Keeping TM backups after a switch in machines

I just switched machines and restored my new machine with the contents of my TM drive. Now, I want to continue using TM, but I also want to keep my previous backups. I remember reading an article about this but can't seem to find it now.
Thanks,
Sam

I don't know what kind of article you read but you have to start a new backup sequence on a new computer. there is no way around that. you can still keep your old backups but TM will make a complete new backup and continue from there. also, what kind of restore did you do? as mentioned you should not do a full system restore from TM using the restore utility on the leopard DVD as this is almost certain to create issues due to hardware differences. it's ok to use Migration Assistant or the setup assistant which don't migrate the system and only migrate user settings and applications. is this what you did?

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HT3275 Reuse Time Machine Backup after moving to new Machine

So I've been using TIme Machine for ages, and usually the restore are fine, but one thing has always bugged me:
When I restore (say for a new hard drive) or bought a new machine (in this case i got the Retina MBP)... and i turn on Time Machine again... I haven't been able to find a way to use the old backup disk on my Time Capsule.
Looking into the support info, I found this:
Message: Time Machine starts a new, full backup instead of a smaller incremental backup
There are three reasons why this may occur:
You performed a full restore.
Your Computer Name (in Sharing preferences) was changed--when this happens, Time Machine will perform a full backup on its next scheduled backup time.
If you have had a hardware repair recently, contact the Apple Authorized Service Provider or Apple Retail Store that performed your repair. In the meantime, you can still browse and recover previous backups by right-clicking or Control-clicking the Time Machine Dock icon, and choosing "Browse Other Time Machine disks" from the contextual menu.
Reading that, I'm led to assume that's just one of the quirks and I can't do anything, and deleting Time Machine backups is quite a hassle as it is.
Is there really no way for my new Retina Macbook to use my old MBP time machine backup and just keep adding incremental data to it? It seems redundant then as say a week ago I deleted something... I actually have no way of getting to it now if I deleted the backup and started again. At the moment, my Time Capsule doesn't have enough space for a complete new one, so i'd HAVE to delete the old one.
Is there a way around this?
Thanks.

ladines wrote:
My account name is the same in both systems.
The account name isn't what controls the permissions; it's the automatically-assigned and mostly-invisible User ID number, also called a UID. The first user account you create is number 501, the next 502, etc. So if you ever had more than one user account, the one(s) you have now may be different. See the pink box in Problems after using Migration Assistant for a detailed explanation.
You really can't change the permissions on Time Machine backups (that would kinda defeat the purpose).
Try creating another account, and see if it has permission to the backups. If it does, you have a couple of options:
* Copy everything now on your system to the new User Account you created above. That's tedious and error-prone, but can be done. See Transferring files from one User Account to another.
* Your existing user account should be able to see and restore from new backups (done from the new drive). When you need to view or restore things from the old backups, use the new account. Eventually, as the older backups are deleted, the problem will fade away.

How can I access old Time Machine backups after restoring from Time Machine?

Just restored my iMac and I can only see "Now" when I enter Time Machine. How can I see all the backups and dates I had before I restored?

While in Time Machine, press the key combination shift-command-C. The front window will show all mounted volumes. All snapshots should now be accessible. Select the one you want and navigate to the files you want to restore.

Time Machine deletes older backups after restore...

Yesterday I took the plunge to replace a failing 4TB RAID0 on my MacPro running ML 10.8.3. The RAID volume contains two non-admin user accounts for everyday work that together are about 2TB.
I installed the two new HDDs, RAIDed them and gave them the same name as before. Then I ran a restore of the two accounts from my Time Machine backup. This took about 4 hours.
Not everything was fine at the end (particularly some permissions in Documents were wrong), but by and large the accounts worked. Today it was time for Time Machine to backup the new changes, but this failed miserably: TM completely deleted the earlier backups even though 99.99% did not have changed. Later TM complained it did not have enough space even though the earlier backup fit on exactly the same volume and there was definitely enough space.
Conclusion: Don't trust TM to keep older backups after a restore. This extremely stupid behaviour fits my impression of ML being unusable for serious Mac users.

