Time Machine asked to delete all my backups

Periodically, time machine tells me it's going to delete all my backups and create a new one. There is no way out of it. All I can say is "OK". But I'm wondering "Why?". Why is it doing that? Months of backup are gone with a single click.
When my backup drive gets full, it warns me that it is going to delete my oldest backups. That's okay. That's expected. But twice now it has told me that it is going to delete my entire backup set and start over. Why? Is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening.
Time machine has worked well for me for years. But suddenly, it's kind of useless.

Start with C13 in the 1st linked article.
Time Machine Troubleshooting
Time Machine Troubleshooting Problems

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Restore from time machine does not list all my backups. I know they exist but there dates are not present on the restore list. Any help appreciated.

Restore from time machine does not list all my backups. I know they exist but their dates are not present on the restore list. Any help appreciated. If I must use one of these older dates to restore, how do I then get the more current data off time machine?

Ok, so am i correct in saying that the steps to fix are as follows.
That's one option, but not what I meant by restoring in the time-travel view. The latter is what you get when you enter Time Machine.
is the fresh install not going to be able to "see" the time machine backups that I have at the moment.
It should, but sometimes people report that it fails. I'm not sure why that happens.

HT3275 Why I'm losing space on my internal HD, after i started to use the Time Machine, and after deleting all my files i still dont have any space on my internal HD!

Why I'm losing space on my internal HD, after i started to use the Time Machine, and after deleting all my files i still dont have any space on my internal HD?

Why I'm losing space on my internal HD, after i started to use the Time Machine, and after deleting all my files i still dont have any space on my internal HD?

Time Machine not completely deleting all backups.

When I restore Time Machine it doesn't seem to erase everything. It states that there is 1.43 TB left when there should be 2 TB left. Any way to resolve this?

See Pondini's TM FAQs, for starters.

Time machine won't delete its oldest backups?

Can anyone explain this to me... in all the time I've used TM (several years, many OSs, two iMacs), it always eventually fills the backup HD and then stops backing up telling me it has run out of space. TM is suppsoed to delete the oldest backups to constantly renew the space available for the newest back ups.
Why does it never do this? Does TM work as described for any one else?
Is there a know solution for this ussue?
Thanks,
Dave

plainhat wrote:
The error message simply said it could not create the folder. My assumption was that the disk was too full. Indeed, after wrestling with it all morning I've managed to clear some of the old backups and it is now (as I write) finally running a backup.
That can happen if the disk gets absolutely, positively, chock-full. Time Machine alone usually won't let that happen -- we see it when there's other data on the disk (in the same partition), that fills the last few MBs. Needless to say, that's not a good idea. Other data needs to be in a separate partition or different disk.
Here's what happens: When Time Machine starts a backup, the first thing it does is create a backup folder, and create and start writing to a (hidden) log file inside it. When that's done, it figures out how much needs to be backed-up, and how much space is available, so it can start deleting old backups. Obviously, if it doesn't have even a few MBs to create the folder and log, it fails.
However, I'm afraid this means as soon as the disk is full again, it will not automagically delete old backups and I'll need to fix it manually again.
Unlikely, unless you have other data there.
NOW... if I can figure out how to keep my Early 2008 MacPro from randomly shutting down, I'll be a happy camper LOL
Are you sure it's random? Could it be a certain number of minutes with no activity? If so, check System Preferences > Security > General. Make sure the Log out .... box isn't checked.
it kept finding files that were locked (from a Dreamweaver enabled web site) and I had to go in and remove those locks inside TM. Interesting adventure.
Indeed! Why in the world anything would be locking files in your backups is beyond me. I don't think I've ever heard of that before.

Time Machine will not delete the oldest backup when external hard drive is full

I may not understand this timemachine thing, but....
I have macbook pro, 15", mid 2011, mountain lion......I have a WD Passport Studio I have ben using to back up with time machine periodically. I tried to back up today and it says i do not have enough room on my external drive. I tought the time machine automatically deletes the oldest back up?

I agree with Linc's response but you also have to realize that it will keep the oldest backup and start removing snapshots if it can.
It is my undestanding that time machine does what is called a full backup the first time and then the snapshots done after that are changes since the first backup. I'm not sure if time machine then does periodic backups or just snapshots.

Time machine how to delete all files?

time machine: how to empty and delete all files?

