Time machine backups and the iTunes library

hello
if i download music from iTunes, i get a message always asking if i would like to back my purchases up to cds.
shouldn't my time machine backup already be taking care of that?
thanks
Wade

There are no tools available to partition a network drive. Only if you break warranty and remove the drive .. plug it into the computer can you partition it.
Nor is moving itunes library a great idea. It has no backup whatsoever.. it is still designed as a target for Time Machine.
See Pondini about mixing data and backups.
Q3 here. http://pondini.org/TM/Time_Capsule.html

Similar Messages

I am setting up a time machine backup to a external Hard drive. I want to backup by Mac book Pro running OSX 10.8.5. I would like to Partition the disk and use one partition for Time machine backups and the other for my Lightroom backups. How to do this?

I want to create a two partition disk. One partition for time machine, the other for Lightroom backup. Currently Time Machine is using the entire drive and it is doing the intial encryption and is about 29% complete after two days. I've decided that I want to turn encryption off and partition the disk. So I do I start over?

With the external drive attached, open Finder>Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility. Select the external drive from the list in the left side panel of the DU window. In the main window panel, click Partition in the buttons top center of that panel.
Select the number of partitions you want and adjust their sizes.
For the first partition, click to highlight the partition, then select the format, Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and then the partition table as GUID [both of those are the defaults]. Click Apply and it will ask to confirm and erase and format that partion...oh, give the partition a name, like Backup.
Then repeat those steps for the second partition..and remember to name it...something like Lightroom.
Close Disk Utilitty and you are ready to send TM to the one partition, and do your backup of Lightroom to the second partition.

Just started my new Macbook Pro, from Time Machine backup and the password is not working

Just got home with my new mackbook pro, and going through the startup process I booted from a time machine back up of my 2007 macbook. When I got to the login part of the process, after the new macbook was registered and ready to go, and now my password is not recognized.

Sorry about that.
I just got done posting back and forth with someone with a similar problem (not exact).
Turn the power off by holding down the power button, that is if just one push does not turn it off.
Then turn it back on and hold down the Option key. That will give you a startup screen where you can select which partition on the drive to boot into. Select the Recovery partition. From there you can use Disk Utility to wipe the Macintosh partition of the drive and then do a reinstall of the OS from the Apple website.
You need a internet connection to do this and depending on your internet speed it can take a few hours to complete. If you have a fairly fast internet connection it may still take 1-2 hours to download the 3.5+GB file to do the reinstall.
Before you go through all this try turning the system off and back on a few time to see if Lion can recover on it's own. I doubt it but it's worth a shot.
Again sorry for the condescending tone.
Happy New Year.

Time Machine backup and main drive corrupted. Help! (REWARD OFFERED)