When a startup drive is replaced Time Machine creates a new backup because the new drive has a different UUID than the old one -- it is a different disk.
When this occurs, TM does not delete the older backup sparsebundle, which is still taking up space on the backup drive. This is a safety feature.
You can access the previous backup using Browse Other Time Machine Disks from the TM icon in the Dock.
Lots of good info can be found here.

How to re-activate 'Mail' after complete successful Time machine re-installation except 'Mail' backup keeps getting stuck?

How to re-activate 'Mail' after complete successful Time machine re-installation except 'Mail' backup keeps getting stuck?

Trying to re-instal my email history the 'Mail Message Import' dialogue screen says: 'Mail needs to import your messages. This might take a few minutes. You won't be able to use Mail until the import is finished'.
The problem is: after importing 5,000 messages it stops and the 'Time remaining' only keeps adding up to many hours (17 hours). There are almost 80,000 email messages in my Time machine backup.
How to get this working? I am even prepared to give up my email history if i can only get my 'Mail' application working again.

Imac keeps crashing in time machine backup after upgrade to mountain lion

2008 imac kept crashing (shutdown and restart) during first backup after upgraded to mountain lion. The backup size was about 10GB but time machine crashed after a while (at most 2GB) and never completed backup. So, I don't have any backup since right before I upgraded from Lion. Any suggestion?

Something strange happened. I was able to get time machine to work by going out to the login screen (the account kept logged in) and let it run the backup with the screen off (screen auto off after a few min). I tried it on two different external drives and that did the trick on both. Since the initial Mountain Lion backup was huge (155 GB), I was quite surprise that it worked at all. I assume your MBP was a Lion to ML. I also just did a 2012 MBP upgrade but that one was smoother. I did not recall having crashing issue. One thing I did find during this was that my WD passport USB drive was corrupted. Not sure it was the cause or not. I had to erase and reformat to get it back to work. Maybe do a verify disk to confirm. Good luck.

FaceTime won't launch after recovery from time machine backup

I cannot get FaceTime to launch after I recovered my machine from a Time Machine backup. I keep getting the following error:
9/3/14 7:57:13.688 PM xpcd[2535]: FaceTime[33694]: registration request failed: (0x11, 0x0) NSCocoaErrorDomain:513 You don’t have permission to save the file “com.apple.logging.08E5E277-0C04-57A1-B16A-FB9E89747C91.plist” in the folder “ByHost”. createSymbolicLinkAtPath:withDestinationPath:error: WR/DST: ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.FaceTime/Data/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.app le.logging.08E5E277-0C04-57A1-B16A-FB9E89747C91.plist 0 stat: 13 -1 o:Root m:040700 f:() fs: hfs, fsid: 1000002/11, mf: 0480d000 -2 o:User m:040700 f:() fs: hfs, fsid: 1000002/11, mf: 0480d000 -3 o:User m:040700 f:() fs: hfs, fsid: 1000002/11, mf: 0480d000 -4 o:User m:040700 f:() fs: hfs, fsid: 1000002/11, mf: 0480d000 -5 <CONTAINER> o:User m:040700 f:() fs: hfs, fsid: 1000002/11, mf: 0480d000 -6 o:User m:040700 f:() fs: hfs, fsid: 1000002/11, mf: 0480d000 -7 <LIBRARY> o:User m:040700 f:hidden fs: hfs, fsid: 1000002/11, mf: 0480d000 !#acl 1 group:ABCDEFAB-CDEF-ABCD-EFAB-CDEF0000000C:everyone:12:deny:delete -8 <HOME> o:User m:040755 f:() fs: hfs, fsid: 1000002/11, mf: 0480d000 !#acl 1 group:ABCDEFAB-CDEF-ABCD-EFAB-CDEF0000000C:everyone:12:deny:delete -9 o:Root m:040755 f:() fs: hfs, fsid: 1000002/11, mf: 0480d000
Anyone know what this is about?
I'm running OS X on a 2.7GHz i5 with 16GB of RAM on a iMac platform.
I've tried to re-instal OS X, but that didn't help me at all. It didn't even change the error message.
Thanks for the help apple community - Take care.

