Time machine back-up has nothing in the files!!!

My iMac 20 inch has just given up the ghost after 3 years and can't be repaired. I bought a new 24 inch iMac and planned to restore my files using the Time Machine back up I had from the old iMac. I have connected the hard drive to Airport Extreme and can see the Time Machine backups but the folders all seem to be aliases with nothing in them. What's happened and can I do anything about it?

When you connect the drive to an Airport Extreme's USB port then you need to enable File Sharing or the drive will not be accessible to any computer using the router. Furthermore, using the drive in this way is not the same as having the drive connected directly to a computer. Using the AEBS is the same as using any NAS which means TM employs a different method of storing files. TM would be looking for a sparsebundle disc image file in which the actual files are stored. What you see in the TM backup folder are simply Unix hard links (a type of alias) to the actual data stored in the sparsebundle.
If you used this drive connected to the AEBS, then TM will need to locate the sparsebundle. If it's gone or damaged, then the backup is lost.

Similar Messages

Hi, I have a macbook pro with a new hard drive installed. My WD external drive backup on time machine now wont let me access the files. I get a prompt saying 'you do not have permission to access the files'

hi, I have a macbook pro with a new hard drive installed and restored. My WD external drive backup on time machine now wont let me access the files. I get a prompt saying 'you do not have permission to access the files' After my new drive was installed I plugged in time machine and it started backing up. I paused it when I realised that it was running for more than a few minutes. I now realise that it probably started backing up the new hard drive all over again. Which makes me think that the original back up must be on the WD back I cant seem to access it. Any ideas would be helpful.

See E-10 in the first link.
Time Machine Troubleshooting
Time Machine Troubleshooting Problems

Time machine backs up and nothing is there. no files

When doing a time machine back up, the system goes through the process which takes upwards to half an hour and uses up the appropriate space on the external hard drive. However, when opening the external hard drive to review the back up, there is nothing there, no files, folders etc.

jhspector wrote:
When it is finished and I open the backup on the external harddrive, there is nothing there.
Your TM drive should not be empty but this is NOT how you should normally access TM. Please read [TM 101|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306681].
You can also watch this [video|http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n055CqFnjyo] to see how it should work.
You didn't answer my question. What happens when you double-click on the Time machine icon in your Applications folder after you've done a backup and with your TM drive attached? This should bring up TM interface as in the video link above. Does it?

FW800 GTech drive as Time Machine Back up - Leave on all the time?

My GTech Q FW800 external drive is my time machine back up - Can I leave this on all the time and boot up and power down my iMac or do I need to "Unmount" it all the time?
Thanks,

You do not need to unmount the backup drive at all unless you wish to disconnect it

Time Machine backing up 19.9GB and the source disk has barely changed

Time Machine currently backing up 19.9 GB when my source disk has barely changed since this it last backed up earlier this afternoon.
What would be causing this and how can I find out why it thinks it needs to back up so much stuff. It there a way to find out what it is backing up?
Help!

If you mean by +archiving the TM disk+ that you intend to stop using that hard drive and use another, or you intend to copy the contents of this drive to another (see caveat below) then yes. If you mean compress the contents...I don't know. TM is doing some rather interesting things behind the scenes and I don't know if you could compress and then decompress it later and have it work.
caveat: apparently not every backup program can copy the contents of a TM disk to another so it can be used to restore the files. One that I know of is SuperDuper!

Why is my Time Machine backup so much larger than the files being backed up?

Mac Mini Server 10.7.1 on a 2011 Mac Mini Server
Here are the drives on my system:
Here are the items excluded from backup:
Note that Server HD and Archive are the only non-excluded disks and the estimated backup size is 563.2 GB (this corresponds with the actual usage on those drives.
However, when I run time machine, it keeps going until by 2TB backup drive is nearly full! And that's with only a single backup instance and nothing else on the drive:
What's going on here??? If I don't backup the other external drive, the backup size doesn't blow up like this.

Just to clarify, the reason why Time Machine backups are generally small is that TM makes extensive use of hard links. symbolic links are small files that point to a different file system entry, while hard links point directly to the original file data on disk (hard links are unintuitive - they are like having multiple doors into a room, except that you can place the doors anywhere you like and still get to the room). So even though there may be dozens of backups of a disk, most of the backed-up items will only have one data source on disk, with only items that have changed needing new representations.
I suspect that when you try to backup a time machine backup, it is converting the hard links into separate on-disk representations - basically taking every pointer to a given piece of on-disk data and creating a new file from it. I'm not sure if that would be a linear or geometric size increase (it sounds like the latter), but either way it's going to get ugly fairly fast.

