Time Machine Back Up Problem

Time Machine continually tells me that it needs over 500 GB of space to do a back up when I only have 125GB used on my iMac disk and that is if it takes everything. I can't seem to figure out what it's pulling and from where to limit it.

Jason Vasquez wrote:
Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist isn't listed in that folder.
If Time Machine is set up, yes it is. You won't see it via a Finder search, unless you include System Files. It's usually easiest to just navigate to it.
Also the only drive that are on my desktop are the Mac HD and the LaCie external I'm trying to back it up to.
See what's shown for +Estimated size of full backup+ under the +Do not back up+ box in TM Preferences > Options.
Also, 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. Copy and post the messages from one of these problem backups here. There's probably a clue lurking there.

Similar Messages

Time machine back up problem after new hard drive install

After having my hard drive replaced I restored using time machine (Seagate backup drive) There are 2 users of this iMac. After restoring I seem to have all my stuff back but the other user has nothing, no pics etc. I assumed that time machine backed up everything on the computer. Is it possible that it only backed up my data? If not, how do I restore the other users data. Appreciate any help with this!

How did you restore the computer? If you used migrate it is important you prepared the computer correctly. If you already setup the user name that pre-existed on the old hard disk migrate will not work properly.. you cannot restore to the same username. So you might need to do the restore again.. (migrate but to a different location eg a USB drive and pick up the files from there).. TM should backup all users that previously were on the computer.. but how you restored will affect how it behaves now.

Potential Solution to Time Machine Back-up Problems

I, like many of you, went out and bought Leopard as soon as it came out and love many of the new features. I was very disappointed that time machine did not work. I seem to have the same problem as many of you in the the preparing time was very long, the back-up was very slow to start and then it would stop without any reason. I would also get the following error message from time to time:
"Time Machine Error - Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume"
I contacted Apple support and after hours of trying one thing and another with senior engineers, it was obvious that this was a problem and they did not have a fix yet. (No disrespect to Apple support, they did the best they could!).
Since my backup would stop after about 10Gb I decided to exclude the majority of my files so that the backup was less than 10Gb and it finally worked. When I included all my files again, I had the same problem. I thought that it must be one particular file or a number of them that was causing the issue.
Using the scientific method of trial and error!!!, I finally established that the file causing the problem on my computer was the iPhoto folder which can be found at:
Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/iPhoto
If I exclude this folder from my time machine backup it works great!!!
I have more than 300Gb backup up without issue now.
I hope that this works for you to and I would love to hear from anyone who has tried it.
Good luck!!

Please visit Pondini's Time Machine FAQ for help with all things Time Machine.

HT1770 Time machine back up problem.

I have 3 external HDs. One is used exclusively for time machine. Files from one of the others are not being backed up. That drive is not excluded. How can I get time machine to back up that HD?

Hmmm can you try excluding it, turn off TM, turn on TM, & remove the exclusion?

Problems Copying Time Machine Back-Up to New Hard Disk

I tried copying my old time machine back-ups from a 500 GB WD HDD to a new Seagate 1TB. Followed the instructions from "Time Machine: How to transfer backups from the current backup drive to a new backup drive". Although terribly slow it seemed to work all well initially. Had it run over night, then discovered the next morning the process was apparently hanging.
Thinking that maybe the energy saver options were the cause of the problem, I unchecked "put hard disk to sleep when possible". So went through the same painful process. Cannot believe that after about 7 h of transfering the whole thing is stuck again:
More than 2 million items were apparently copied, now nothing is happening at all... (neither GB nor minutes changing anymore)
1) Is this a common problem? More importantly: how can it be solved?
2) Is there another way to transfer time machine back-ups to another hard disk?
Thanks!

This is getting (more) annoying: turned out that something went wrong with the 500 GB HDD with the original time machine back-up. Managed to repair it in the 3rd attempt with disk utility. Heard of SuperDuper and thought I'd give it a try.
Cloning the back-up disk to the new 1 TB HDD seemed to work well, but I am a bit surprised with the result:
It seems time machine recognizes now the 1 TB Seagate HDD as a 500 GB (the size of the original WD) only?

