It seems as if my time machine has lost some backups.

I have had my time machine for over six months.  I lost a video a couple of months ago and needed it replaced and was able to do so without a problem. For some reason that video is gone again and I went back into the time machine to get it.  This time however the time machine only shows a couple of months of backups and I cant go far enough back to find the file I need.  It is a 2T time machine and I have pleanty of space so I know it never got full. 
Is there a way to restore or access older backups that Im guessing still must be in there somewhere?  Thank you for your help

There is a likely chance that shortly after you installed Lion on your computer, that Time Machine sent you a message indicating that it needed to start a new set of backups.
At that time, the previous backups would have been deleted and new backups were started over again.
That would explain the "shorter" history of backups.
If by some chance the "old" backups are still on the Time Capsule, you can try the following:
Right-Click on the Time Machine icon on the dock
Select Browse Other Time Machine Backups
See if there is another "disk" that appears
If yes, click the other disk to highlight it and then click Use Selected Disk to see your "old" backups
Reverse the procedure above to get back to your current set of backups.
Another thought......did you delete the file from your computer at any time, thinking that it would stay on the Time Capsule? 

Similar Messages

  • Time Machine has lost all backups

    I have a time capsule that was reset on 15th April when I moved the home folder on our iMac to an external disk. It needed to be reset as there was not enough free space to keep the existing backups and continue with the new external. Time machine has been running since and backing up our files.
    Today I noticed that Time Machine was working hard doing a backup and when I check the status in the top bar it shows that time machine is backing up all or our data (approx 250Gb). I opened the time machine application and it only shows a backup from today - there is no history.
    What could have happened? It looks like the time capsule was wiped and time machine has started from scratch again. One other thing, I updated to the latest AirPort utility this morning, coincidence?
    Hope someone can help as I do not want this to happen again.
    All the best
    Andrew Wright.

    Thanks for the link, but the answers there did not really help explain why a full backup was done. None of the reasons in D3 were applicable. I did look at the system log and found the info below. This appears to show a 'normal' backup just before 2pm then the full backup just after 3pm. The question is still 'why would time machine want to backup everything when most files were already backed up'?
    Jun 17 13:55:24 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[746]: Starting standard backup
    Jun 17 13:55:24 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[746]: Attempting to mount network destination using URL: afp://[email protected]/Time%20Capsule
    Jun 17 13:55:33 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[746]: Mounted network destination using URL: afp://[email protected]/Time%20Capsule
    Jun 17 13:55:37 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[746]: QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN
    Jun 17 13:55:40 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[746]: Disk image /Volumes/Time Capsule/MyMac.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
    Jun 17 13:55:40 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[746]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
    Jun 17 13:56:02 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[746]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 841.0 MB requested (including padding), 149.65 GB available
    Jun 17 13:57:28 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[746]: Copied 1601 files (183.8 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.
    Jun 17 13:57:28 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[746]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 592.4 MB requested (including padding), 149.65 GB available
    Jun 17 13:57:31 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[746]: Copied 7 files (93 bytes) from volume Macintosh HD.
    Jun 17 13:57:32 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[746]: Starting post-backup thinning
    Jun 17 13:58:02 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[746]: Deleted backup /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/MyMac/2011-05-18-162329: 149.65 GB now available
    Jun 17 13:58:02 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[746]: Post-back up thinning complete: 1 expired backups removed
    Jun 17 13:58:02 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[746]: Backup completed successfully.
    Jun 17 13:58:06 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[746]: Ejected Time Machine disk image.
    Jun 17 13:58:06 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[746]: Ejected Time Machine network volume.
    Jun 17 15:16:12 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[425]: Starting standard backup
    Jun 17 15:16:12 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[425]: Attempting to mount network destination using URL: afp://[email protected]/Time%20Capsule
    Jun 17 15:16:21 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[425]: Mounted network destination using URL: afp://[email protected]/Time%20Capsule
    Jun 17 15:16:23 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[425]: QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN
    Jun 17 15:16:26 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[425]: Disk image /Volumes/Time Capsule/MyMac.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
    Jun 17 15:16:26 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[425]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
    Jun 17 15:16:40 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[425]: Node requires deep traversal:/Volumes/Users reason:must scan subdirs|
    Jun 17 15:17:17 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[425]: Compacting storage: 297.87 GB requested (including padding), 149.65 GB available before compacting
    Jun 17 15:17:17 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[425]: Stopping backup.
    Jun 17 15:17:18 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[425]: Backup canceled.
    Jun 17 15:17:19 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[425]: Ejected Time Machine disk image.
    Jun 17 15:17:19 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[425]: Compacting backup disk image to recover free space
    Jun 17 15:18:11 iMac-2 com.apple.backupd[425]: Completed backup disk image compaction

