Time Machine backing up to wrong drive

I woke up this morning to find that my available internal hard disk space had been cut in half. I downloaded a hard disk profiling tool (Disk Inventory X) and found that in /Volumes/Data/ there is now a directory called Backups.backupdb that contains a complete copy of everything on my hard disk, created last night at 2AM.
I opened the Time Machine Preferences panel and looked, and everything appears normal. It's still set to back up to my Time Capsule, just like it was last night. There's no indication that I can find of why it made a complete backup of my internal drive to my internal drive at 2AM.
Has anyone else had an experience like this?
How can I...
- safely delete the newly created backup?
- verify that the existing backup on the Time Capsule is still being updated?
- make sure that it doesn't backup to the internal drive again?
Thanks!

rtempchin wrote:
Has anyone else had an experience like this?
Hi, and welcome to the forums.
Yes, a few folks have.
How can I...
- safely delete the newly created backup?
Turn Time Machine off.
From a Finder window, select +Go > Go to Folder+ from the menubar, then type /Volumes in the prompt.
Delete the Data folder. That will probably take a very long time. Then Restart your Mac.
- verify that the existing backup on the Time Capsule is still being updated?
Do a "full reset" of Time Machine, per #A4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of the +Time Machine+ forum).
Then run a backup and make sure that Data folder doesn't get created again.
- make sure that it doesn't backup to the internal drive again?
Good question. This isn't common, and seems to be caused by your Mac losing contact with the TC's drive at just the wrong time and in just the wrong way. I don't recall seeing an exact cause, or a way to precent it. See: http://db.tidbits.com/article/9620

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Time Machine Back Up 3rd Hard Drive to 4th Hard Drive

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Hi, and welcome to the forums.
Lyssa is correct.
TM can back-up multiple drives/partitions, and each source volume is shown separately in the TM interface, but it's destination must be a single volume. It is possible, of course, for that single volume to be a concatenated Raid set, but that doesn't seem to be what you want.
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Does Time Machine back up USB Flash Drive?

I have a 128GB USB Flash Drive. The contents of this flash drive was restored from a previous external SSD (used as storage and has died on me).
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So when I plug in my USB Flash Drive, it appears in the Exclude List.
However, after I remove the USB Flash Drive from the exclude list and click on Save.
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Because when I open up the Time Machine preference, the USB Flash Drive re-appears in the Exclude List again.
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When I open the HDD I use for Time Machine, I noticed that the latest backup consist of both my MacAir
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What is the format of the volume on the flash drive? It's shown in the Finder Info window.

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Time machine back up other external drive?

Hi folks,
My HD is filling up fast. What I need to know is if I move say, my music and photos to an external drive, will time machine back up the music and photos when they reside on the external drive? I have time machine running on an external drive dedicated to time machine. I'm using OX Mavericks.
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Time Machine Back Up to Thumb Drive?

I see some posts where people say, sure, a USB thumb drive "should" work with Time Machine.
I see this post where it wasn't working for someone:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5674834&#5674834
I see this FAQ where it talks about specific disk formats needed for TM backups (I'm not sure how Flash drives are formatted -- are they user formattable?):
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1771551
So has anyone actually backed up successfully to say an 8GB or 16GB thumb drive?
I know you're all dying to tell me I need a terabyte drive for backups. But actually I have everything excluded from Time Machine's backups except for documents in my User directory. TM often has absolutely nothing to back up if I've been goofing off instead of doing anything productive (all too often). Sometime TM gets to back up the grand total of one changed TextEdit doc at 80kb (It's pretty excited at least to have something to do).
So that 8GB drive will take quite a while to fill up. And then since I don't want to end up with gobs of backed-up data to keep around for the rest of my life on obsolete hard drives, I'll periodically go through that, copy the stuff I actually need to keep to DVD, and purge the drive.
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GenericName123 wrote:
I know you're all dying to tell me I need a terabyte drive for backups. But actually I have everything excluded from Time Machine's backups except for documents in my User directory.
If all you're backing-up is your documents, why do you want to use Time Machine at all? It will do that, but you're not getting any of the advantages of TM.
Something like CarbonCopyCloner, SuperDuper! or the like (most often used to make full, bootable clones, but can do this sort of thing instead) would likely be much better, if they'll work to a thumb drive.
But the larger question is, do you have some sort of backup of your entire system? If not, why not? Unless all you do with your Mac is those documents, you're going to be in a "world of hurt" when your internal HD fails (yes, that's when, not if it fails), or the OS gets corrupted, or other things go wrong or break.
And no, you don't necessarily need a 1 tb external to use TM to back up your entire system. A general rule of thumb is, TM should have 2-3 times the space of the data it's backing-up, not the total size of your internal HD. So if you have, say, 250 gb used, a 500 gb drive would probably work well, depending on your habits. See item #1 in the Frequently Asked Questions post at the top of this forum.
since I don't want to end up with gobs of backed-up data to keep around for the rest of my life on obsolete hard drives
That is how some backup apps work, but not Time Machine. It will fill all the space available to it, but then begin deleting the oldest backups for you, automatically, when it needs room for new ones. And since each TM backup is, in effect, a full copy of everything on your system at the time of the backup, you don't lose the backups of anything current or that was on your system at the time of any remaining backup. Thus you have a continuously-refreshed set of backups.
And by the way, please update your profile so we know what sort of Mac you have, and what version of Leopard you're on. It doesn't much matter for this post, but often it can make a difference.

