On Macbook, Time Machine is running whenever I log in after screen saver engages

I'm not sure why this started happening but - I have Time Capsule, 3TB and I'm using Time Machine on my Macbook Pro. I'm also using software called Time Machine Scheduler to control when Time Machine backs up. That software requires Time Machine to be "off".
Everything worked fine for about a month. Each morning I would check and see that it had completed a backup recently.
However, recently, when I log into my Macbook after it sits idle for a while, and I am challenged with a password, once I authenticate, rather than being presented with the desktop, the system appeaers to be "in" Time Machine, showing the starry background and the windows going back into infinity. It's like Time Machine is being launched by Time Machine Scheduler but rather than backing up, it's just going into Time Machine and sitting there. My Mac Mini has the exact same setup but it appears to work fine.
If I manually initiate a backup ("Backup Now") in Time Machine, it appears to work fine.
Ideas?

Plus to pondini..
If possible you can use ethernet.. that speeds things up greatly.
If you are close to the TC make sure it is connecting via the 5ghz wireless.. Check the actual wireless link speed. And transfer rates.. if rates are too slow.. then look at relocating the wireless or putting in some sort of wireless extender.
I guess the other question is what is slow.. the disk on the computer, internet, just overall feel of the computer.. perhaps give a specific.. what is slow.

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How Can I Speed Up My MacBook When Time Machine is running on Time Capsule

My Macbook starts to run really slow and I consistenly get the color wheel when trying to do other tasks when Time Machine is running in the background. I am connected to Time Machine on a Time Capsule. Given this runs every hour its really annoying.

Plus to pondini..
If possible you can use ethernet.. that speeds things up greatly.
If you are close to the TC make sure it is connecting via the 5ghz wireless.. Check the actual wireless link speed. And transfer rates.. if rates are too slow.. then look at relocating the wireless or putting in some sort of wireless extender.
I guess the other question is what is slow.. the disk on the computer, internet, just overall feel of the computer.. perhaps give a specific.. what is slow.

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Using WD, My Passport for Mac, 2TB with Time-Machine. Updated software on MacBook, now once time machine starts running an update it does not stop untill cancel it!

1. The first time takes very long always, after that it will only do changes very hour and you will not notice it. The drive must be correctly formatted, Guid Partition Table, Mac Os Extended (journaled).
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Will Time Machine identify a back up hard drive after main has been erased?

I went to the Genius Bar a couple of days ago and was told that in order to fix some of the problems I was having I should do a achieve and install (or maybe erase and install I can't remember.) Then use Time Machine to restore all the files on my computer except for the system and library folders (since there is a lot of stuff inside them that has been causing errors.)
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The Time Machine disk certainly shouldn't look blank - that could indicate a pro blem with your backups not running when you expect.
When you look at your Time Machine disk you should see a 'Backups.backupdb' dire ctory which contains subdirectories for each Time Machine snapshot.
If you don't see these then your Time Machine isn't backing up and you shouldn't re-install your machine :)
If you do see that, then you should be OK (as long as the subdirectories cover r ecent dates), in which case you can run the re-install - I'd go for a 'clean ins tall' and use the 'Copy my settings from a Time Machine backup' which is one of the options after the first boot.

I am having sporadic issues after new hard drive install and recovery using Time Machine. The same sluggish response, start up screen pixelating...If I reinstall Lion will it wipe out other applications? My HD was formatted and partitioned correctly, I ha

I am having sporadic issues after new hard drive install and recovery using Time Machine. The same sluggish response, start up screen pixelating...If I reinstall Lion will it wipe out other applications? My HD was formatted and partitioned correctly, I have a late 2009 iMac.

Use the trackpad to scroll, thats what it was designed for. The scroll bars automatically disappear when not being used and will appear if you scroll up or down using the trackpad.
This is a user-to-user forum and most people will post on here if they have problems. You very rarely get people posting to say there update went smooth. The fact is the vast majority of Mountain Lion users will not be experiencing any major problems with the OS, or maybe with apps which are not compatible, but thats hardly Apple's fault if developers don't update their apps.

My backup hard drive does not have enough space for time machine to perform a back up even after erasing entire contents of bu hard drive

My backup hard drive does not have enough space for time machine to perform a back up even after erasing entire contents of bu hard drive. The hard drive has been in service for almost two years performing this function with no sign of failure. How do I adjust time machine perameters?

The only way to limit the size of the backup is to exclude data from the backup, which you can do in Time Machine preferences.
If you use multiple browsers, have you tried clearing your browser caches? However, that's just a stop gap if it works. You either need to limit what you backup or get another drive.