Back up all data before proceeding.
This procedure will unlock all your user files (not system files) and reset their ownership, permissions, and access controls to the default. If you've intentionally set special values for those attributes on any of your files, they will be reverted. In that case, either stop here, or be prepared to recreate the settings if necessary. Do so only after verifying that those settings didn't cause the problem. If none of this is meaningful to you, you don't need to worry about it, but you do need to follow the instructions below.
Step 1
If you have more than one user, and the one in question is not an administrator, then go to Step 2.
Triple-click anywhere in the following line on this page to select it:
sudo find ~ $TMPDIR.. -exec chflags -h nouchg,nouappnd,noschg,nosappnd {} + -exec chown -h $UID {} + -exec chmod +rw {} + -exec chmod -h -N {} + -type d -exec chmod -h +x {} + 2>&-
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.
Launch the built-in Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window by pressing command-V. I've tested these instructions only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, you may have to press the return key after pasting.
You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. Type carefully and then press return. You may get a one-time warning to be careful. If you don’t have a login password, you’ll need to set one before you can run the command. If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator.
The command may take several minutes to run, depending on how many files you have. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign ($) to appear, then quit Terminal.
Step 2 (optional)
Take this step only if you have trouble with Step 1, if you prefer not to take it, or if it doesn't solve the problem.
Start up in Recovery mode. When the OS X Utilities screen appears, select
Utilities ▹ Terminal
from the menu bar. A Terminal window will open. In that window, type this:
res
Press the tab key. The partial command you typed will automatically be completed to this:
resetpassword
Press return. A Reset Password window will open. You’re not going to reset a password.
Select your startup volume ("Macintosh HD," unless you gave it a different name) if not already selected.
Select your username from the menu labeled Select the user account if not already selected.
Under Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs, click the Reset button.
Select
 ▹ Restart
from the menu bar.

Time Machine Backups after recent upgrade to Mountain Lion

Basically to keep a long story short - i need to take my computer in for repair tomorrow. I recently did an upgrade to Mountain Lion a day or two ago. I haven't done a Time Machine backup until today (a couple days after i upgraded to Mountain Lion) because i wanted to make sure that my previous TM backup (Snow Leopard 10.6.8) was the most up to date and best update that i could revert back to if i had any issues with Mountain Lion, or any application compatibility, etc etc.
I don't have any broken applications and it seems like Mountain Lion is running better than Snow Leopard. However, as i said - i'm taking my computer in for repair tomorrow, i would like to know that i have the most up to date Time Machine backup with the new Mountain Lion so that when i restore it back from my Time Machine backup after i get it back from repair, i won't have any issues with the migration, which could potentially lead me into more technicalities.
I have a 500GB Harddrive, with about 70GB left of free space....I did the initial backup prior to upgrading to Mountain Lion, and it upgraded 400+GB of info, now, since Mountain Lion - the first backup with Mountain Lion initially said 46GB - then it went down to 14GB by the time it was all said and done....so what exactly did it back up?
Did it back up all the necessary files to keep Mountain Lion running smoothly when i restore it back to the way it was after i get it back? Did it not back everything up that it needs to? Is it safe to erase my internal drive and do a clean installation so i can take it in, and not worry about not being able to migrate things back over or applications not working correctly?
When i get it back, i presume it will come with Mountain Lion back on it and i can just boot up into the Recovery Disk and restore it from a Time Machine backup that way, correct?
Thanks for the help.
- Jason

I received the same error and experienced the same issue that you have described but after performing a Time Capsule soft reset and then toggling the TM Off and then back On I was able issue a backup now and see my previous backups.
Here is the link to where I posted my fix; https://discussions.apple.com/message/19069543#19069543. Someone else had success using a different method. The only comment / complaint that I have since the ML OS X upgrade is that TM now takes at least 20 to 30 seconds before I can click/select a backup.
I hope this helps.

Time machine dropping old backups after migrating

I recently changed from an iMac to a retina Macbook Pro. I read that I could continue my time machine after migrating my mac. My new macbook keeps trying to create a brand new backup. I enter time machine and go back to find all my old dates but it drops after a minute or so. Is my mac trying to create new backups instead of continuing? I have a second backup portable hard drive with thunderbolt. It only took an hour to do what my network storge was taking 22 hours! how can I keep my old backups without my mac trying to restart again?

