Stop time machine from renaming my external hard drive?

im sorry if this is a repost but i couldnt find the answer to this anywhere
maybe im just being a bit thick here, but every time my time machine backs up data onto an external hard drive, it just changes the name of that external hard drive to "time machine backups", is there a way to stop this?
thanks in advance

I've never seen such behavior and TM certainly should not do that. I would not have thought it possible, actually. try resetting TM preferences. delete the file /library/preferences/com.apple.timemachine.plist. then go to TM system preferences and set it up again. if you had any folders/drives excluded from backups make sure to add them back to the exclusion list as it will be wiped out too.

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Is there any way to create a time machine backup to an external hard drive with content already on it? I have a hard drive that i have used for pictures but when i try to run a backup it says i need to start from a blank drive. Can i get around it?

Is there any way to create a time machine backup to an external hard drive with content already on it? I have a hard drive that i have used for pictures but when i try to run a backup it says i need to start from a blank drive. Can i get around it?

It would be much better if you had separate drives for the pictures and Time Machine backups.....but, if you want to use the same drive for both purposes, temporarily move the folder with the pictures to another location for safe storage.
Run the Time Machine backup on the hard drive and verify that everything is working correctly. Time Machine will format the disk for you in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as part of the backup process.
Then move the folder with the pictures back to the hard drive with the Time Machine backups.
When you have tested to make sure that everything is working again, then and only then should you delete the folder with pictures from the temporary storage area.
Again....it would be much better to keep Time Machine backups on a drive just for that purpose, and other data on another drive for that purpose. This is clearly one of those times when the fact that you can do something does not mean to imply that you should do it.

Hallo ,why is it that when I delete a photo ,which is backed up by time machine and western digital external hard drive , that I am able to restore the photo okay but not the titles and descriptions . I have a Macbook 4.1, mac osx 10.5.8 . Iphoto 7.1.5 ,

QUESTION.
Hallo , my question is ;whenever I delete a photo and restore it through Time machine and Western digital external hard drive , I am able to restore the photo but not the titles and descriptions . Western Digital inform me that it isn't their external hard drive problem and suggest that it is an Apple software problem ?
I am using a Macbook 4.1 , with Mac OSX 10.5.8 . I photo 7.1.5 , last modifie4d 01/05/2010 -universal . Should I be upgrading Iphoto ?
I hope that someone is able to help in this matter , as i have to restore 12000 photos !
Thanking you in anticipation.
Alan from Wigton

Hallo Kieth ,
I am not quite ready to restore the full iphoto library , as I have days of work re - imputting titles,descriptions and enhancement . I hope that your suggestion works , as I use my Macbook basically to work with digital photography. Through time , I will need to delete my library to recover more disc space and I would hate to have to spend more time re - imputting titles and descriptions all over again .
Thanks for your interest and advice.
regards - Alan

Re Time Machine I have an external hard drive with files I backed up manually over the past 2 years 1TB of memory. I am finally taking the leap to use Time machine to back everything. will I have to reformat that drive, thus wiping my previous bac

Re Time Machine
I have an external hard drive with files I backed up manually over the past 2 years 1TB of memory.
I am finally taking the leap to use Time machine to back everything.
will I have to reformat that drive, thus wiping my previous back ups?
can I split it the drive in two partitions?
Also
as I have two separate Macbook Pro's- one older than the other.
OSX 10.68
the other is
OSX 10.75
can I back them up separately?
or even synch and merge files and folders etc? between the two?

You CAN use a drive with files already on it to store Time Machine backups. But long term, that is not recommended. You do not need to reformat or re-partition the drive to do this. Once Time Machine Backups are established, you could remove the old files.
But do not delete Time Machines files with the Finder -- that can cause it to lose its place and lose everything.
With the cost of backup drives under US$100, it might be a better idea in the long run to get another drive. Best results from Time Machine is a drive about 3 times larger than the drive(s) you are backing up.

I got a macbook pro 2008 and can not back up using time machine. it eject my external hard drive everytime. does someone has a fix???

i got a macbook pro 2008 and can not back up using time machine. it eject my external hard drive everytime. does anybody has a fix???

Does your external hard drive have it's own power supply? It should.
Is your external hard drive formatted with the NTFS file system? It won't work.
It needs to be formatted either with Mac OS Extended or FAT32.
(There are drivers available to add NTFS support to OS X but their quality is unknown, especially the "free" ones.)