  • Time Machine has stopped making backups

    Time Machine has worked fine for me fore many months, the backup disk being a 1 TB external firewire drive.
    But now Time Machine will not make a backup. I keep getting the same error message: "Time Machine Error. This backup is too large for the backup volume. The backup requires 88.7 GB but only 58.5 are available."
    I thought Time Machine just deleted the oldest files on the drive to make the room it needs for continued backups. So why isn't it doing that now? How do I get it to go back to doing that?
    Thanks for any help!
    Tom

    Tom Baker1 wrote:
    My Time Machine backup disk is an external 1 TB firewire drive with only one partition, dedicated entirely to TM, and it backs up the two internal drives in my G5. One of these two internal drives has about 600 GB of data on it and the other about 400, so together they would be enough to fill the external Time Machine backup drive.
    Yes, that's too small. Our "rule of thumb" is, TM needs 2-3 times the space of the data it's backing up. See #1 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
    Now I have discovered that there is something wrong with the Time Machine backups as well. I decided to go into TM to see just how far back in time the backups go, but it will only allow me to go back as far as yesterday. It acts as though there are no backups older than yesterday afternoon.
    That's probably correct; your TM disk is too small, and there's just not room for more. Here's the situation: A full backup has nearly filled the disk; something fairly large has been added or changed, and there just isn't room for it, in addition to the full backup.
    The 88.7 GB it's requesting means it's trying to back up about 74 GB (it adds 20% for workspace, etc., on the TM disk).
    This is getting stranger all the time. At this point should I just give up trying to fix the situation, erase the backup drive, and start all over again?
    That probably won't help much, if at all. To confirm what's going on, Click here to download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window. Navigate to the last backup attempt, then copy and post all the messages for that run here.
    You need to do one of the following:
    Get a larger drive, at least 2 TB.
    Get an additional drive; use one for TM backups of one of your internal HDs, the other for a different app to back-up the other internal HD.
    Exclude a lot of stuff from Time Machine (at least 300 GB).
    Use a different app, such as CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper, to back up your internals to separate partitions on the 1 TB drive. These will be exact copies only; no previous copies of things you've changed or deleted.

  • Time machine has stopped showing backups

    Time machine used to show backups back to when the machine was new in November. Now it has suddenly begun to show only today/now.
    Regardless of which finder window I have opened, it always goes to 'computer' and shows the external hard drive, 'macintosh HD' and 'network' icons.
    If I close time machine and open up the backups on my external hard drive, all the time machine backups are there. What IS going on?!

    Does this fix help?
    +Mac OS X 10.5: Time Machine backups are not visible+
    +http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306928+
    +Check your computer name in Sharing preferences. Make sure the computer name only includes ASCII characters from following set and is not blank (no matter which Mac OS X language version you are using):+
    0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
    If it doesn't make sure that the connections to your Time Machine disk are solid. You could also try resetting the PRAM.
    Resetting your Mac's PRAM and NVRAM
    http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238

  • Time machine has lost a year of backups

    I have time machine set to write to a Seagate Free Agent hard drive. It has 574GB spare on it, so it's nowhere near full, but I have no backups before about a month ago.
    Time machine preferences say that I have backups going back to September 2009, and the timescale when I enter Time machine says the same, but the windows are greyed out and unavailable.
    I haven't had any problems that I know about.
    Help please?

