Stopping time machine

I began using time machine today and i was wondering if during the time that it is backing up files and i need to leave with my mbp (which it is connected to) is it safe to stop it and eject the ehd so that i may take the notebook with me? Also can i just change the time it backs up? Am i able to do it say once a day?
Thank you in advance.

cobos wrote:
I began using time machine today and i was wondering if during the time that it is backing up files and i need to leave with my mbp (which it is connected to) is it safe to stop it and eject the ehd so that i may take the notebook with me?
Not recommended. Let the backup finish.
Also can i just change the time it backs up?
Not with standard Leopard tools. There are 3rd party apps that will do it. Not sure of the name - try googling for it.
Am i able to do it say once a day?
You can turn off TM with the switch in the TM Preferences and then turn it on once a day. If the BU does not start immediately, on the TM icon on the top right menu, just click "backup now."
If you only backup once a day the backup will naturally take much longer than an hourly backup.

Similar Messages

How do I stop Time Machine from backing up Aperture thumbnails?

Hi,
My 2TB backup drive recently became full, and I became curious as to what was filling it up. I wrote a perl script to analyze the Time Machine backups, and I noticed that over 50% of my backup was filled with AP.Thumbnails and AP.Minis from the Aperture project directory. In particular, the AP.Thumbnails files in the backup consumed 737 GB of disk space!
The problem with the thumbnails files is that they are a single file that contains all of the thumbnails for all of the 40,000 photos I have in Aperture and it is now 20gb in size. Every time I add a new file to Aperture, the thumbnail file changes, and I get a new 20gb of data added to my backup. I add photos often which means that most of my backups have 20gb of Aperture files (which are easy to rebuild and don't need to be backed up).
I decided to try and stop Time Machine from backing up these files, and there seems to be no way of doing so (without telling Time Machine to skip backing up my entire Aperture project which I don't want to do). In Finder, you can do a "show package contents", but the Time Machine GUI doesn't allow this.
I tried to tell Time Machine to exclude the files via the GUI, but Time Machine sees the Aperture Library as a single package and won't let me exclude individual files from within the package.
I googled around, and found the attribute that Time Machine puts on files to exclude them from the backup. I used xattr to set the attributes:
xattr -w com.apple.metadata:comapple_backupexcludeItem com.apple.backupd <filename>
I also used this command on the iPhoto thumbnail files.
I used spotlight to find all of the files with this attribute using this command:
sudo mdfind "comapple_backupexcludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"
This command returned the iPhoto files, but did not return the Aperture files.
However, if I run "xattr" on the Aperture files, the attribute does exist!
During my next time machine backup, the iPhoto files were skipped as I wanted them to be, but the Aperture thumbnails were backed up again
I thought that maybe time machine was looking at the aperture package as an atomic unit, but iPhoto is stored as a package as well, and the attributes worked there on files inside the package.
Does anyone have any idea why time machine is still backing up these files? Is there any way I can get around this?
It seems to me to be an incredible oversight on Apple's part since both tools are Apple. The thumbnails files are very expensive to backup, and they are not necessary for backup since the are easy to rebuild from the original photos which are also backed up.
Thanks,
Ron