Please check to let us know what version of AirPort Utility that you have so we can provide the correct instructions to erase the Time Capule disk.
Open Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities > AirPort Utility
Click the AirPort Utility menu just to the right of the Apple icon in the upper left corner of the screen
Choose About AirPort Utility
What version of AirPort Utility do you have?

Time machine has deleted all old backups

Hi, I'm desperate! time machine has all the old backups deleted on my time capsule, only today's early still a backup available. It was still 1TB space on the hard disk. What did I do wrong? There was no warning!

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

Time Machine error after restoring all data

Sorry, I've tried to run through various trouble shooting guides on Time Machine (notably here http://pondini.org/TM/C4.html etc) but haven't been able to work out a solution.
I just had my iMac harddrive replaced and earlier did a full restore of the harddrive from my Time Machine backup drive.
Time Machine, rather than deleting the old backups on the disk, is now giving me the error message
"This backup is too large for the backup disk. The backup requires 564.63 GB but only 521.89 GB are available."
I backed up to Snow Leopard 10.6.8. I just upgraded to Mountain Lion 10.8.3 because there were a couple of comments online that suggested that might help resolve the problem (unfortunately it didn't)
It seems from articles I've read that this is a known issue that occassonally happens when a full restore happens and Time Machine can't associate the new harddrive with the old backups.
One solution seems to be to use disk utility to reformat the external harddrive and start again, but that seems slightly like using a sledgehammer to smash a nut. Is there a less dramatic solution? Is there a easy way to just associate the two drives with one another again?
Many thanks in advance for any help you can offer, and apologies if I've missed a relevant/ helpful thread somewhere else on the board.

"Reconnecting" to your backups

Time Machine : Deleting all local backups of one of several computers leaves files behind

Hi,
I'm in the process of transitioning my Time Machine setup. For the moment, I have a local Time Machine volume backing up three Macs to the same Backups.bakupdb folder (I had set that up two years ago before reading Pondini's Time Machine FAQ).
Basically what I want to achieve is have a partition per computer that I'm backing up. So what I did was I partitioned a second external drive into 3 partitions, and I copied my TM partition to each of these 3 temporary partitions. I did that using Disk Utility's Restore tab. My plan was then to delete the backups of two computers off each temporary partition (per question 12 of Pondini's FAQ), to get 1 computer per partition on the temporary drive, then partition my main external drive in 3 and copy back each temporary partition to the main drive.
(The second external drive is lent, I can't just switch to using it.)
From what I read on question 12 of Pondini's FAQ and this reply by Pondini to a similar thread, I thought that deleting all backups of one computer via the Time Machine interface would leave me with an empty folder for that computer under Backups.backupdb, and that I could just delete this folder via the Finder. This is * not * what happened.
After all backups for the first computer I wanted to delete off the first temporary partition are deleted, the folder for this Mac is not empty ; it still contains all the 15 dates folder of the individual backups. What's more, these date folders aren't empty either. The first 12 of them I deleted (the most recent ones) each contains a Macintosh HD folder, under which remains a System/Library/CoreServices hierarchy. The (locked) boot.efi file is alone in the CoreServices folder. The last 3 dates I deleted (the oldest backups), however, still contain an even bigger hierarchy. Applications, Library, System and Users exists in all three, with a lot of subfolders and lots of files, totalizing around 2 GB of data. Most of the files are locked, even logged into root (very diverse files : plists, dylibs, rtf files, fonts, etc) but some are not (apps, and other diverse files : colorsync profiles, dashboard widgets, bundles...). Seems like Time Machine could not delete everything. (Why ?)
Note that I deleted the backups for one computer using that same computer, first using an Admin account for the first 3 or 4 dates and then using the root account to avoid having to always authenticate. (I didn't think it would create a problem... maybe it has?)
When I go back into Time Machine for this computer, no backups remains. It's like if Time Machine doesn't see the data that it could't delete... This is all very strange.
My question is : can I delete these leftover files and folders bia the Finder without fear it's going to break the backups for the other computers on the same partition ? If not, what should I do ?
Sorry for the long post, but I hope I was clear...