I can not get Time Machine to back up an external WD Passport 2 TB drive! Has anyone else had this problem? The drive is new and I was running Snow Leopard and upgraded to Lion and it still won't do it. Time Machine backs up the internal drive fine.

I bought 2 2TB WD Passport Drives with the intention of housing my iTunes/iPhoto libraries off my older MacBook. I have successfully transferred the Libraries to one and am using the other one for Time Machine. In Snow Leopard I could back up my computer to Time Machine no problem but when I did not exclude the iTunes/iPhoto drive the back up fails. Both drives have been reformatted, permissions repaired and checked in Disk Utility and one was replaced. I have been to the Genius Bar now 5 times. I have tried using USB drive and FireWire. Both drives are recognized and are working properly otherwise regardless how they are connected. Finally yesterday the Apple store installed Lion to see if that fixed the issue and it did not. Time Machine successfully backed up a USB Flash drive, and today I will try an older external drive. Any ideas on what else to try??? Do I have to resort to third party software like Carbon Copy Cloned to get this done? Any ideas why this wont work? I am using a FireWire converter but as I said, both drives are working normally otherwise (libraries working, time machine working for the computer's hard drive. Any ideas would be appreciated!!?

Thanks so much but none of that helped. It was driving me crazy because it would back up another external drive. I just changed the name of the drive from iPhoto/iTunes Library to Media Libraries and IT WORKED!! I guess for some reason it didn't like the drive being called iPhoto or iTunes ???? I don't understand but I have tried so many solutions and exchanging things out but the name change did it????!!!
Thank you for your help and replying to this. Guess I made my own issue!

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TIme Machine backing up an External Drive

hello
a problem that is really vexing me
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due to the iTunes drive getting full I got a new 1TB drive for that (not the same as Time Machine one as I need one that was USB powered for travelling purposes)
obvioulsy I moved to 2TB drive for time machine then
here is where the problem started, I was told my Time Machine the 2TB needed to be reformatted which was fair enough, so that is not MS-DOS extended (journaled) it immediately went about backing up my macbook straight away
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a tired Ronan in Cork, Ireland

ronanfromcork wrote:
I did check 1TB drive and that is formatted as MS_DOS (Fat) - is that the issue
yes.
TM will not back up drives formatted for winsloth.

HT201250 will time machine back from an external drive

I save all data ,photos documents etc to an external WD My book Live drive and want to back this up.How do I do that in Time machine

With your WD EHD connected to your Mac...
Go to Time Machine > Preferences > Options... then select the + to add your WD EHD...
Some interesting reading here...
http://pondini.org/TM/27.html
See the Green Box.
More Info here > http://pondini.org/TM/10.html
From Pondini’s excellent Information Here...
Frequently Asked Questions

HT201250 Can time machine back up external hard drives too?

I'm new to Time Machine. Can I set it up to back up both my internal HD and an external HD?
Thanks,
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Yes but it's poor advice by Apple for the reason hardware fails just as often as software, if you drop that drive, you have ruined all your backups at the same time.
If you get malware, you have just infected all your backups at the same time.
Apple created TimeMachine and didnt provide a Windows version, in my opinion it's to trap as much as your data as possible so you can't decide to later to switch to a Windows PC without a great deal of pain and effort.
So the more drives you backup with Apple's TimeMachine the more data is trapped in it when the hardware or software fails.
The best advice is to have a multiple backup system and match each piece of hardware with two of it's own seperate hardware backups.
So if you have a boot drive, you need two external backups of it.
If you have a storage drive for extra space, then you need two more drives as backup of that.
Drives are cheap, data is not.
If you drop the only backup, get a power surge, or a criminal breaks in or a fire and it's dead or gone, or get malware, you won't know until it's already infected the first backup restored that it's still on the loose and need ot take stronger measures, your going to wish you had the second backup safe and sound someplace.
Most commonly used backup methods

Time Machine backing up external hard drives?

I have a Macbook Pro connected to two external drives. One is a simple 2 TB drive and the other a 6TB RAID1 drive. Before I switched from OSX 10.6.8 to Mountain Lion, Time Machine appeared to back up both the MacBook Pro and the external 2TB drive to the RAID1 drive. After switching to Mountain Lion, Time Machine seems only to back up the Macbook Pro but not the 2TB external drive to the RAID1.
I have read conflicting information on various discussion groups about whether Time Machine indeed backs up external drives or not.
If Time Machine does NOT back up external drives, i'd be grateful for advice on how to otherwise back up this drive.
thanks very much.

By default, it will exclude all externals.
To have one backed-up, you must remove it from the exclusion list
System Preferences > Time Machne > Options > remove the drive you want backed up from the list

Can time machine back up multiple hard drives

I want to back up the internal drive on my Mac mini as well as an external data rive using Time Machine with a dedicated
second external drive.

Yes. Ensure they're not excluded in the Time Machine pane of System Preferences; if a drive can't be removed from the exclusion list, it's in a format Time Machine can't back up, such as FAT32.
(66191)

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First, since this is *unsupported by Apple,* there's nowhere to go when there's trouble.
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Can Time Machine back up external hard drives?

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Thanks. I had my suspicions about that, but I'm glad to hear it's an easy fix.
And special thanks for the quick answer. It came so fast, I think I felt wind blowing over my keyboard.
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Time Machine backing up to wrong drive

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