Shadow99999 wrote:
Hi,
My 2TB backup drive recently became full, and I became curious as to what was filling it up. I wrote a perl script to analyze the Time Machine backups,
No need to write your own script for that. there are a couple of already made nice GUI tools for this - TimeTracker http://www.charlessoft.com/ and BackupLoupe http://soma-zone.com/BackupLoupe/
and I noticed that over 50% of my backup was filled with AP.Thumbnails and AP.Minis from the Aperture project directory. In particular, the AP.Thumbnails files in the backup consumed 737 GB of disk space!
The problem with the thumbnails files is that they are a single file that contains all of the thumbnails for all of the 40,000 photos I have in Aperture and it is now 20gb in size. Every time I add a new file to Aperture, the thumbnail file changes, and I get a new 20gb of data added to my backup. I add photos often which means that most of my backups have 20gb of Aperture files (which are easy to rebuild and don't need to be backed up).
I decided to try and stop Time Machine from backing up these files, and there seems to be no way of doing so (without telling Time Machine to skip backing up my entire Aperture project which I don't want to do). In Finder, you can do a "show package contents", but the Time Machine GUI doesn't allow this.
I tried to tell Time Machine to exclude the files via the GUI, but Time Machine sees the Aperture Library as a single package and won't let me exclude individual files from within the package.
I don't have aperture but I think most people exclude the whole thing from TM backups and back it up separately. but if you want to exclude a subfolder in a package that's easy too. just select the package in finder, control-click on it and select "show package contents". in the resulting finder window drill to the folder you want to exclude and drag it to the TM exclusion list in TM system preferences->options.
I googled around, and found the attribute that Time Machine puts on files to exclude them from the backup. I used xattr to set the attributes:
xattr -w com.apple.metadata:comapple_backupexcludeItem com.apple.backupd <filename>
I was not aware of this method for excluding stuff from TM backups. could you provide a link to where you found this?
I also used this command on the iPhoto thumbnail files.
I used spotlight to find all of the files with this attribute using this command:
sudo mdfind "comapple_backupexcludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"
This command returned the iPhoto files, but did not return the Aperture files.
that's because Spotlight never looks inside packages unless you start a search inside a package directly. iphoto seems to be the only exception. I don't know how it's done.

How to Stop Time Machine before Disk is Full

In the System Preferences, Time Machine will keep weekly backups "until your backup disk is full". I also use the backup disk for other storage purposes, so is there a way to stop Time Machine perhaps when the disk is 90% full or has 10 gigs left?
Does anyone know a command line trick or option to adjust this setting to backup "until your backup disk is nearly full"? I'd prefer a way to limit Time Machine from taking over the entire disk.

OK then - Create a file A on the disk that represents 10% of the disk space. When the disk fills you can then remove the file A and deal with disk full conditions as you wish.
You can create a file easily in terminal.app. Use the mkfile command.
Let's say you disk with Volume name "Big" is 300 GB in size.
In Terminal enter
cd /Volumes/Big
mkfile 30g TempFile
This will create a 30 GB file with a pathname of /Volumes/Big/TempFile
This is somewhat of a kludge but it's simple.

How to stop Time Machine from backing up Temp Files?

Hi folks!
I am trying to find out how to stop Time Machine from constantly backing up 'useless' temporary files accumulated from web browsing? Although I don't change or add large files to my HD, Time Machine backs up hundreds of MBs every hour. Those file amounts make sense when I consider that I browse a lot to YouTube, SoundCloud, etc to watch videos or listen to music - I just don't want them to be backed up.
Under Time Machine Options I already excluded the following items from backups:
~/Library/Caches
/Library/Caches
~/Downloads
But even though I did this weeks ago, Time Machine stills finds large files to be backed up every hour and my only guess is that I am still missing a location where either Safari or Firefox - the two web browsers I use - store temporary files.
Can you help?
Thanks a lot in advance!

oas2103 wrote:
they come from my anti-virus software
Are you sure you need that? There are no viruses that run on OSX. None. Zip. Zero.
If you're running Windoze on your Mac, that's the same as running it on a PC, so it needs all the same anti-everything stuff you'd use on a PC.
There is some "malware," such as Trojans, for Macs, though. But (unlike viruses that can get onto your system without your knowledge), you must approve their installation (via your Admin password) and/or operation (via the "This application was downloaded from the internet ..." prompt).
Appropriately enough, some of these Trojans are included in pirated versions of Apple software, such as iWork!
For the gory details, see Thomas Reed's [Mac Virus Guide|http://www.reedcorner.net/thomas/guides/macvirus].
Thanks a lot again!
You're quite welcome, and thanks for posting back.