Phil_6379 wrote:
After all backups for the first computer I wanted to delete off the first temporary partition are deleted, the folder for this Mac is not empty ; it still contains all the 15 dates folder of the individual backups.
It shouldn't; when you delete a backup, the date-stamped backup folder and all it's contents should be deleted.
Most likely, there was some sort of corruption, either on the original or the copies, that left some pieces. On occasion, that will happen even when Time Machine is doing it's normal "thinning:" there will be a message in the log about finding a "partially-deleted" backup, and trying again. Sometimes the second try will do it, sometimes not. In that case, you might be able to delete it after running Repair Disk; if not, sometimes you can delete it via the Finder.
Under Lion only, deleting backups via the Finder is supported by Apple; you'll get a message about how it can't be undone. But it doesn't always work, so is recommended only as a last resort. Holding the Option key while deleting may help with the locked files.
If you can't get rid of the detritus, however, I'd recommend erasing the affected partition(s) and starting over. I'd not continue backing-up to a set of suspect backups -- the way they're all linked together, there's just no telling whether you could do a full system restore successfully.
In addition, as Linc says, even if you have some things off-site, I'd strongly recommend getting another external HD for "secondary" onsite backups. Externals are getting much less expensive all the time, and if there's a problem with the old one (either the drive itself or the backups on it), you'll be in a large pickle. Plus, of course, drives don't last forever. See #27 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions for some suggestions.

Why did time machine delete all my backups ??

In time machine, I wanted to delete an old Lion backup to make more space for my new Mountain Lion. So within the "Star Wars" interface, I selected a few old backup directories (with the date on them), from year 2012. I had several backups from year 2013 I still wanted to keep... So i used the action button (the icon with the wheel) and asked to delete the selected directories of year 2013... But after waiting about 15 minutes to complete, all the backup including from year 2013 are GONE ! And the automatic backup from the new Mountain Lion started.
How come ?

Natael wrote:
@Pondini : yep, everything. 4 weeks ago was the most recent backup of all the Lion's ones.
Maybe. How did you do the upgrade? If you erased and installed, that could explain what seems to have happened, depending on how you put your stuff back. If so, there may be a fix, and you may not have lost the backups.
If you don't put things back in just the way Time Machine expects, it treats the drive as a different one, so does a full backup. And you've got messages for a full backup.
We have seen a few reports that TM occasionally does that even on a normal upgrade "in place" but I'm not sure how accurate they are.
See if the procedure in #E3 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting will display the old backups.
Now i'm reluctant to remove some old backups of my other macbook Snow Leopard's time machine... they are saved on the same HDD that i'm using for the ML.
In the same partition?
The widget doesn't "recall" removing anything. It seems to mention the error because of the lack of space, and/or a mounting problem.
No, no space problem. If it deleted backups, each one would be documented, although that might have been done on an earlier backup.
Could not back up OS X Recovery to /Volumes/MACDATA/Backups.backupdb: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=-69737 "Unable to mount recovery partition" UserInfo=0x7fd01438a350 {NSLocalizedDescription=Unable to mount recovery partition}
That's Time Machine trying to copy the Recovery HD to the Time Machine drive. Either there isn't one, or it may be damaged.
Error: Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-50 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (OSStatus error -50.)" (paramErr: error in user parameter list) deleting backup: /Volumes/MACDATA/Backups.backupdb/Macintosh/2013-06-06-114031.inProgress/BD2B91 A4-6790-42E6-AEBE-E631D990D253
That's a bogus message; trying to delete something it couldn't find from the work file.
Message was edited by: Pondini

Time Machine deleted ALL my backups

I was using time machine for quite a while to backup my hard drive and then stopped it for a while. When I turned it back on today, it backed up my ENTIRE hard drive (50 GB) and deleted ALL the old files & time machine backups.
The files and information on those old backups were extremely important. Is there any way of getting these back? Or am I SOL.
Thanks in advance, I really appreciate any help.

If TM completed what was most likely a new, full backup (which it will do after a long period without backups), then much (or most) of your old backups have already been overwritten.
It is possible that you might be able to recover some data from the rest of the disk with a +Data Recovery+ app, such as Data Rescue II, or a 3rd-party service. Neither is cheap or certain.
If you want to try that, stop using the disk immediately. To find such apps & services, look for +Data Recovery+ or +Disk recovery+ via Google, VersionTracker.com, or MacUpdate.com

OMG... Time machine deleted ALL the backups, even latest..

