz-G?uenter Arnold wrote:
since the upgrade to SL it seem that Time Machine has problems to completely remove old backups completely. The "removed" backups do not show up in Time Machine anymore, but the backup folders and part of their contents can still be seen in Finder.
Hi, and welcome to the forums.
That happens occasionally, in both Leopard and Snow Leopard, sometimes after something was deleted from the Finder, but also after an abnormal shutdown or improper disconnection of the TM disk.
Run a +*Repair Disk+* on it via Disk Utility, in your Applications/Utilities folder. If it finds errors, but can't fix them all, run it again (and again) until it either fixes them all, or can't fix any more.

Indesign CS6 acting strange at times

I am not loving Indesign CS6. Not because of it's functionality but because it acts strangely. When I quit it, sometimes it takes forever to quit and you start wondering if it is going to, sometimes it says it's closed but the tabbed windows still remain in view only grayed out with the beachball spinning. Eventually it goes away but it is disturbing. anyone know why?
Another thing is that when I change a font size, it will look like it changed but still have the after image of the previous size. Irritating.
One more, and I've had this problem for all of the last versions since I think cs4. When I try to replace a pdf with a current version, (unless I have restarted my computer since the last time I created it,) it tells me that I don't haver permisson or that file may be in use. I end up going to the pdf and trashing it physically. Not very efficient.
I know there are 3 issues but I've only had it for a couple of months at best.
The first issue is the most disturbing.
Mountain Lion 10.8.2, 8 gb memory, processor 3.06 ghz intel

Again, please remove your auto-signature when replying by email.
Let's try a couple of diagnostic experiments, please.
First, create a new user account onthe mac and log in with that and tell us if there is a change in behavior in ID.
Second, try starting in with extensions disabled by holding down the Shift key while booting the Mac. Does that make a difference?
Do you run any sort of utilities -- anti-virus, Mac Keeper, etc.?

Strange network performance when using Time Machine with APE External HD

All -
I am still looking into a performance issue with TM and and an external HD on the APE.
Strangely the network activity changes from a more or less steady 200-400kb/sec to a pulsed 1-2Mb, and than a few seconds later back to 200-300kb.
I posted a few screenshots from the Activity Monitor here: http://gallery.mac.com/erwinhogeweg#100039
The RSSI is -32, and I have a 130Mb connection with the base station, but I am not even using 1% of this BW. The overall CPU load is about 40%, so it is completely mystery (to me) why this transfer rate is slow.
Is there anyone who can give some insight in this?
There is 107GB of data on my local HD. With about 2GB/hour, it will take 2 days to back this up to a n APE Time Machine drive...
Kind Regards,
Erwin

Do NOT use a USB hub with an APE...
I had two LaCie HDs, so I figure I connect them both with a USB hub. This was not a good idea. As soon as I removed the hub the network BW was at a steady 1-2Mb/s, with an occasional peak to 5Mb/s. Still way lower than the theoretical maximum, but hey, I guess you can't have it all.
Thanks,
Erwin

Strange error trying to restore from time machine sparsebundle

I had my iMac hard drive go bad, so I replaced it, powered the unit back up and booted into the Snow Leopard install disk.
I got to the step where I'm trying to restore from my Time Machine .sparsebundle and I selected the date and time of the backup I wanted to restore. When I click Next to go the next screen (Select a Destination) the utility gets stuck "Searching for Disks," and below that a warning icon says
"This disk does not have enough space to restore your system."
This sounds scary, and as the Time Machine drive now has the sole copy of my data I'm reluctant to do anything to it.
Does anyone know what's going on?
Thanks in advance,
Dan.

Are you sure the new drive is formatted properly?
Check it via Disk Utility (you can get there from the same Utilities menu where you selected +Restore from backups).+
Select the top line of the drive (with size and make). Be sure the *Partition Map Scheme* at the bottom says +GUID Partition Table.+
Then select the next line, with the name you gave it, and be sure the Format shown towards the lower left is +Mac OS Extended (Journaled),+ unless you made it +Mac OS Extended (Case-Sensitive, journaled),+
Also see how much space it shows for Available to the right.

Time Machine wants 16 days to do an initial backup. ps shows PRI = 33 with NI = 0.   But I can not get sudo renice to set PRI less than 15. And renice sets NI directly with strange behavior for PRI. Any suggestions?