Problem Emptying Trash filled with Time Machine Back Up Files

I have needed to create more space on an external hard drive that I use for TIme Machine back up of my hard drive. I took some of the Time Machine back ups [2011 and 2012] and dumped them into my trash. I have gone into my Preferences and removed the check mark beside the "empty trash securely" so that I can get rid of the folders faster. I have a Mac X snow leopard operating system 10.6.8.
However, it takes about 1o hours to have the trash "preparing to empty trash" identify about 175,000 files. I don't know how many I have in their but it has got to be over a million.
What can I do to get rid of all of these files from my Time Machine back up? I don't want to wait five or six days before the trash starts to empty. Appreciate any help you can give. Thanks.

http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/trash.html

My external hard drive is 'seen' by my iMac and I can go into the Finder and open files and folders. I am using the hard drive for Time Machine back up. However Time Machine says it can't find the drive. Same thing has happened with Final Cut Express.

My new LaCie external hard drive is 'seen' by my iMac and I can go into the Finder and open files and folders. I am using the hard drive for Time Machine back up. However Time Machine says it can't find the drive.
The same thing happened recently between Final Cut Express and my other LaCie external hard drive used as the Scratch disk. It fixed itself.
I've run out of ideas. Help would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

have you done some searches on FCPx and time machine? Is there a known issue with using a TM drive with FCPx? dunno but ...wait...I'll take 60 sec for you cause I'm just that kind of guy.... google...." fcpx time machine problem" Frist page link
http://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/fcpx-bug-best-practices-for-using-external-hard- drives-and-final-cut-pro-x/
You cannot have time machine backups on your hard drive if you intend to use it in FCPX.
booya!

Restore iPhotoLibrary specifically from EXTERNAL Hard drive Time Machine back up?

My laptop Photo Library is corrupted somehow. I tried to restore from a prior in Time Machine on laptop and made the mistake of not saying to keep BOTH copies, but after trying for 3 hours of telling me it was doing it through various windows, a little one popped open saying something about permissions and it opened an old iPhotoLibrary from 2 years ago! ... I do have that one now and am copying it off my laptop as fast as I can to FLICKR
cuz APPLE has become a PHOTO sinkhole... (We are talking 20,000 pics folks with scanned in family pics from 100 yrs ago!)
I think I have a good copy on my External Hard Drive Time Machine back up from about 3 weeks ago. How do I use that to Restore from
or should I just wait for this PHOTOS thing to come out?
NEXT Question is there a convenient way to split it into MULTIPLE ones..eg KEEP old stable photos in one or more.
and use another for all the new ones not editted or sorted yet? I do see there is a new Option under iPHOTO/File menu to just switch
libraries but, of course, you cant even see that if your Library wont open!

For TM help post in the forum for your OS - and see https://www.apple.com/support/timemachine/ and http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html and http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
Depends on undisclosed information
With the current OS and iPhoto you switch library using the switch library command - with any version you can switch libraries by holding the option key down while you launch iPhoto which brings up the select library window
And generally it is not a smart idea to have multiple iPhoto libraries - it generally has no advantages and makes things much more difficult and complicated and often leads to user errors that cause major problems
If you want to anyway the most convent way to split libraries is to use the paid version of iPhoto Library Manager - http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/ -
LN

Can't restore new hard drive from time machine back up

Looking for some help on this one....
Briefly: iMac 24" aluminium early 2008 (model 2134) trying to upgrade the original 320 gb HDD. So I bought a WD Caviar Black 64 mb, 6gb/s 1Tb drive, intalled it pretty smoothly and then using an install disc restored it from a time machine back up. That went fine then I could not restart the mac (kernel panic). So i trouble shooted with an extended hardware test, disk repair and everything seemed fine. I reinstalled my old HDD again and worked perfectly so I figured my iMac doesn't like this Caviar (due to sata3 perhaps??) so I went and bought a Seagate barracuda sata2 1 TB 7200 rpm and repated the whole process. Again everything went super smooth until the restoring process ended and the iMac was restarted. Kernel panic again. Already tried PRAM, option key. Booting from the CD or my old drive is not a problem at all but from the newly installed drive (x2) ... Impossible
Any thoughts ???
Thanks

Booting from the CD or my old drive is not a problem at all but from the newly installed drive (x2) ... Impossible
Disconnect all peripherals from your computer except for the keyboard and mouse. Double check to make sure that you installed the hard drive correctly - http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Browse/iMac#SectioniMac_Num20
Select your imac then select hard drive replacement, and there are the instructions.
Video instructions - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzuBW3mu7LI and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVzYXgUhygI

Will existing Time Machine back ups build after 1 account migration

I have one i-Mac happily backing up with Time Machine to an external hard drive.
I have just bought a second i-mac (the old one's filling up) and propose to use migration assistant to move an admin account from the old to the new i-mac leaving two other accounts (and their files etc) on the old one. I see from some posts that it seems as if Time Machine will start a new back up series for the new i-mac's back ups (cos its a new MAC address). But what about the old i-mac? Will that continue to extend the existing (old) Time Machine back up files, albeit without my transferred account and its files? I'd like to end up with the old i-mac continuing to work with and build its Time Machine back ups (less my account and its new files) and have a new back up series from the new i-mac building to a separate partition on the external drive.
Second minor point: I have read that putting a partition on the external drive is the best way forward as it will stop competition for space and allow changes in one set up in future to have no impact on the other. Is this the best way forward?
Does this all make sense?
Sorry but I can't see an answer in the forum to what must be a reasonably common issue in this expanding mac world.

I then tried to move it (TM back up files) off with Restore, whilst preserving the TM back ups but I couldn't seem to do it to the i-Macs hard drive nor to partition that to allow this to happen (assuming the lack of a discrete partition was the problem).
That's likely correct. This only works if you restore one entire partition to another, and check the +Erase destination+ box.
The problem was that I could not (maybe for the same contiguous reasons) create a new partition on the old i-Mac just to temporarily move the TM back up to. Without it I could not 'empty' the WDC firewire drive and partition it prior to returning the TM back ups to it albeit contiguously in a dedicated partition.
Unfortunately for me to retain the TM back ups for the account I moved to the new i-Mac, I will have to leave that account on the old i-Mac as well. I can't see a way around that? If I delete the account on it then surely I will lose the ability to Log onto it and then to click TM and see back in time on that account?
If I understand you correctly, that will be true eventually, but not immediately, as TM will, eventually, delete it's copies of anything that's no longer on your internal HD. That will depend, of course, on how long TM can keep it's backups. But while they're still there, if you log on with Admin privileges, you should be able to view the old backups.
Not sure I explained myself clearly. Sorry. Having understood from your earlier help that 'migrate' actually means 'make a copy in another place', I have the migrated account in two places: one now dormant, on the old i-Mac and two, where it is migrated to (the new i-Mac). But TM continues to back up all accounts, indeed everything, on the old i-Mac by dint of its MAC address. So to see the migrated account's past history I assume I have to access the version on the old i-Mac. To put it another way, when logged into one account on the old i-Mac I believe it is not possible to see the TM history and files of another account on that i-Mac despite TM backing the entire HD. You have to be logged in to that account to see it. On the new i-Mac, with its different MAC address, TM is busy creating the first TM back up and I assumed that in the migrate it did not bring TM history as I had read that it is MAC address specific.
The only issue (apart from having this account's history spread over two machines (pre-today on the old i-Mac's TM and today onwards on the new i-Mac) is that I have all the files on both machines. I am not worried about security only unnecessary usage of disk space. It isn't critical, there's lots of it, but it just seems wasteful and untidy. Unless you guys know otherwise?
If I understand what you've done, you do have duplicates of the current contents, but only one copy of the old backups (on the old F/W drive).
On the old i-Mac I have the two accounts I wanted to stay there plus the now dormant account I migrated. TM continues to work away at memorising ALL these although there will be no further changes to the dormant migrated account as I will not be running it on the old i-Mac. On the new i-Mac I have the migrated account of which TM is now creating its first (huge) back up but starting today. There is no history here. So I have copies of everything; its just that the old history of the migrated account remains on the old i-Mac and a new history (does that make sense?) is building from the new one. My point was that if I were to delete the dormant account from the old i-Mac, then I could not access it to use TM with it. I believe TM only shows the history of the account and screen you're in at the time?
There is an option in TM that will allow you to selectively +Delete all backups of+ selected items. +Enter Time Machine,+ locate and select the item(s), click the "gear" icon in the Finder window's toolbar, and select the +Delete all backups of ..+ option.
What you can't do is, keep the backups of only previous versions of things that were changed or deleted. It's all or nothing.
Not sure I understand this. What would have been nice but I do not think is possible is to have moved the account to the new i-Mac together with the TM's back ups of that account and continue to build it up (whilst having access to its history) on the new i-Mac. If that were (is?) possible I could have totally deleted the old account and with it its files from the old i-Mac, freed up some HD space and had a full AND growing TM history all on the new i-Mac.
Many thanks for staying the course and for your continuing help.