Hey All...
I have just experienced a nightmare. If anyone can help I would be in your debt.
Here we go...
I was trying to move the backup of old computer ( partition A ) to a new partition ( B ) on same ext. hard drive.   Not enough space in partition b so I looked into deleting some old backups before copying A to B using restore in disc utility.
Inside time machine I was using the cog thing to select delete backup... selected the oldest backup, thinking this would delete only the oldest backup.
It deleted ALL the backups on A, including the latest.
This had work files on it that are important so it's a bit of a disaster. I have had a great backup stradegy for the last 15 years and have NEVER before lost anything. Here is my details...
Macbook Pro 2.2 GHz
10.7.5
External drive 4 partitions
Partition A was backed up using 10.6
From a G5 which I deleted the files from.
I am hoping the files could be recovred from either the G5 or the hard drive or my trash on the macbook pro?
I have and will not do too much on my computer like disc utility stuff or empty trash etc.
It's a long shot, but anyone have any ideas..?
Thanks in advance..

The...........Haggis wrote:
Thanks for your prompt reply Pondini,
I could have selected all in error but I am sure I didn't. I guess I must have.. grrr.
I cannot see any when I enter time machine.
Ok. It's just that I've never heard of it erasing more than what was selected.
It's possible something went wrong, and at least some of the other backups are still there. Especially if no other changes have been made to the TM drive, you might try running Repair Disk on it with Disk Utility. Unlikely to help, but it's worth a try.
The G5. I erased the drive using disk utility and haven't used it since. There is 2 drives on that machine, the drive we are talking about is not bootable it's just storage.
Since you already have it, you might want to try running the File Salvage app on it (you'll probably need another HD, or at least partition, to receive whatever it finds).   The results might be more usable than the results from the TM drive, since they're "ordinary" files and folders, not all the "hard links" Time Machine uses.
EDIT:
I had the ext drive hanging off my Mac Book pro 10.7. Ext drive had TM backups of 2 laptops and G5.
Hold on a minute -- how were all those backups made -- by connecting the drive directly to each Mac, or were any made over a network (wired or wireless)? Are they / were they all in the same partition, or separate ones?
Message was edited by: Pondini

Time Machine Deleted ALL the backups!

Today, TM was cleaning up the old backups as it does every so often, however it inadvertently deleted ALL of the backups.
1) Can I recover my backups?
2) If so, how can I recover said backups?
3) How can I prevent this from happening again?
Thanks.
What a bummer....

TheChemist wrote:
May 30 15:12:50 francoisimac com.apple.backupd[500]: Starting pre-backup thinning: 423.93 GB requested (including padding), 123.83 GB available
The "padding" is workspace, etc., that TM needs on the backup drive. It's about 20%, so Time Machine estimates it needs to back up about 350 GB. That's the symptom: there isn't enough room for that.
The one question I would love answered is what would trigger a pre-backup thinning?
Not enough room for the new backup. In that case, Time Machine first deletes "expired" backups, then your oldest ones.
Unfortunately, there's no way to tell what that 350 GB was. After a backup finishes successfully, you can see what was backed-up, but not before.
So, you need to start with #D4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum). Something you're running is apparently causing a very large, but not full, backup (a full one would need about the 500 GB that's on your internal HD, plus another 100 GB temporarily).
If you still can't figure it out, erase the drive and do a full backup. Then immediately do another. If it's quite large, see #A2 in Troubleshooting to download +Time Tracker+ or BackupLoupe to see what's causing the huge backups.
If it's small, turn Time Machine off. Periodically, run a backup manually. (Select +Back Up Now+ from the TM icon in your menubar, or by right-clicking the TM icon in your Dock). Sooner or later, you should see a very large one, and hopefully it will complete so you can see what caused it, via +Time Tracker+ or BackupLoupe.

HT3275 My Time Machine deletes ALL previous backups

Every so often, Time Machine deletes ALL previous backups and starts over from scratch. It has done this several times in the last year. I have not changed any hardware or the name of the computer. Why is this happening? Makes me very concerned that I now have NO backups while it chugs away rebuilding a 210 GB backup.
Just got an error message:
Time Machine couldn’t complete the backup. Time machine could not delete the backup disk image "/Volumes/Joe's iMac.purgeable"
HELP!
iMac 27: 8GB, 2.9 GHz Intel Core I5
OS X Yosemite 10.10.1
Backup volume is Western Digital MyBookLiveDuo with 2TB and 1.8TB available

Hi Joe,
Have you Repaired both drives first, then Repaired Permissions on both?
Have you looked through Pondini's extensive TM help site?
http://Pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
Can't imagine something not being covered there.

Time Machine asked to delete all my backups

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