After Time Machine backs up my file vault files (after logging out), when I next log into the user account it beachballs permanently during log in.

After Time Machine backs up my file vault files (after logging out), when I next log into the user account it beachballs permanently during log in. The backup was successful, as I had to restore after this issue last time. Hard resetting doesn't resolve the issue. Is there a Time Machine setting that I should be aware of?
I have 2011 13" MBP, 10.6.8 and use an external hard drive connected via USB for my Time Machine backups.
Thanks

I was able to get it to work. Thanks for your help. It's unfortunate the two applications do not work well together. This is what I did:
1) Safe boot and logged into the affected user (since the whole issue damaged the account's system settings).
2) Turned off File Vault in System Preferences. I needed to make some space on the hard drive first since apparently the total free space on the hard drive has to equal or exceed the amount of data currently in the file vault. I deleted some files and moved others to the Admin account. This whole process took awhile.
3) Finally, just restarted and logged in. The next time machine backup seems to be a significant backup, I assume because it's backing up the user account in a different way now that File Vault is turned off.
Thanks again!

Time machine doesn't recognize my old backups after clean install

Time machine doesn't recognize my old backups after clean install of OSX Lion
I also tried using migration assistant with no success.
I just want to use TM to restore files and folders SELECTIVELY.
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Oh yeah, and the other thing is, now I CAN'T go back in time using my Time Machine back-up . . . It says I've never backed up now (I guess because this is a fresh install that's TECHNICALLY correct), but I restored from this Time Machine file . . . Surely I've done something wrong that can be fixed. Help, please?

Time Machine keeps running out of space

This is really annoying. Starting about 2-3 months ago, my Time Machine suddenly keeps running out of space. I have a MacBook Pro bought in 2009 summer with 500 GB Hard Drive. My Time Machine drive is als 500 GB. I currently have 117 GB left in my MacBook's hard drive, and 65 GB left in my Time Machine's drive.
As of this moment my Time Machine only have 1 backup that was done Yesterday. It's trying to create a new backup, but can't because apparently it needs 69 GB while I only have 65 GB.
Why does it need 69 GB? I can't imagine a reason why. I haven't downloaded anything more than 1 GB, if even that much, most likely not, and all I do on this MacBook is pretty much browsing. In any case, it's hard to imagine there's a 69 GB data change between yesterday and today. That's a lot of data by any standard.
Thanks for any help!

If your internal disk is 500GB with 117GB free then you are using 383GB
and your Time Machine disk is too small. It is recommended that your
Time Machine disk is 2 to 3 times bigger than the data you are backing up.
There are also some tools you can get that will display details from the
logs to show you what is being backed up, it may be worth getting one of
those to determine why the backup is so big. I think the first thing you
should do is get a bigger disk.
Dave

Time machine failing , running extremely slow

Working on a faculty member's MacBook (I'm an IT person at a college) (Macbook 5,1, 2.0 GH core2 duo, aluminum unibody). Her problem is that Time machine is continually failing , and has done so 'for about two weeks'.
This is a typical error:
Oct 25 07:48:11 xxxxxxxxxxx com.apple.backupd[341]: Starting standard backup
Oct 25 07:48:11 xxxxxxxxxxx com.apple.backupd[341]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
Oct 25 07:48:14 xxxxxxxxxxx com.apple.backupd[341]: Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Mac HD
Oct 25 07:48:17 xxxxxxxxxxx com.apple.backupd[341]: Deep event scan at path:/ reason:must scan subdirs|new event db|
Oct 25 07:53:31 xxxxxxxxxxx com.apple.backupd[341]: Finished scan
Oct 25 07:57:44 xxxxxxxxxxx com.apple.backupd[341]: 34.32 GB required (including padding), 512.25 GB available
Oct 25 08:52:28 xxxxxxxxxxx com.apple.backupd[341]: Copied 2.2 MB of 26.6 GB, 45136 of 57941 items
Oct 25 09:54:08 xxxxxxxxxxx com.apple.backupd[341]: Copied 3.7 MB of 26.6 GB, 54478 of 57941 items
Oct 25 10:56:32 xxxxxxxxxxx com.apple.backupd[341]: Copied 23.5 MB of 26.6 GB, 93659 of 93659 items
Oct 25 11:07:05 xxxxxxxxxxx com.apple.backupd[341]: Stopping backup to allow backup destination disk to be unmounted or ejected.
Oct 25 11:07:06 xxxxxxxxxxx com.apple.backupd[341]: Copied 94623 files (74.0 MB) from volume Mac HD.
Oct 25 11:14:05 xxxxxxxx-MacBook com.apple.backupd[309]: Starting standard backup
Oct 25 11:14:05 xxxxxxxx-MacBook com.apple.backupd[309]: Error -35 while resolving alias to backup target
Oct 25 11:14:15 xxxxxxxx-MacBook com.apple.backupd[309]: Backup failed with error: 19
(note: the 'stopping backup to allow destination disk to be unmounted or ejected' entry did not correspond to anything of the sort initiated by the user)
Both the Mac and Time Machine drives check out with Disk Utility, and swapping in another disk to try a new Time Machine backup was similarly very slow (about 4 hours to copy ~ 7 Gigs) although it did not fail entirely.
I reformatted the new drive and used Carbon Copy Cloner to back up her system; a complete backup with CCC took just over an hour (~130 gb) and no errors were reported.
The same USB port was used throughout, and the drives were directly connected to the Mac and have their own power supply.
Previously Time Machine was working just fine.
Any ideas? Just set the thing up with a newly formatted drive and let it run the 10 days it's claiming to need??