I am running my first backup on Time Machine using a Seagate external hard drive with a thunderbolt adapter and cable. I have a MacBook Pro 2011. It is backing up 11GB, and is telling me it will take approx two days. Is this normal?

I am running my first backup on Time Machine using a Seagate external hard drive with a thunderbolt adapter and cable. I have a MacBook Pro 2011. It is backing up 11GB, and is telling me it will take approx two days. Is this normal?

Download the supplemental fix to 10.7.5
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1599

Time Machine and backing up external hard drives

Time machine will not back external hard drives I have connected to my Mac Pro. It works fine with the 3 hard drives mounted in the computer. Is this the way Time Machine is intended to work or am I doing something wrong? Thanks in advance for your assistance.

According to Disk Utility, GUID and AFP are both ok for a non-bootable drive with either CPU. The difference is when you want to make a volume bootable.
Since TM volumes are not bootable, it shouldn't matter UNLESS you have some other bootable system installed on the drive.
Right now, the drive on my Intel iMac is partitioned AFP and the one on the PPC powerbook is GUID. They both appear to be behaving themselves. The iMac has had one instance (since the last partition job) of a massive backup which occurred right after I changed the exclude list and the PPC has had no massive backups (other than the initial one). On that one, I built the exclude list BEFORE the initial backup.
- gws

Will Time Machine Back up an External Hard Drive Attached to my Mac Pro?

Apple TV is GREAT, but it quickly filled up my hard drive. My thought is to take my folder that contains all of my personal files and put it on an 1TB external hard drive. I'd then "point" iTunes to where this new folder is. First, is that the right approach? Will that mess anything else up? Second, can I have Time Machine then back this external hard drive up? So, I'd like to have Time Machine back up my Mac HD and the external HD. If Time Machine won't do this, is there a good back up program for Macs that is very turnkey?
Thanks in advance!!!

GregT wrote:
Apple TV is GREAT, but it quickly filled up my hard drive. My thought is to take my folder that contains all of my personal files and put it on an 1TB external hard drive. I'd then "point" iTunes to where this new folder is. First, is that the right approach? Will that mess anything else up? Second, can I have Time Machine then back this external hard drive up?
If the drive is formatted +Mac OS Extended,+ yes. While it's connected, go to TM Preferences > Options. If it's listed in the exclusion box, just select it and click the minus sign at the bottom.
If it's listed in gray, however, it's either formatted wrong or corrupted, and you can't remove the exclusion.

With Time Machine I have an external hard drive formatted with Mac

With Time Machine I have an external hard drive formatted with Mac. The record contained files windows. How to recover?
Serious mistake: to connect a Mac to an external drive with data (important!) Windows, the warning appears: "You want to use the disk for Time Machine?" Wrong button, so in 2-3 seconds, the disk is formatted. Now Mac "sees" the disc but empty, Windows does not see it under "My Computer" but in "Disk Management" is reported as "hard core", "healthy", "GPT protective partition" Is there a way to retrieve the files? Sorry for my English Thanks

I'm having a difficult time following, I understand English isn't your native language. You may have good luck with Google Translate.
Also please read Pondini's Time Machine FAQs & Time Machine Troubleshooting.

Will Time Machine work with an external hard drive connected (via usb) to Airport Extreme?

Will Time Machine work with an external hard drive connected (via usb) to Airport Extreme?

Sorry, but this article is about 4 years old, and was printed based on preliminary information at the time.
The bottom line here is that Apple does not officially support Time Machine backups to a drive at the USB port of the AirPort Extreme.
If it works for you, great.
You might want to review the Apple Support documents below, which are far more recent than the article you reference:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/15139.html
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2038
It is supported.....
This is NOT correct. Please do not post false information on the forums.

Can 'Time Machine' back-up other external hard drives

Can 'Time Machine' back-up other external hard drives connected to your mac as well as the mac memory itself?

As Neil says, yes, it can. But external HDs are excluded by default; you have to tell Time Machine when you do want to back one up.
See the exclusions box in Time Machine Prefs > Options.
If the drive is shown in black, just select it and click the minus sign at the bottom.
If it's shown in gray, though, it's not formatted for a Mac, and Time Machine can't back it up (and you can't remove it).