Stopping Time Machine from backing up when running FCP

Is there any way of stopping Time Machine from making backups when I have Final Cut Pro running?
Each time TM is about to prepare backup, FCP goes down in performance like an ant in maple syrup.
Quite annoying. And sure, I can live with no backups made during work. (I hit Command-S every minute instead... ;-))

You may have something else going on, that doesn't seem to be a problem at other times.
First, see if the size of the backups makes sense, given the changes you've made. If in doubt, 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. That will show the duration of each backup at the top, and the total size in the "Copied" messages.
If that seems large, see #D4 in the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip* at the top of this forum.
If the size seems reasonable, but the amount of time is not, see #D2 in the same place; any or all of the suggestions there may speed them up.

Trouble stopping Time Machine backup.

Recently I have been unable to stop time machine from the menu bar.
I tried force quit with no avail. So I resorted to kill -9 to stop it.
But could not shut the machine down without using the power button.
Any ideas or help appreciated.
Thanks

This can be the result of several things.
1. Exclude your TM disk/partition from any anti-virus scanning.
2. Exclude it from Spotlight (System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy).
3. Be sure it's connected directly to your Mac (no hubs, and not the USB port on keyboard).
If those don't help, download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget from: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/timemachinebuddy.html. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window. Copy and post the messages here (be sure to get them all, as sometimes they overflow the small window).

How Do I Stop Time Machine From Filling Up My External Hard Drive?

Hi all -
I have a 750GB OWC external hard drive on which I back up about 100GB of data from my MacBook using Time Machine, and also store a bunch of media files for work. Currently about 650GB of that is full, and that is mostly because of two Time Machine-related files: The "Backups.backupdb" folder, which is 135.15GB, and "MacBook_001b63336000.sparsebundle," which is 233.71 GB. That means that in the nine months since I bought the drive, about 370GB, or half its available space, has been eaten by Time Machine backups.
I only back up so I have a bootable copy of all my current (not past) MacBook data if my MacBook is ever lost, stolen, or damaged. I am now very concerned that, if left unchecked, Time Machine will eat into the remaining 100GB of empty space. And my old external hard drive died precisely because it ran out of empty space. Some of my critical files were lost forever, and others I got back in pieces after several weeks of anguish and quite a bit of cash.
Apple's support page addresses this concern (incredibly) by instructing me to buy another external hard drive. That solution is expensive for me, and what's the point, when Time Machine will eventually fill that one up too?
So, my questions are:
1. Is there any point at which Time Machine recognizes it's nearly out of hard drive space, and either stops backing up, or deletes old backups, or sends me a warning, or something?
2. If not, is there a way I could designate a maximum size for Time Machine backups to take, such as 150 GB, that it cannot exceed?
3. Partitioning has been suggested, but I don't know how. Any instructions?
4. The OWC hard drive came with its own backup software. Should I just use that and shut up?
It would be mighty ironic if the software I use to save all my data got so fat, it sacrificed all my data....
Thanks in advance -