    The grayed-out windows are the clue.
    What you see in the "Star Wars" display depends on how you get there and how you navigate once you're there -- if you start with a Finder window showing a folder that's a month old, you'll see all the backups that include it normally; all prior backups will appear, but be grayed-out and not selectable.
    The easiest thing to do is select your Computer in the Finder Sidebar (or press ShiftCmdC before entering Time Machine), navigate to the backup in question, then see what's there.
    There's a sample of this in #15 of [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).

  • Time machine has hidden past backup files

    I recently did a restore using Time Machine.
    1) Time Machine created a new backup folder.
    2) the old backup folders are still on the drive but no longer visible or excessible.
    3) the files are still there because the backup hard drive is almost full.
    4) is there a way to bring back the backup files Time Machine has hidden or possibly overwritten

    Thank you Pondini for jumping in on this one.
    I use Time Machine to backup on an external hard for my FCP video files to another external HD. I do not use TM for my iMac. (Snow Leopard).
    On Wednesday my FCP hard drive had a failure of some sort and would not allow to be written on, so I formatted the FCP hard drive and then "restored" the latest files from the backup hard drive. But, during the the process of restoring the auto backup kicked in and started to backup the FCP hard drive onto the backup HD at the same time I was restoring the FCP drive.
    When all was said and done... the backup drive no longer showed the past three months of FCP files, but instead only shows Wednesday's last folder. The files are still on the backup drive because I am now getting a "failure" due to lack of hard drive space. I believe it's because the three months of files are still on the hard drive but Time Machine is no longer recoginizing the old folders. The current backup folder reads:
    Backups.backupdb - with the folder inside: Admin's iMac (2) - with another folder inside:  2012-12-23-193009 -  followed by a "Latest" folder that has only 4KB Alias in the Size and Kind columns.
    Are you running Snow Leopard?  YES
    It did that when you ran a new backup after the restore, right? YES but Time Machine created a new backup folder.
    Did you do a "full system restore," starting up from your Snow Leopard Install disc? YES, but after 5 hours the backup stopped with the "failure" due to not enough disk space to contine. This is not possible because the backup HD is 4T and reading 1.8T available.
    I am trying to find a way to revive the original Time Machine folders that go back to November without having to reformat the entire backup drive.

  • Time Machine has lost the link with its old backup files

    This has got me a bit puzzled.
    I recently obtained a nice new iMac to use in conjunction with my trusty MacBook Pro. Previously the MBP was my main machine and I habitually plugged it into an external HDD for Time Machine to use. No problem there.
    Now, since setting up the iMac I have the external HDD connected to that. I access the HDD on the MBP over my ethernet network, which is great: I can swap files, sync files easily and automatically with ChronoSync, and I'm very happy. The only problem is that I can't use the HDD for backing up the MacBook Pro anymore. Time Machine says there isn't enough room, "This backup is too large for the backup volume." Obviously TM doesn't recognise its own files from the days when the HDD was connected directly to the MBP.
    I realise I can erase the HDD and tell TM to start backing up from scratch but I'm hesitant to do so. I have months of incremental backups on there already and I'm not keen to lose them. Is there anything I can do to pick up from where TM left off before I changed my cables around? It seems such a pity to throw months of backup out the window.