For all things TM... See Pondini's excellent Information Here...
http://pondini.org/OSX/Home.html
Perhaps this is what you are looking for...
http://pondini.org/TM/B5.html
From Section B = Troubleshooting.

Restore Time Machine Full Backup After Catastrophic Failure

I am new to the Mac and using Time Machine as my primary backup utility. My concern is the way it creates one full backup at the beginning and only incremental ones after that. If the full backup gets overwritten due to the program needing hard drive space, does it know to create another full backup, even if it needs to delete some older incremental backups?
I am concerned I will need to complete a full restore at some point, and will not be able to do so because there will not be a full backup present on the Time Machine disk.
Also, who has had to restore from a catastrophic disk failure using an external time machine disk? Is this easy? Does it work properly?

you concerns are unfounded. due to the way TM keeps data organized every backup is full and independent of any other backups.
when TM makes a backup it only backs up afresh new and changed files. everything else is _*hard linked*_ to existing backup copies.
deleting an earlier backup to save space as TM does sometimes has zero effect on the remaining backups. they remain full and complete. doing a full system restore from TM is very easy. you boot from the SL install DVD and select "restore system from backup" from Utilities menu.
However, it should be noted that TM is still very buggy and doing a full restore can not be tested until you actually do it. therefore, it's advisable to have a double backup using a different backup tool. bootable clones are the best for doing a full restore. CCCloner and Superduper are excellent cloning backup programs.

HT201250 Time Machine not keeping hourly backups.

My Time Machine backups don't seem to be working correctly. It doesn't appear to be keeping hourly backups. When I enter Time Machine and look at the backup from just one hour ago, the newest file is from several weeks ago, not one hour ago.
Same thing with monthly backups. At a certain point, the backup history skips several months.
I've scoured the internet but can't seem to find anyone else with this problem or a solution.

That's odd. Mine go away after 24 hours like clockwork.
As VA2020 says, it's probably not a significant space problem, but worth investigating, especially after that long a time.
I'd suggest downloading the Time Machine Buddy widget, which extracts TM's messages from your logs and displays them in a little window. Check your last few backups, especially for messages about "thinning".
As an example, here's my most recent set, showing routine deletion of an hourly:
*Starting standard backup*
*Backing up to: /Volumes/TmBackups/Backups.backupdb*
*No pre-backup thinning needed: 133.2 MB requested (including padding), 175.83 GB available*
*Copied 492 files (2.7 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.*
*Starting post-backup thinning*
*Deleted backup /Volumes/TmBackups/Backups.backupdb/JPs.G5.iMac/2009-01-19-191145: 175.83 GB now available*
*Post-back up thinning complete: 1 expired backups removed*
*Backup completed successfully.*
If yours look hinky (pardon the technical term), especially any sort of failure message, or not being able to delete old backups, copy and post them here (be careful to get all the messages, as they often overflow the little window).
One question: have you used any of the 3rd part apps or postings about modifying TM's preference file to alter the backup schedule?

How to continue use Time Machine backup after migration?

Hi,
I just purchased a new mac and migrated using my Time Machine backup from my NAS.
This went smooth but now I would like to keep this backup as base for my new mac. Unfortunately, this does not seem to work as my mac tries now to create a new image.
As I have pretty important documents on my previous backup, it would be nice if there would still be a way to continue using this one. I saw somewhere that the migration assistant should ask if we want to continue based on this backup after migration but I did not receive this question.
Is there still a way to solve this?
Thanks in advance for your input!
Kind regards,
Fred

Hi Leonie,
Thanks for your link! I am migrating from Leopard to Mavericks. If I understand correctly, this is the reason why I cannot inherit from previous backup.
The procudure to tweak seems pretty complicated though... not sure I will risk it.
Thanks anyway!
KR,
Fred