Andrew Saks wrote:
Hi all -
I have a 750GB OWC external hard drive on which I back up about 100GB of data from my MacBook using Time Machine, and also store a bunch of media files for work. Currently about 650GB of that is full, and that is mostly because of two Time Machine-related files: The "Backups.backupdb" folder, which is 135.15GB, and "MacBook_001b63336000.sparsebundle," which is 233.71 GB. That means that in the nine months since I bought the drive, about 370GB, or half its available space, has been eaten by Time Machine backups.
this is pretty confusing. have you been using it for both wireless and wired backups? the sparse bundle would only be created if you've used it for network backups. directly attached TM drives don't use a sparse bundle so it looks like you've got two separate backup lines. you should get rid of one as using both is very space inefficient.
I only back up so I have a bootable copy of all my current (not past) MacBook data if my MacBook is ever lost, stolen, or damaged.
FYI, TM backups are not bootable themselves. You can use the "full system restore from TM" utility on the leopard install DVd to restore your system from backups. That restored system will, of course be bootable.
I am now very concerned that, if left unchecked, Time Machine will eat into the remaining 100GB of empty space. And my old external hard drive died precisely because it ran out of empty space. Some of my critical files were lost forever, and others I got back in pieces after several weeks of anguish and quite a bit of cash.
Apple's support page addresses this concern (incredibly) by instructing me to buy another external hard drive. That solution is expensive for me, and what's the point, when Time Machine will eventually fill that one up too?
So, my questions are:
1. Is there any point at which Time Machine recognizes it's nearly out of hard drive space, and either stops backing up, or deletes old backups, or sends me a warning, or something?
I'm not sure of the precise point (TM need some free space on the backup drive to operate) but yes, this will eventually happen. when it does, TM will inform you of this and will give you an option of either stopping TM backups and changing the TM drive or starting to delete old backups. If you choose the latter it will start deleting old backups to create space for new ones. this is done automatically.
2. If not, is there a way I could designate a maximum size for Time Machine backups to take, such as 150 GB, that it cannot exceed?
not unless you partition the drive.
3. Partitioning has been suggested, but I don't know how.
it's an option but not right now. you have too little free space left for a successful partitioning process. If you try, the process is sure to fail due to disk fragmentation.
You need to get rid of A LOT of data if you want to try partitioning. also, fort the future, it's a very good idea to keep one partition entirely for TM and another for data. You'll avoid some of the problems you are having now.
Any instructions?
type "creating new volumes" in disk utility help.
4. The OWC hard drive came with its own backup software. Should I just use that and shut up?
don't. besides TM there are much better options out there. CCCloner and Superduper! are better than anything that OWC software has to offer.
It would be mighty ironic if the software I use to save all my data got so fat, it sacrificed all my data....
Thanks in advance -

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.

How to stop Time Machine from polling disks

I have shut off Time Machine in system preferences but it continuously asks if I want to use it with a disk that is attached.
The questions is simple - how can I stop this from happening?
I have already tried:
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup -bool YES
It still continues to harass me daily. Any suggestions appreciated!

I may have spoke to soon. I think I finally squashed the prompts with the terminal command I noted above.
Essentially what you are saying is let TM set up a preference file then shut it off - that would probably work. Thanks for the suggestion - if I get the prompt again from TM I will try your idea.

How to stop Time Machine from deleting historical backups

So for the first time I encountered what happens when Time Machine runs out of room - IT DELETES THE OLDEST BACKUPS UNTIL IT HAS ENOUGH ROOM!!!
That's terrible if you rely on those backups. We've been using it like an archive and it's been spectacular. Work on a project and delete it when I'm done because I know Time Machine has a copy.
Well, I no longer have copies of my work from Arpil until July because Time Machine deleted those AUTOMATICALLY to make room. I had always thought that it would warn me it was going to delete older backups and I could just decline. Then I'd go out and get a new drive. This make Time Machine unusable for my purposes.
Is there a was to make Time Machine just stop backing up or warn you before it erases old backups? Some way where it cannot erase them on it's own? Perhaps some Terminal command or anything?
Thanks!

Landon White wrote:
So for the first time I encountered what happens when Time Machine runs out of room - IT DELETES THE OLDEST BACKUPS UNTIL IT HAS ENOUGH ROOM!!!
That's terrible if you rely on those backups. We've been using it like an archive and it's been spectacular. Work on a project and delete it when I'm done because I know Time Machine has a copy.
Well, I no longer have copies of my work from Arpil until July because Time Machine deleted those AUTOMATICALLY to make room. I had always thought that it would warn me it was going to delete older backups and I could just decline.
in system preferences->Time machine->options there is a check box "warn when old backups are deleted". if this box is checked TM is supposed to warn you when it first starts deleting old backups. However, that particular feature is quite buggy and TM is well known not to do that on occasion. there are also other situations when it might decide to delete old backups without warning. Therefore you should NOT use TM as an archiving utility. apart from the above issues it also thins old backups and THAT is always done without warning. TM is a backup tool not an archiving one and you shouldn't use it as such.
Message was edited by: V.K.