    Have you thought about re-connecting your HDD directly back to your MBP - as you had it before. Provided the MBP's name has not changed, TM should pick-up from where it left off. Bear in mind that TM will only back up one mac at a time, and as I understand it, you would need Time Capsule or other networkable HD to back up both macs to. Considering the reasonable cost of external HD, you might be better off to get another one for your iMac.
    The macs can still be connected over the network and you could still use ChronoSync for syncing etc.
    Joe

  • Permissions are badly messed up on any disk Time Machine has used to backup

    *The Short Version:*
    After using an external disk as a Time Machine target, disk permissions are forever and always utterly ignored which causes huge problems when said disk is supposed to share publicly and privately accessible files/folders over the local network.
    Said disk is no longer used for Time Machine, but permissions still refuse to work after the "Ignore ownership..." option is disabled, ACL's are cleared, and more.
    *The Long Version:*
    So, I'm trying to share some folders off of an external disk I temporarily used for a week as a Time Machine backup disk.
    Because I have both "public", and private documents on the disk, I need to use disk permissions, to disallow access to some folders. Enabling file sharing works great, except any and every user get full read/write access to everything.
    I have another external aswell, which is identical, just it's never been used as a Time Machine target volume, and permissions are obeyed perfectly.
    Originally I think the Ignore ownership option was enabled, but the checkbox wasn't showing up on the Get Info panel. After some messing around, I realized it's not displayed if there's a folder called "Backups.backupdb" on the root of the disk.
    Now, a few hours later, after renaming "Backups.backupdb" to "Backups.backupdb_OLD", clearing ACL permissions from the disk, unmounting, mounting, restarting file sharing, and lots more, IT STILL IGNORES ANY AND ALL PERMISSIONS?!
    Is there some kinda super secret disk flag option or something I'm missing which causes OSX to still ignore permissions no matter what?
    I hope someone here knows what's going on, 2 hours of Googling hasn't helped at all.

    UPDATE
    I seem to have gotten file sharing to obey the permissions, to some degree. It included removing the share from system preferences, using TinkerTool System to change the permissions to anything (didn't seem to work via normal Finder, as I'd already tried that), and then adding the volume back in sharing preferences.
    This doesn't really seem very reliable tho, so I'm hoping someone can come with a technical reason/solution for this.

  • Time Machine has deleted all backups except one..?

    (Snow Leopard 10.6.8) Mac Pro.
    I've been backing up for at least 2 years using Time Machine on an internal 500Gb drive. Today I get a message saying the drive is full and when I check all backups over the last 8 months (approx) have gone. The only backup surviving is the one it did just before the message popped up. Have tried Repair disk and Disk Warrior, but they're still gone. Is this most likely to be a failing drive issue? And is there any chance I can recover them?

    Time Machine will not delete your old backups unless it starts to run out of space on the hard drive......or.....your backups have become corrupted and Time Machine cannot repair them.
    In the latter case, a message like this will appear on your screen:
    Do you recall seeing this message recently?

  • How to prevent time machine from deleting certain backup folders?

    So, I have problem undrestanding time machine. Time machine has made a backup of my files in Nov 2012 and another backup from Jan 2013. There is some files in Nov 2012 that I want to keep them forever and never be deleted. So, they were backed up by Time machine (I have deleted those files from my computer so they're no lonegr excist in my compuetr). Althought they do excist on my time machine under the Nov 2012 folder, I am not able to modify them at all for example, I'm not allowed to copy them somehwere else. Since, I can not make another copy of them, I am worried if time machine delete my Nov 2012  in future and then they will be gone. Can someone please help me in modifying/ controling my folder so it won't be deleted in future? 

    You are using Time Machine incorrectly, your files will be deleted from Time Machine after you delete them from your Mac, the only variable is when.
    Time Machine is a backup, not a storage system.
    Restore them now and copy them to long term storage (another hard drive)

  • Time machine doesn't show backups

    So I my logic board died and I decided to reformat my computer after it was repaired just for a fresh start. My time machine has all the backups, however, when I tried to restore from it, i opened up time machine to see that NOTHING was there. I set the drive to be the same drive used before and the drive DOES actually contain all the backups. It's just when i open up time machine to restore nothing is there. Does anyone know how I can fix this?