Spotlight does index the volumes as files are added to them. I'd imagine you can add the Time Machine volume to the spotlight "Privacy" list to prevent it from being indexed, if you're hoping that will speed things up a bit. The Time Machine backups, especially the initial one, can take a while.

Entourage vanished when I auto-updated my macbook. time machine rescue me?

I am using a macbook 2.4 intel core duo. 10.5.8 (haven't updated to snow leopard yet).
I hit auto update and... my entourage program vanished from the computer. Not a trace.
I have my main identity backed up in time machine.
And... I can not find the original disk for Office (I find this to be an important and frustrating detail--I paid $199 for the educator version of Office! I am a legit paying customer.
Can anyone give me some advice as to what to do?
It would annoy me to no end to buy another copy of office... but I would spend 200 to get entourage back on track. i need those old emails.
My next question involves how to use time machine in this matter: I have never had to back up an entire application. And, re time machine, i have never actually used it. I don't want to synch my computer to the version it was a week ago when it happened... don't quite grasp my options.
many thanks in advance for any insight.

this forum is for troubleshooting Apple Software Update for Windows, a software package for Windows designed to update Apple products that run on Windows, and not related to Entourage or Time Machine.
If you don't know how to use Time Machine I suggest you consult your Mac's own built in Help files via the Help menu or post your question in the Time Machine forum:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1227

Does anyone know if I can run Time Machine when running 10.4 osx?

I have an older G4 that I want to run some type of backup program on because it recently crashed and was a bear to get the info back. I added an external drive to the system, thinking that I would run time Machine but I don't think it will run on 10.4. On my network I have three macs and two Apple Tv's. One of the Mac's is a MacBook Pro Intel version (4 years old). I also have one Airport Exteme. If I cannot run Time Machine from the 10.4 Power Book is there a way to connect the external drive to the AExtreme and use that to do some type of backup?
Thanks for any suggesttions.

Stiobhard Cassel wrote:
Not sure that it will work. When I took a quick look it says that it need the following
PPC / Intel, Mac OS X 10.4-10.6 or later.
The G4 does not have an intel chip.
Did I read that wrong?
Probably. Current version 2.6.2 should run fine on your PPC machine. It does on mine, though I don't use it for backup (Retrospect 6 for me, just from inertia).

Time Machine Service - Run scripts after backup

I am running Mavericks Server (10.9.5), server version 3.2.2
The server is used as a backup destination for a lot of Macs, and I am trying to create a complementary service that keeps track of all of the incoming backups and logs all backup events.
Is there any way to have a script execute whenever the Time Machine service completes a backup, or for that matter, and way to tell when a backup is running or has completed?
The options I have thought of so far are:
1. Script that monitors the logs to look for appropriate events
2. Run script on timer that scans the backup folder and looks for new backups
Neither of these seems ideal to mean, so I was hoping someone might have a better idea.
Thoughts?

In order to back up the configuration and state of some services the server needs them to termporarily be turned off. This includes the backing up of Time Machine.
So in order to back up the Time Machine configuration and details about what computers it is backing up where, the server would need to turn off the Time Machine backup service. But if it's turned off, it can't use it to back things up.
Similarly, imagine you needed to restore the backup. To view the backups you would need the Time Machine backup service to be working. But you can't overwrite the configuration and status information of a service which is turned on, because that would confuse the process doing the serving. But if the process is turned off, you can't use it to restore the backup.
So do what Linc said: use the System Preferences panel to back the computer up, and don't back it up to the same device you're backing up its Time Machine clients to.