Stopping Time Machine from deleting older backups?

Dear Folks,
I'm using Time Machine Editor to control how often TM does its backups and it works great. Because I have a large TM drive and am not doing super-frequent backups, I have plenty of free space on the drive; it'll easily take 6-9 months before the drive would be full of daily backups. Accordingly,I'd like it if there were some way to preserve the daily backups that are older than a month(TM preserves only the weekly ones).
Does anyone know of a third-party app that will let me control the frequency with which TM deletes older backups?
Thanks!
pax / Ctein

(none) Ctein wrote:
Dear Folks,
I'm using Time Machine Editor to control how often TM does its backups and it works great.
Do note that if you ever decide to stop using it, you must use it to revert to Time Machine's default behavior before deleting the app. Otherwise, Time Machine will continue use the last settings it made. See #13 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
Because I have a large TM drive and am not doing super-frequent backups,
Time Machine was designed to do hourly backups, and will protect you best if you let it back up as often as practical. If they're done frequently, the backups should be quick and unobtrusive. If they aren't, something is wrong.
I have plenty of free space on the drive; it'll easily take 6-9 months before the drive would be full of daily backups. Accordingly,I'd like it if there were some way to preserve the daily backups that are older than a month(TM preserves only the weekly ones).
Does anyone know of a third-party app that will let me control the frequency with which TM deletes older backups?
No. The actual Time Machine application doesn't actually perform the backups; it just lets you control where, when, and what gets backed-up. The backup programming, including the "thinning," is built-in to the "works" embedded deeply into OSX.
If you were to keep all the daily backups, it would reduce the length of time before the oldest weeklies start getting deleted. That's usually a pretty good trade-off.
And remember, every Time Machine backup is, in effect, a full backup -- it's a complete "snapshot" of the way your entire system looked at the time of the backup.

Can't stop Time Machine

Can some iGenius please help?
I've only been using a mac for 2 days and just plugged in a new hard drive that I bought for the specific purpose of transporting large video files.... SOMEHOW I accidentally elected to use my WD as a Time Machine backup disk, and now I can't make it stop! Its trying to back up 200+GB... I have no idea how to reset/wipe/reformat the hard drive so this won't happen anymore... I tried deleting backup folder and renaming the drive, but it doesnt work... Have no idea how to go into settings etc to kill it.. Any advice please?
Sorry, i'm also kind of a technical dunce as it is! :-/

You can now use Disk Utility (from your "Go" menu in Finder choose Utilities > Disk Utility. Choose your new drive and erase tab in Disk Utilities.
Just make sure you don't choose it as startup disk for Time Machine.
-mj

How to stop Time Machine from creating entirely new backup of external drive?

I've included an external drive to be backed up into Time Machine. For a few days, the drive was disconnected, however, so only Macintosh HD was getting backed up. I recently re-added the external drive. However, now it appears that since the external wasn't included in the most recent backups, it's decided to re-backup the entire drive.
Is there any way to prevent it from backing up the entire external drive and instead just backup the changes made, or is that not possible because there is a gap in the backups made for the external?

First, the amount that TM says it's going to back up is not necessarily the amount it will back up. You'll only know that when the backup finishes.
I haven't tried this myself, but it may be that after you exclude a volume, TM loses continuity with the previous snapshot. In that case, future backups should be incremental, as long as you don't exclude the volume again.