    Yes, sorry, I didn't read the initial post carefully enough.
    If babolat is still at the restore stage, the best answer is to boot up from the Leopard install disk and choose Restore from a Time Machine Backup from the Utilities menu. This will get the system back where it was and may also associate the backup directory with the new hardware (not totally sure of the latter though).
    The backed up data itself can be accessed using the Browse Other Time Machine Disks option in Time Machine. I believe the Migration Assistant approach will work to get the full user across, but will not associate the existing backup directory with the new hardware.

  • Time Machine not thinning older backups (Hourly= Daily= Weekly)

    Ever since upgrading to Snow Leopard, Time machine has kept hourly backups of my computer.
    In the past under 10.5, after about 24 hours, TM would delete all but the last hourly backup of the day and keep daily backups for 30 days, then after about 30 days delete the daily backups except for 1 per week and keep weekly backups thereafter.
    Now, TM does it's hourly backups like normal, but I have hourly backups from today all they way back to 29 August (about 24 hours prior to when I upgraded to 10.6) and then weekly backups from that date until 30 July (i.e. about 30 days prior to the upgrade).
    Called AppleCare and talked to 2 different people. Both questioned whether TM really was even supposed to thin old backups like this (um, it's written in the da^^ preference pane, guys) and one admitted that he doesn't even use a Mac at home and that in the support office they don't have TM on their macs, so he's never used it!
    Needless to say, not sure how to a) get TM to start thinning the backups like it should and b) also thin out all the previous backups so I don't have a 2 month glut of frequent backups.
    I've looked all over and found nothing. Anyone with some advice? I'd like to avoid killing all my backups and starting over.

    Forensic
    I suggest you follow the advice posted above by V.K., once installed it will provide a log of what TM is doing.
    Once you have that info, post back here and someone far wiser than I will help you to resolve the issue.

  • Time machine has deleted/hidden *all* my backups.

    At the moment I'm using two 1TB external hard drives connected to my mac, one as storage and one just for time machine. Yesterday the storage drive died on me, so I replaced it with another 1TB drive.
    Time machine has been backing up everything on the main computer and the storage drive for several months now so I thought it would be an easy fix, just restore what was lost from the storage drive and I'm set.
    After connecting and formatting the new external hard drive I tried restoring the lost data but couldn't figure out a way to have it restore from time machine directly to the new drive. Instead, I went into the Backups.backupdb folder on the time machine drive, found the most recent backup of the files I needed from Feb 9th and just dragged and dropped it into the new drive.
    It comprised of some 550GB of data, so I left it copying overnight. Checking on it this morning, it seems that a little less than half of the data has been copied across and what's worse - time machine no longer shows any backups made before this morning. Checking in the drive contents, it seems that the backup folders no longer exist either.
    Now, I don't actually think the data has gone missing since the time machine drive is still showing that it has some 700GB of data still on it, it's just not viewable for some reason.
    I've been through Disk Utility to see if the drive needs repairing, but I'm being told that there's no problem with it. I've also checked to see if the data has somehow found its way into the trash can, but it's not there either.
    Does anyone have any suggestions as to what happened and how to recover my lost backups?

    pheadlessg wrote:
    Thanks for that. It's backing up again now but the old backups are still missing.
    I have no idea what went wrong with the drag and drop. It should have copied your data (likely with a zillion permission problems), but shouldn't have affected the TM data. There might be something in your logs, but that probably won't help now.
    Your old backups are probably hosed (pardon the technical term <grin>).
    You might be able to give yourself read rights to the .Trashes folder, and see if there's anything in it, but I doubt you'll see anything.
    To do so, select it, then +Get Info.+
    Click the padlock at the bottom of the pane, then enter your Administrator's password.
    Then click the plus sign at the bottom; you should get a selection screen for yourself. Click it.
    That should give you read rights.
    A very long shot, but worth a try.
    Most likely, you're going to end up erasing the drive/partition and starting over.