How do I change permissions for the documents and files on my Mac Book Pro after I re-instaalled the HD using a Time Machine back-up?

I had to re-install the HD on my Mac Book Pro. I used a Time Machine back-up for all the apps and files. Most were restored, However, I cannot unlock a number of them. I tried changing the permissions using Get info but it is not working. I am using the latest version of Moutain Lion OSX.

Linc:
Very helpful suggestion and response, Thanks for pointing out that it is a permission issue. I am working through the issue and resolving my problem.

How do I find the Library folder on time machine back up disk

I had to rebuild my iMac and wanted to start fresh. I'm useing mountain lion and had everything backed up with time machine. The problem that i'm having is that I can't get the aplication support floder to show up in the library folder that you find under user menu. I know if you hold down the option key while youpull down the go window it will show up on your Mac, but how do I get to the one that is on your time machine backup, useing Moutian Lion? Thanks for any help.

Once you have the folder open in the Finder, enter Time Machine and you'll see the snapshots of the folder.

How do I recover my Bookmarks from a Time Machine Back Up

I just upgraded from a 2 year old MacBook running Snow Leopard to a new MacBook Pro running Lion. Because of the problems Apple has between these 2 operating systems, I can not use the automated Migration Assistant to migrate over any of my old files, user info, or settings to the new machine. I'm having to manually pull over document files and applications from my Time Machine back up disk.
I can't seem to find my Bookmarks from the old computer in my back up files. On the Time Machine drive, I've looked in User, Application Support, Library, amongst many others. Not seeing it anywhere. They don't seem to be in Time Machine at all, or rather they're only there if I do the automated migration for all of my programs and settings. Which of course is not possible, because it leads to massive disk permission errors and a corrupted hard drive on the new machine. One thing I'm realizing i should have done was make a manual back up of my bookmarks in Firefox before I wiped my old machine. If I didn't do this, am I screwed?
If anyone has ideas I would love some help, I really really don't want to lose years of bookmarks.
Oh, and whatever you do, don't buy a Mac with OSX Lion unless you want to waste LOTS of time fixing Apple's mistakes. This whole process has been a disaster so far. There are all kinds of issues with the transition to Lion, I'm 40+ hrs in now. Apple now has their very own version of Vista.

The following has instructions: OS X Mavericks: Restore items backed up with Time Machine
The following is old but specific to iPhoto and may help: iPhoto '11: Restoring from Time Machine with iPhoto '11 (9.2 or later) and OS X Lion 10.7.2 (or later)
Also, see http://www.imore.com/how-set-and-restore-time-machine-backup

Mail 6.2 will no longer open on my macbook pro after migrating my old computer from a time machine back up

Hi,
I recently got a new 13" macbook pro to replace my old macbook.
I did a migration assistant transfer from a time machine back up of my old macbooks data on to my macbook however Mail 6.2 will no lonfer work for me.
It worked fine before the transfer and no it opens ok but if i click 'new viewer window' it unexpectedly quits
Any and all help would be greatly appreciated
Thanks
Pacman481

Eek, sorry for the multiple posting, I keep trying new things and needing to report back. SO, in those accounts that I thought I'd "fixed," I tried going back in and changing the settings back to the way I like them, i.e. leaving the messages on the server for a week (because sometimes I like to see messags on my iphone too) and as soon as I did that, it started downloading old messages before, i.e. back to the same problem.
Meaning, there's no workaround for the account I share with my business partner, because the only way I've "fixed" it on my personal accounts is to have mail removed from the server immediately, which is not possible on the accounts I share. (And is kind of a bummer for my personal accounts, too, given that I like to see mail on my iphone too).
Sorry for info overload, just trying to be helpful and cover all the bases. :-)

HT201250 how do i add external hard drive to my time machine back up

how do i add external hard drive to my time machine back up so that I may view the files independently on apple tv please?

To elaborate on above. I am looking to add about 300gig of photos on an external hard drive to TC.
Once I do this I believe I can then have itunes source its photos from TC without having them stored directly on my iMac?
Then I am assuming once I keep itunes on with home sharing I can stream these photos through Apple TV?
My inital problem is getting the photos onto TC in an individual folder not just a backup folder....is that possible or what would you suggest please?

Time Machine Back Up Problem

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