Time machine doesn't see external hard drive on network

I have a pair of external hard drives connected to my iMac, which is connected to my 2WIRE modem/router via Ethernet. I'm using one of them as a Time Machine drive. For the past couple years, I've been backing up the laptops in the house to that Time Machine drive without fail.
Now none of the laptops (a MacBook and an iBook) won't see either external drive connected to the iMac, even though the iMac has file sharing turned on (as it always has) and both laptops are connected to the iMac via the Finder. Both laptops can see the iMac and the external drives connected to it via the Finder, but in Time Machine, when I try to select my Time Machine drive, nothing appears in the window.
I was having a problem with the Time Machine drive and had to wipe and reformat it, but I don't understand why Time Machine won't see the other external drive either, even if there is a problem with the TM drive. I recall Time Machine picking up all available hard drives as possible backup destinations, as long as they're also seen in the Finder.
The iMac has been having some OS X issues. The Finder will crash sometimes, and I have no choice but to hold down the power button to shut it down and then start it up. When it starts, it takes longer than it normally does, I assume because it's checking and/or fixing some things. However, those issues have been going on for a long time (I think I need to reinstall OS X in it, since Disk Utility finds nothing wrong; also, the hard drive in the iMac crashed about 2 months ago and I put a new one in; I then restored the TM backup to it, and the OS X issues have persisted, which tells me it's software-related, not the drive).
Also, the iMac backs up to the Time Machine drive just fine. Of course, the TM drive is connected to it locally, whereas the laptops have to get to that drive via wireless file sharing.
I did try plugging one of the external hard drives on the iMac into my MacBook, and Time Machine saw it immediately, so my guess is the issue must lie with my router and/or the iMac, but I don't know what to check next. I've restarted the iMac, I've restarted the laptops, I've turned TM on and off on the laptops, and I've turned file sharing on and off on the iMac; none of those things reestablished the connection.
I suppose I could just go with external hard drives for the laptops, but my wife moves her iBook all over the house, so I know hers won't get backed up regularly. That was the nice thing about the system I had in place, which I realize wasn't as elegant as a Time Capsule.
Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.

That should say "Now none of the laptops (a MacBook and an iBook) will see either external drive..." I hate typos.
Anyway, after rereading my post, I'm starting to think I just need to reinstall OS X on the iMac, given the other issues it's experiencing. Any advice for doing that would be appreciated, if that's indeed the solution. Thanks.

Time Machine is causing my external hard drive not to be recognized or read

I have been using Time Machine on my MAC. I don't like it. I now have gone into preferences and stopped it from further backups. Now, I want to restore my Toshiba External Hard Drive and have it backup. When I look into my Macintosh HD, it does not "see" the drive. It doesn't appear in Finder. I am assuming that Time Machine configured it or reformatted it? So, how do I get it "back" from Time Machine? One person commented that this is an issue of formatting my hard drive, but the problem started with Time Machine. Where should I post this question, if not here?
Thank you!

I'm guessing that Time Machine hides it from Finder as most users aren't going to want to be mucking around in it. Try opening up Disk Utility and see if you can see it. You can reformat it from there as well.

Time Machine backup to AEBS external hard drive

Buy in haste, repent at leisure they say. I needed a new wireless router and thought the AEBS looked just the thing - and a quick look on the spec page showed you could connect an external hard drive via USB - great, I could back up all our computers wirelessly I thought, using Time Machine. Didn't see the small print that says you cannot do this, tho' can't see why Apple couldn't make it work.
I have had a whole string of hard drives go down in the past year, LaCie, Maxtor, WD, and two internal hard drives from a MacBook and a MacBook Pro. The only ones that seem bullet proof are the Gtech drives I have for editing in Final Cut so I bought one of those for our communal Time Machine drive.
To begin with everything worked fine despite Apple not supporting this set up. Then with a regular Software update I must have upped the firmware to 7.4.2 and the system stopped working. I discovered the problem and went back to 7.4.1 but no joy. Then, inexplicably, it began to work again later that day so I just breathed a sigh of relief. Now it's happened again - I realised that I had updated to 7.4.2 again - presumably from a Snow Leopard update, and I am now unable to get it going again even after going back to 7.4.1.
I can select the external HD so that it appears on the desk top as a wireless drive, it appears in the list of available disks in TM, but if you ask it to back up it takes an age to return a message saying it 'could not access the sparsebundle (error 109).
It seems to me I have invested heavily in a system that is never going to work but I wondered if there was some way of backing up manually over the wireless link using another type of back up system? Or are there other things I should try? I know some people seem to have this set up working fine...