How to stop Time Machine from trying to resize a sparse bundle

With 10.8, I'm backing up wirelessly from my MacBook Pro to a sparse bundle on a Drobo connected to a Mac mini on the same network. I used Drobo's Time Tamer to create the sparse bundle. The sparsebundle is a set size and cannot be resized (this is intentional to avoid filling the Drobo which is mostly used to store non-backed up non-critical data.
Every step of the backup process works, but Time Machine spends a good 20-30 minutes during each backup "resizing" the disk image. It doesn't actually suceed in resizing the disk image, but it displays "Looking for Backup Disk" in the Time Machine menu while Console reveals that it's resizing the disk image ("Resizing backup disk image from 17.59 TB to 17.59 TB"). It doesn't cause any errors, but it does turn the backup time from a few minutes
Does anyone know of a workaround to disable this resizing step or to make it fail quickly and proceed with the rest of the backup normally?
I wasn't using Time Machine before upgrading to 10.8 from 10.7, so I don't know if this is a new issue with Mountain Lion. I suspect that this would happen in earlier OS versions too.

I'm experiencing it on a Synology NAS. Time Machine always starts by "Resizing backup disk image from 1.07 TB to 1.07 TB." In the status bar, it just displays "looking for backup disk."
I don't have any solutions yet. Would definitely be interested to hear. I think it might have to do with the fact that I increased the user's disk quota (on the NAS) after doing the initial time machine backup. While Time Machine correctly identified the extra space as available, it somehow can't get over the fact that it changed once.
Things I have done:
Manually ran hdiutil resize -size 1000g *.sparseimage. This did change the reported disk size in the disk's Info.plist, but the next backup still did the resize step.

How to stop Time Machine backing up on a specific external hard drive?

I work on a iMac 2.66 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, with Mac OS X 10.6.8. I use two external hard drives that are the exact same model, 2 TB WD My Book 1110 Media: one is intended for back-up, the other for storing video editing files. They're both connected through USB 2.0.
I set the "back-up" hard drive as back-up disk for Time Machine, through the Time Machine preferences. Now, everytime I connect the "video" hard drive, Time Machine recognizes it as a back-up disk, and starts backing up on it. I could delete the "Backups.backupdb" file that Time Machine had created by connecting the "video" hard drive to another Mac and moving it to the Trash, but as soon as I reconnect the "video" hard drive to my iMac, Time Machine backs up on it again.
Is there a way to "de-select" a hard drive from Time Machine's list of back-up disks?
Note: I should mention another thing that might indicate a conflict. When both hard drives "back-up" and "video" are connected to my iMac, if I open Final Cut Pro X, I can only see my "back-up" hard drive. To access the files I am working on, I need to eject the "back-up" hard drive, and suddenly the "video" drive appears.
If you have any idea of how to solve this conflict... I am a bit lost.
Thank you!

Welcome to Apple Support Communities.
Give them unique volume names using Disk Utility.
Then set Time Machine back up to that unique volume name.
For example, I regularly use 4 external drives (though they're not all the same model).
The descriptions quickly tell me which drives I have connected to my MacBook when open Finder:
My Time Machine backup volume is named 'Time Machine 1TB'.
My iPhoto backup volume is named 'iPhoto Backup 320GB'
My iTunes backup volume is named 'iTunes Backup 120GB'
and the last is 'Windows 7 Backup 250Gb' but since it's a Windows volume, it is formatted NTFS.
This likely means that you will have to erase and repartition one of your drives to name it.
You MIGHT be able to rename it using Finder, right-clicking on the volume, and selecting Rename (current volume name).
WARNING: I can't be certain of what just renaming it that way could screw up in the way of permissions and file links.
Within Disk Utility, it seems it is absolutely not possible to change a volume name without clicking the Partition tab, and that involves erasing.
Given the choice, I'd probably choose to rename (erase and repartition) the Time Machine drive. A current backup or two on Time Machine, and I'm good. I don't really need to go 'way back' to recover files, because I really don't ever erase anything. I just keep buying bigger drives!
And I still burn the 'absolutely critical, priceless, can't ever be without this stuff' files to DVD or CD at least monthly or quarterly, in case one of my TM or backup drives fails at the same time as my primary hard drive. Call me paranoid, but I worked in Information Technology for many years: Murphy was an optimist!
Message was edited by: kostby

Stopping time machine

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