Time Machine said it would take 16 days to do an initial backup, and indeed, after many days it is less than a quarter done.   (The problem started when I put in a new bank disk for Time Machine to write to for its backup file.)
Activity Monitor shows that the process name is   backups   with Process ID   6060.
Then putting this PID in Terminal UNIX command ps gave:
EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ ps -l -p 6060
UID   PID PPID        F CPU PRI NI       SZ    RSS ...
    0 6060     1 1004004   0 33 0 2556488 29040 ...
Wow! A priority of 33!
Don't know how that happened, but the way to fix that (I thought) is with renice.
But renice doesn't work.
After a lot of playing with renice and ps, it looks as though renice can not make the priority better than (no less than) 15.
And the parameter you put in, that according to the man page that is supposed to be priority, turns out to be "nice index", with priority changed by sometimes subtracting or sometimes adding either this number or twice this number - down to a limit of priority no less than 15.
EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ ps -l -p 6060
UID   PID PPID        F CPU PRI NI       SZ    RSS ...
    0 6060     1 1004004   0 33 0 2556488 29040 ...
EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ sudo renice 5 -p 6060
EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ ps -l -p 6060
UID   PID PPID        F CPU PRI NI       SZ    RSS ...
    0 6060     1 1004004   0 28 5 2555964 29028 ...
EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ sudo renice -5 -p 6060
EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ ps -l -p 6060
UID   PID PPID        F CPU PRI NI       SZ    RSS ...
    0 6060     1 1004004   0 38 -5 2555964 29028 ...
EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ sudo renice -15 -p 6060
EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ ps -l -p 6060
UID   PID PPID        F CPU PRI NI       SZ    RSS ...
    0 6060     1 1004004   0 48 -15 2555964 29028 ...
EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ ps -l -p 6060
UID   PID PPID        F CPU PRI NI       SZ    RSS ...
    0 6060     1 1004004   0 48 -15 2555964 29028 ...
EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ sudo renice -n -5 -p 6060
EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ ps -l -p 6060
UID   PID PPID        F CPU PRI NI       SZ    RSS ...
    0 6060     1 1004004   0 53 -20 2555964 29028 ...
EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$
This is with OSX 10.7.5 and Terminal 2.2.3 on an early 2009 Mac Pro with lots of memory.
What am I dong wrong, and any suggestions for how to fix my Time Machine process?

The backup file size is 1.67 TB.*
That's across the internal bus of a 2009 quad-core Mac Pro - which is pretty fast.
Copying an hour's worth of MPEG-2 HD takes about a minute.
I do a fresh backup from scratch about once a year, and the last time it finished over night.
This time the first Time Machine backup is only about 1/5 complete after many days, and Activity Monitor shows essentially no use of disk drives or of CPU. And in the first note I pointed out what is gleaned by using Terminal to execute the UNIX ps command. The priority of the running Time Machine process looks incorrect to me.
I could be wrong, but I think the problem is process priority, not file size.
I am unable to set priority to 0 or a negative number. Can someone straighten me out on how to do that?
[*The machine has four 1.5 TB disk drives in it plus lots of memory. Two of the physical drives are configured as one 3 TB backup drive (RAID concatanated).]

Can I daisy chain macs to act as time machines?

Say I have a lab of macs numbered between 1 - 16. All of these macs are connected via a switch so they can all see each other.
What I am thinking is to partition the HDD on every mac so that there are 2 partitions each. One of the partitions will be for the OS and the local files and the other will be for the back up of another mac. Doing it this way I was hoping to daisy chain them
Mac ID#
Partition 1
Partition 2
1
Local 1
16's Local
2
Local 2
1's Local
3
Local 3
2's Local
4
Local 4
3's Local
5
Local 5
4's Local
6
Local 6
5's Local
16
Local 16
15's Local
I was thinking of making the 2nd partition of each mac as a time machine target and having it sync the files nightly.
The reason for this is due to the amount of data generated on each mac that getting a dedicated backup server would be too expensive (I would need ~7 TB) for my budget ($0).
Is this possible? Is there a better way?

I don't know, I presume you would share the 2nd partition so the other Mac could see it. Unless someone knows a definite answer then you can only try it and see what happens.
One problem I see is not the Macs but the switch, inexpensive switches generally don't have an ASIC per port, this would reduce the bandwidth the switch could handle at any one time. The more expensive switches I used to work with had one ASIC per 2 ports or one on each port but they were expensive, probably the same price as a backup system you cannot afford.
Hope someone as a definitive answer for you.

Is Time Machine Acting Strange ? Or ...

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