Time machine is deleting all my old backups after moving to different iMac

Hi - I had to move my data to a different machine and so I prepared a different iMac (early 2008). This is what I did:
I booted into Snow Leopard from my DVD
erased the HD
installed SL 10.6
booted into SL
ran software update to upgrade to 10.6.8 (to get the App Store)
installed Mountain Lion 10.8.2
used Migration Asistant to restore all my data, apps, and settings from my time machine backup
This all worked fine and at some point time machine asked me whether to inherit the time machine history. I confirmed this and all seemed fine until I noticed that time machine was backing for a long time and a lot of space was being freed on the time machine volume. I found that it was deleting all my old backups. Before I had data going back to 2010 but now I only have backups left from JAN 2012 onwards.
After some searching I found the excellent Pondini time machine site and performed the actions under B6 ("Reconecting" to your backups):
exxi:~ michael$ sudo tmutil inheritbackup /Volumes/tm2/Backups.backupdb/exxi
Password:
exxi:~ michael$ sudo tmutil associatedisk -a / /Volumes/tm2/Backups.backupdb/exxi/2013-02-03-150320/exxi_hd
I restarted the backup after applying the command above but it still is deleting old backups. I tried the same comand by associating it with an older backup but still it keeps deleting my backups.
What can I do to stop it from erasing all my backups?
Cheers
Michael

Just found this info in the Backup dashboard widget:
Starting manual backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/tm2/Backups.backupdb
Inheritance scan required for /, associated with previous UUID: [deleted]
Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: exxi_hd
Deep event scan at path:/ reason:must scan subdirs|new event db|
First backup after disk inheritance for / - complete scan required
Finished scan
Found 839161 files (154.88 GB) needing backup
188.83 GB required (including padding), 145.37 GB available
Deleted backup /Volumes/tm2/Backups.backupdb/exxi/2012-03-04-160328 containing 2.25 GB; 147.63 GB now available, 188.83 GB required
Deleted backup /Volumes/tm2/Backups.backupdb/exxi/2013-02-05-181442.inProgress/57E7F008-929C-4 DF8-B062-F034FEE7A606 containing 4 KB; 147.63 GB now available, 188.83 GB required
Deleted backup /Volumes/tm2/Backups.backupdb/exxi/2013-01-07-112745 containing 130.8 MB; 147.76 GB now available, 188.83 GB required
Removed 3 expired backups so far, more space is needed - deleting oldest backups to make room
Deleted backup /Volumes/tm2/Backups.backupdb/exxi/2012-03-11-191620 containing 2.08 GB; 149.86 GB now available, 188.83 GB required
Removed 4 expired backups so far, more space is needed - deleting oldest backups to make room
Backup deletion was canceled by user
Deleted 4 backups containing 4.46 GB total; 149.86 GB now available, 188.83 GB required
Backup date range was shortened: oldest backup is now Mar 31, 2012
Backup canceled.

Time Machine does a full backup after a full restore

Hi,
To test Time Machine (as you should always do with any backup system) I decided to do a full restore of one of my Macs. This went fine (after figuring out how to mount my remote backup disk).
However I noticed that when the restored machine did its first scheduled Time Machine backup after being restored it did what pretty much amounted to a full backup (taking ages).
I believe Time Machine should be clever enough to know that the restored files are the same as the backed up ones, and there is no need to copy new versions.
Cheers, Ed.

Indeed not unexpected, however it would be easy to fix this in the future by linking the restore into the existing baseline (given that it is a direct copy of it) as it writes the files.
It is worth mentioning because if you have a smallish backup disk (I don't) then writing the second baseline may flush out a number of your older weekly backups that you would rather have retained. It will also eventually mean that you will always have those two baselines and therefore restrict the number of valid backups that you can keep.
Cheers, Ed.

How can I fix repetitive 'fontd' crashes after recovery from time machine backup?

After recovery from time machine backup (Disk Utility told me to reformat my internal hard drive) i got annoying repetitive prompts from crashing 'fontd'. How can I fix it? Anyone suffering from the same disease?

Back up all data.
Launch the Font Book application and validate all fonts. You must select the fonts in order to validate them. See the built-in help and this support article for instructions. If Font Book finds any issues, resolve them, then boot in safe mode to rebuild the font caches. Boot again as usual and test.
Note: If FileVault is enabled under OS X 10.7 or later, or if a firmware password is set, or if the boot volume is a software RAID, you can’t boot in safe mode. In that case, ask for instructions.

Keeping TM backups after a switch in machines

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