Time machine backing up has gone nuts!

Configuration: MBP mid 2010, 13 inch, SSD 120 GB, Ram 8 GB, TM Drive 1 TB external Seagate. Running on Mountain Lion 10.8.4
For some unknown reason, TM backin up seems to go on endlessly and the backup size keeps on growing. This has been happening for about a week! As a result the machine wont sleep for several hours. the backup size usually goes up to as much as 25 GBs!
Can someone tell me whats going on?
Neerav

Do you use virtualization software, such as VMware, Parallels, or VirtualBox?
The virtualization software creates a large virtual-disk container that is constantly changing, so it has to be backed up every time Time Machine runs. That will quickly fill up any backup destination.
You should exclude the virtual-disk file(s) from your Time Machine backups. To do that, click the Options button in the Time Machine preference pane. Back up the files on the virtual disk from within the guest system, using a native backup application.
A compromise solution is to create a "snapshot" of the virtual machine in the virtualization software (not a Time Machine snapshot.) That will give you a single large file that never changes and only has to be backed up once. All the subsequent changes will be stored in a new file that's initially much smaller, but will grow over time. You should still exclude that file from TM backup. If you ever need to restore the VM from Time Machine, you'll have a working setup, which will make it easy for you to restore the rest of the data from within the guest system.
Another common cause of large TM snapshots is native OS X disk images. If you store a lot of data on one or more writable disk images, they should be in "sparsebundle" format, which will be backed up much more efficiently than any other format. Also be aware that disk image files are not backed up at all while the image is mounted. Make sure you unmount the image often so it can be backed up. If you ever restore, you will, of course, lose all changes made since the last backup. Consider eliminating large read/write disk images from your workflow, if possible.

Time Machine Back up fails 10% of the way thru.

Cannot get Time Machine to do an initial Backup. Using a WD Elements external USB drive that I have used successfully on other macs. Gets about 15 G thru a 132 G backup. I have verified and repaired both the Mac HD and WD external
Message is The backup was not performed because an error occurred while copying files to the back up disk. The problem may be temporary. Try again later. If problem persists use disk utility to repair back up disk.
I sent an IOMEGA drive back sometime ago because I was getting the same message and assumed the drive was bad.
Thanks

Stephen Whoolery wrote:
I will try the widget. And yes , it was a simple drag from the finder for the iphoto. It only imports a single photo of what it claims to be of 12,000 !. Therefore I assume my iphoto (08) is corrupted because no way do I have 12000 photos. I was having trouble with iphoto several months ago and a rebuild restored what were many lost photos. Iphoto does crash now and then .
What did you find with the widget?
Error 36 is an I/O error. It usually means there's a problem with a file, and the first one encountered will usually abort the process (whether a Time Machine backup or Finder copy).
Sometimes that can be fixed by Repairing the disk it's on, per #A5 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum). But sometimes the file is damaged internally, and must be dealt with individually.
Until we know what messages you're getting, we're just speculating.

TS1550 can time machine back up discs other than the start up disc

My question is, can Time Machine backup your entire system. By entire system I mean my startup disk and all my internal hard drives and the 3 or 4 external hard drives I have hooked up to my computer. I'm working a lot with videos, pictures and music which is very space intensive, so I need to back up all my information not just start up disk. Can Time Machine take care of that?

To answer you question directly, I don't think so.
To offer my $.02, don't rely on TM. It puts all your data into one big file. When it works, it's great, when it fails, even just a little, it's useless.
You may want to look at SuperDuper or CarbnCopyCloner. They cost a little bit, but you can make bootable backups, schedule backups, easily backup more than one HD, and the backups will be readable on any Mac. Your backups will be individual files, not just one large file that can only be read by TM.

HT4116 How do i get an iphoto library off my time machine back up and exported to a file of just photo images?

I have backed up my imac that died, but how do i get the photos that are in time machine on the back up disc exported to another mac i have that also has an iphoto librbary?

This should be of help in merging the libraries: Fat Cat Software - iPhoto Library Manager Help - Merging libraries
OT

While searching in Time Machine, I'm seeing double of the files

While I do searches in time machine the finder shows two of every file it finds. It only does this for the month of December. Is it saving two of every file or is this just a glitch? I recently did an erase and install of Leopard and I think that could be a possible cause.

If you make an alias in OS X, it points to one item. In TM, it uses multiple pointers to the original. Get rid of one alias, and the rest still work. That's how it should be working.