The problem here is the way Apple chooses to implement Time Machine Backup in 10.6.x to a Network volume. When TM first came out myself and a bunch of similarly naive Unix hackers figured we could get the best of both worlds by backing up with Time Machine to a backed up or otherwise redundant network volume using Time Machine. But in the beginning TM didn't backup to network volumes. It does now by creating a sparse bundle on the network volume and backing up to the Sparse bundle as if it were a physical, local, disk drive. I seems logical to infer that Time Machine was written to backup to locally connected disk drives which differ from network disk drives in one very important respect: You can tell a local, physical disk drive that you need to know the status of any given write operation and you can trust that result with a reasonably high degree of confidence. That same can't be said for a write to network drive so Apple fakes it by creating a Pseudo Drive or Disk Image Drive on the network volume and writing way. The Sparse Bundle Error comes up when the Pseudo Drive wasn't put away correctly. There are filesystem repair programs to fix this condition which are described in other threads. Dig around for "fsck sparse bundle" on Google the next time this happens and you may be able to rescue things.

Time machine, finder save to external hard drive problems

I have a new 2.26 GHz mini and I wanted to get bootcamp going and install windows xp. The instructions suggested to backup the hard drive and I thought this is a great time to try the time machine. I plugged in a external hard drive, opened time machine (Time machine said it needed 29 GB for full backup and the drive had 32 GB free), selected the drive, and let the "backup count down(I think it was a minute and a half)" run down to zero. Time machine started backing up the my main drive to the external drive no problem. It was running good (100MB in 5-10 seconds) for a little while when I noticed that it had reached 2.3 GB and was not going any higher. I let it stay like that for about 5 minutes thinking that maybe it would start going again. No luck. I shut down time machine and saw a finder window with the progress bar behind it saying 2.3 GB. I push the stop button and it said stopping, but it would not stop and disappear like it should. I relaunch the finder and the icons on the desktop disappeared and would not come back. I relaunched repeatedly but they would not come back. Since the bar at the top of the screen would not come back I had to hold in the power button to shut down the computer.
Upon restart everything seemed to work fine until I tried time machine again and it would not work. So I tried to manually backup the files to the external drive. When I copied some files the little finder window popped up and said, zero KB of 290 MB, and would not change. I left it running while opened a browser and did a search for an answer to my problems. After about a half an hour I went back and saw that some files had been transferred. When I looked in the Activity monitor, I saw it was saving the files very slowly. I went to the finder progress bar and when I hit the stop button, it would say stopping but it wouldn't. I would have to relaunch the finder to make it stop. Then I tried to copy the files to a shared drive on my network and the same thing happens.
Before using the time machine both these drives worked no problems. I went to the shared drive computer and used that machine to copy the files from the mini. All files transferred no problems. So now I'm trying to find out what is wrong with my mini. It seems that it has to do with the finder since it effects both the usb and ethernet hard drives. All other functions work as they should. I don't know if anyone has had this problem after using time machine but any help would be appreciated.
Also I tried deleting my com.apple.finder.plist and relaunch the finder. No change.
Scott

Batlo wrote:
(Time machine said it needed 29 GB for full backup and the drive had 32 GB free)
That's much too small for your backups. Time Machine usually 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).
I noticed that it had reached 2.3 GB and was not going any higher. I let it stay like that for about 5 minutes thinking that maybe it would start going again. No luck. I shut down time machine and saw a finder window with the progress bar behind it saying 2.3 GB.
That sounds like the drive is not formatted properly. See #C1 in the Start with the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
The other problems may have the same cause.
Most likely, it's set up for Windoze and not suitable for Time Machine. With only 32 GB free, you must have other data on the drive, so you probably can't erase it and reformat it for Time Machine.
Report back with your findings for the *Partition Map Scheme* and Format of the drive (per #C1), and we can figure out what to do next.

Stop time machine from renaming my external hard drive?

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