Time Machine always running

My Time Machines backups are taking more than an hour to complete so my MacBook Air 2013 is constantly running Time Machine.
Using Time Machine Buddy, I'm able to see that each Time Machine backup is taking about 90 minutes. But it's only backing up about 4GB of data each time. I have a somewhat speedy (75MB/sec) portable USB 3.0 drive dedicated as my Time Machine, so I can't imagine that being a factor.
I know there's shareware to adjust the time interval between Time Machine backups. But really, it shouldn't be taking so long for such little data. Any tips or ideas why it's taking so long and how to fix?

Are you running a VM? Parallels or similar virtualization software?
I know there's shareware to adjust the time interval between Time Machine backups.
Right, don't use anything like that. Find out what the problem is and fix it.
Don't use any "anti-virus" software either since it has been known to cause the problem you describe.

A Macbook/Time Machine/Time Capsule epic - still in progress. Please help!

I'll try and keep this to the point.
I decided to upgrade my Macbook's 160GB Hitachi hard drive to a 500GB Samsung model. I also have a 500GB Time Capsule that has has an ongoing Time Machine backup going back to June 13, 2008.
I figured that I would change out the HD, then use the 'restore' function in Time Machine to bring the system back to where I left it. I figured that's exactly why I purchased Time Capsule in the first place.
The drive installed and formatted (using 'zero fill' to check for drive errors) just fine, and the restore kicked off great. The estimation was for something like 28 hours (for 49GB of data) which was a bit alarming but apparently not unheard of.
A day later, I found it stuck at 71% or so, and checking the install log revealed that I was getting 'error -36' messages for several music and video tracks in iTunes. It literally got stuck for about 8 hours, taking about half an hour to realize that each song was going to be an 'error -36' before moving on to the next one, and so on.
It was clearly never going to finish, at least not this year.
I clicked on stop, clicked to confirm that I was sure...and then it hung. I tried quitting the installer, which also hung, so in the end I was forced to do a hard power down. When I rebooted using the Leopard DVD, I attempted another restore, thinking I'd choose another date from which to restore. This time, however, opening up the Time Capsule drive hung.
OK, Time Capsule's Time Machine backup file is now toast. End of story.
Here's my question: I figure my next step is to figure out whether the HD in Time Capsule is faulty or whether the backup file itself is corrupt. I'm now 'zero fill' erasing the TC's HD. Does this give you a surefire way to tell that the drive is in good condition? If it fails, I guess it's under warranty. If not, I'll start a new backup from scratch (I don't see what else there is to do at this stage, frankly) and try to restore that and see how that goes.
Does anyone know what an 'error -36' is, anyway? Can anyone tell me if I've missed something, or some reason why this may not have worked as well as it was supposed to? Or anything that I should do next that I may not have thought of?
Thanks so much,
Michael.

I will remember to try to repair the TC disk via Disk Utility next time - I didn't even know you could do that until now! Thanks for that. In that case, I agree that I wiped the drive, because it would have been a great opportunity to try out the repair function and see if it could have made it work.
Well, the good news is that I have succeeded with my original intention, which was to replace my internal HD with a larger one, using Time Machine/Time Capsule to bring everything back. It worked perfectly, and I now have a Macbook with a 500GB drive. Awesome! By the way, I can recommend the Samsung drive if anyone is thinking of making the switch. So far, excellent performance, near-silent operation, and loads of storage space - for now!
The solution to the problem became clear once I erased the TC's HD and wanted to start over. My idea was that I would make a complete Time Machine backup, then change out the drive, then restore.
After the erasure, I found that the backup would not start, and everything about the Mac was sluggish! I cycled the power on the Time Capsule, and everything was like new once again. I restarted the backup and without delay, it started backing up - and fast.
Once this completed, I did a restore, and the estimated time was 8 hours. Big improvement from 24! After just 80 mins, it had restored 25% of the system - and this is wirelessly (using 'N')! Clearly, everything had become jammed up and during my previous restore attempt, it pretty much ground to a halt.
So everything is great now. It is possible that I didn't even have file corruption after all, perhaps just a refusal by the system to go any further. I won't know now, but should it happen again, I will power cycle first as well as run repairs on the disk via Disk Utility. I suspect that this is all that was needed.
Thanks for the responses again, and hopefully this post may help someone in the future.

On Macbook, Time Machine is running whenever I log in after screen saver engages

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