In regard to Time Machine. I have two accounts one is an admin account, the other is a standard user account. When I implement Time Machine when I am logged into the Admin account, is the standard user also backed up?

in regard to Time Machine.
I have two accounts on one Macbook Pro running OS 10.6.8. One account is an admin account, the other is a standard user account.
When I initially implemented Time Machine I was logged into the Admin account. I allowed Time Machine to erase the drive and backup the computer. Is the standard user account contents also backed up?
Also after I completed the Time Machine backup session, I turned off Time Machine and removed the portable hard drive. I plan to return in to Time Machine after being away from the portable hard drive for approximately a month. After a short interruption of approximately one month, when the Macbook Pro is reconnected and Time Machine is turned back on, will Time Machine create a new instance of a backup? WIll the back up contain the standard user account changes?

Time Machine backs up by default all the user accounts.
When you reconnect the backup drive after one month, Time Machine will do an incremental backup and it might take a while minutes to hours depending on how much has been changed. With a gap of a month, Time Machine will have to do a lengthier than normal survey of both drives to see what has changed, so it might take some time preparing for the backup. The backup will include everything that has changed since the previous one.

Unable to access time machine back up

HELP PLEASE! It appears I have lost my iPhoto library due to Time Machine preparing for new back up and I am unable to access the last back up. The sequence of events is below:
1. copied iphoto library from iMac to External Network Drive (WD 1.5TB White). Created a new folder called Pictures on the external drive and kept iphoto library there.
2. Mapped iphoto to the new location of the iphoto library. Imported more photos from a DVD.
3. Deleted iphoto library from the iMac harddrive.
4. iphoto throws error that there is no iphoto libraray. selects the same path again to map the iphoto library but to my horror I dont find iphoto library on the network drive.
5. browse the folders on the network drive using finder to see if I can find the iphoto library but I see that the folder is empty.
6. I checked other folders on the network drive which I had created same time as the pictures folder for iphoto library and had kept sizeable amount of data (mostly pictures to be imported into iphoto at a later stage), but find nothing in these folders as well.
7. I have been using the same drive for keeping time machine back ups and I had the last back up before I copied iphoto library onto the network drive (steps 1 and 2 above), so I went into Time Machine Backup to restore the data.
8. I get an error message that Time Machine cant access the back up. The information on time machine icon shows that last back up was on 16 July 2013 and oldest back up was on 03 April 2013 but both are greyed out so I cant click them. Furthermore Timemachine wants me to start a new backup but I am reluctant to start a new back up till I am able to access my back up on 16th July 2013 to get iphoto library back.
As of now I have no access to iphoto library and time machine back means I have lost ALL of my photos! it is very scary thought. I am sure there should be a way out. Any help is greatly appreciated!

That means the disk image is corrupt, which is to be expected, because the network storage device isn't suitable for use with Time Machine, whatever the manufacturer says. You may have lost your data.
The first thing you should do is protect yourself from further data loss by starting a new backup on a locally-attached external hard drive, not a network drive.
You can then try to retrieve the data in the Finder by descending into the folder named "Backups.backupdb" on the disk image. It may or may not be possible. If not, you need the services of data-recovery consultant. I don't recommend that you try to repair the volume, because that could easily ruin whatever chance there is for recovery if the repair fails.

If I erase and install Lion, will my exisiting Time Machine Back-up be overwritten?

Since upgrading to Lion, I have experienced problems with permissions and having to repair the disk.
I have decided to do an erase and install of Lion, but would like to clarify a few things about the time machine back up.
Firstly, once the operating system has been re-installed (I do not intend to restore from backup), will my current time machine back up continue to operate or will a new back up need to take its place?
Secondly, rather than restoring from the back up (as I have alot of redundant apps), am I able to select certain apps/app data to restore? (If the answer to the above is 'Yes' then i assume that this could be done by entering time machine once I am up and running).
Thanks

First, it's unlikely that reinstalling Lion will solve your problems. But that's not the question.
If you do erase and restore, you won't lose your TM backups, but TM will need to back up all your files, even if they were previously backed up. That may result in the deletion of many snapshots to free up space.

Time Machine back failure?

Hi all, I hope someone can help please.
My time machine back up has stopped working.
It tells me I do not have enough room on my 1TB external back up drive to back up to.
When I go into options and look at the estimated size of the back up it tells me that is is 2.59TB. But when I look at my Home drive it trying to back up it is only 116GB?
I'm not sure what to do as this does not make any sense to me.
Any ideas?
Cheers
Russ ;'o)

I have now fixed it.
Thanks for looking ;o)

Time machine back-up has nothing in the files!!!

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for