  • Time Machine has locked my external drive. HELP

    Time Machine hosed me again. After several unsuccessful attempts to backup on my PowerMac G5 dual 2.33 Ghz, I was able to complete my first full backup to an external 2 gig DROBO (USB 2.0 interface). It took 20 hours to do 180 gigs.
    Now I have just discovered that Time Machine has made that external drive READ-ONLY! I cannot write to the drive and neither can Time Machine.
    Does anybody know what is up and how to fix this short of using root UNIX shell which terrifies me. I just want to take it off and cut my losses, but the drive also has a ton of music on it that iTunes uses.

    Okay Jeffery, I think I've found the solution, especially if you are seeing the "Unknown" user in your Get Info window's Sharing & Permissions setting for your drobo.
    I had written earlier about my work-around for getting my drobo to work right after getting the "read-only" error from Time Machine. But unfortunately it was a temporary and temperamental fix. There were times then I had to eject the disk and launch Disk Utility to run a repair on the disk which would take more than half an hour on my drobo. But all the while my permissions had this "Unknown" user. Well I decided to "Go UNIX" and see if I could fix this problem once and for all.
    I opened up Terminal and typed "*ls -la /Volumes*". This gives me a directory listing of my mounted drive volumes. I noticed that all of my drives, internal, external, USB and FireWire, all had "root" as the user and "admin" as the group, _EXCEPT for my drobo!_ So I forced it to conform by changing it manually by typing "*sudo chown root:admin /Volumes/Drobo\ Backup\ HD/*".
    sudo = temporarily enables root mode by asking for your password before executing.
    chown = changes ownership to...
    root:admin = "root" is the user and "admin" is the group.
    */Volumes/Drobo\ Backup\ HD/* = My drobo drive is named "*Drobo Backup HD*", but UNIX sees spaces as command separators, so you have to use the "\ " to signify spaces within a name.
    After doing this over a week ago, _I have not had any other problems_ with using my drobo as a backup drive. It has never come up with the "read-only" error in Time Machine, the Sharing & Permissions setting do not have any "Unknown" users or groups, I don't even need to wait for my drobo before logging in like I did in the past. I just boot my Mac and everything with my drobo and Time Machine just works... No problems!
    It seems to be permanently fixed for me, so if you are willing to try this solution, I'm sure it would work for you. If UNIX terrifies you too much, and you do not trust yourself editing the commands above, let me know the name of your drobo drive on your desktop and I will post a message with the EXACT UNIX commands customized for just for you, so all you have to do is copy and paste them into your Terminal window to do it. But like I said, I've done this over a week ago and I not had one single problem.

  • Time Machine has simply stopped backing up any new files. No items set to be excluded, No error messages.

    I have a Macbook with OS X 10.6.8 and a 500GB external hard drive, which still has 208.5GB available. For some reason, Time Machine has simply stopped backing up any new files (documents, music, movies--anything). No items are set to be excluded from backups in Time Machine options except for the external hard drive itself. Also, no error messages appear, Time Machine seems to run just fine, but when I enter Time Machine, or look through the files on the hard drive, new files just aren't there. I am not very tech savvy, so I was not able to understand some of the answers people gave to similar questions on here. I did go to Pondini's website and followed as many troubleshooting instructions as I could understand (for example I did manage to do a full reset of Time Machine) but nothing changed. Do I just need to erase the entire backup drive and sart all over? If so, what will prevent this from happening again later on? Please help.

    Your TM drive liekly stopped backing up because it hit a series of bad sectors on the drive, to eliminate this all new drives should be Disk Utility > Zero Erased (one step below 7x in Lion) before use.
    Reducing bad sectors effect on hard drives
    Diversify your backups with bootable clones and archives on DVD's etc so your prepared for anything, including using a PC.
    only if you have too of course, but it happens, people just can't afford a Mac anymore.
    Most commonly used backup methods explained
    So make other backups, then Zero Erase teh TM drive and set it back up again and your problem should be resolved.
    If not, then it's data corruption on your boot drive!
    You'll know if it's data corruption on your boot drive, when you go to make the clone, it will hang too.

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