Here's the deal:
I have a Macbook Pro and a Mac Mini both runnign Snow Leopard. I use the Mac Mini as a kind of media center / server, it has a few external drives connected to it. On of these drives (1GB) is dedicated to Time Machine, the Mac Mini (80 GB hard drive) backs up to it directly and the Macbook Pro (500 GB hard drive) does it over the network (Time Machine created a sparsebundle). This has worked well for years now. Occasionally I got the error that Time Machine needed to start a new backup because the old one was corrupt. That happened about 2-3 times a year (did the same thing when I backued up via USB). Now about 2 weeks ago, that error came up and I just let the Macbook Pro on overnight and connected the ethernet cable for faster transfer.
When I woke up, the Macbook Pro didn't respont at all, spinning beachball, no response at all beside mouse movement. I let it do it's thing for another 10 hours (while I was at work) and just held down the power button to power off and restart it. But all I got was the gray-on-gray flashing folder with the question mark in it, that's what you get when the Mac can't find bootable partitions. So I popped in the OSX Snow Leopard install disk, ran disk utility. It saw the hard drive, but no partition (i.e. Machintosh HD) on it. I checked the Time Machine backup and the sparsebundle was 300 GB (the Macbook Pro had 400 GB used, the remaining 100 GB were free). There is no way to restore from an unfinished Time Machine backup...
First thing I did was clone the internal (Macbook Pro) hard drive to a DMG disk image using DiskDrill (the only program I found that could recognize the drive at all, not even DiskWarrior could). I also bought the exact same hard drive model and partitioned it like the cloned the corrupted hard drive to the new one using ddrescue (a command line tool that doesn't quit upon i/o errors but proceeds and tries to recover as much as it can). It copied everything except 65 kilobytes, the corrupted drive seemed to be physically damaged in a bunch of sectors relatively at the beginning of the disk. Since I had now an exact copy on a fresh, healthy drive, I went crazy trying out Disk Warrior (didn't recognize the drive at all), data rescue, testdisc, p a Windows isk, etc. Only R-Studio (on windows) showed the EFI and Macintosh HD partitions on there, they started and ended on the same sectors on the corrupted drive and its clone. After some research, I figured that the partition table was corrupt so I reformated the clone disk using the OSX Snow Leopard install disk (1 HFS Journaled Partition with GUID Partition table). R-Studio showed the EFI and Macintosh HD on that reformated drive, again, same sectors as before. So I figured I could just copy just the bytes where the Macintosh HD starts from the corrupted drive to the clone (using ddrescue). That worked, after almost 24 hours, I had the clone drive with a "disk1" partition on it that even disk utility could see.
Now I was able to run Disk Warrior on it, but all it could do was recover a few Application folders (Resource-Folders and lproj-stuff), about 100 MB in total. It couldn't repair more of catalog file apparently. Luckily, Time Machine backed up quite a bit (300 GB out of 400 GB of data) and I was able to manually copy all the Dokuments, Desktop, user Library, Applications, Music, Download and Movies. Unfortunatley, only a little bit of the Pictures folder was copied. iPhoto library (80 to 100 GB) was nowhere to be found, backup must have failed right then. I can salvage the drives (time machine drive, original hard drive with a few broken sectors, DMG-image of that drive, 1-1 copy of that drive with partition table repaired) but that only gives me files with numeric names and today's date on teh JPEGs (instead of the date the picture was taken).
Is there any way I can recover that iPhoto library? It appears the catalog file got corrupted because the hard drive (only 8 months old...) failed on a few sectors. If I understand it correctly, the catalog file on HFS+ file systems is where the folder structure and file names are stored in a B-Tree. I can't imagine that some i/o error during backup can totally annihilate that file when it was working perfectly before. Here's a few things I want to try out but haven't figured out how so far:
- Time Machine had to start a new backup. There's plenty of free space on that drive so there's a good chance there's old data left on it. Is there a way to restore files (including file names) and fodlers from deleted time machine backups?
- Is there any way to re-build that catalog file from what is there left on the original hard drive? I can't imagine 65 kilobytes destroys it all.
- Are there other ways to recover my iPhoto Library? The raw JPEG (and AVI) files with correct file names or metadata would suffice.
Thanks in advance for any help, I'll actually reward the person with a working solution, 5 years of photo memories are somewhat important. It really ***** that a failure during a backup destroys that...

Final Update:
The catalog file on the original hard drive could not be fixed. Seems like Mac OSX tried to repair the catalog file while the sectors this file resides on failed. To make things worse the partition table was also broken beyond repair, even overwriting the sectors with a new correct partition table didn't help. DiskWarrior found less then 100 MB worth of stuff, mainly Applications folders.
I recovered pretty much everything from the incomplete Time Machine backup by right-clicking the sparsebundle and browsing through the folders with the long alphanumeric names, looking for the version of the folder with the most files in there. All I was missing was part of the ~/Pictures folder, i.e. photobooth pictures and the whole iPhoto Library. My best option was to recover these files using data recovery tools.
DiskDrill proved to be the absolute best, fast, responsive, efficient, and the only one able to mount the DMG-file with no valid file system on it. As there were many i/o errors and broken sectors on the original hard drive, I made a copy of it using a free command line tool called ddrescue (the standard dd tool just aborted when it encountered the i/o error). ddrescue copied the whole drive to a DMG image, I had 56 kilobytes with errors on the first pass, but it managed to shrink that down to just 4 kilobytes (wow!) after the second pass where it tries to re-read the broken secors. It took about 24 hours for a 512 GB 2.5" drive (5400 rpm) but well worth it. Be advised that ddrescue is really persistent and tries everything to recover those last errorneous bytes. At the very end of the process, the read/write head of the hard drive just goes wild trying to catch the data on the sectors with different momentum. This works but I assume this is pretty damaging for the original drive. I also copied it all to a new hard drive (again using ddrescue) and tried partition and catalog repair tools on that (DiskWarrion, testdiks, pdisk, etc.). Still no hint of a good result.
I made a deep scan on the clone hard drive with DiskDrill. At the end (after about 8 hours over USB) it found 13 partition (I assume that's the Macintosh HD, EFI and some DMG files lying around) and hundreds of thousands of pictures. I restored some JPG files just to check the quality, some were damaged, some were good with all the EXIF data intact. I just made it copy all JPG files into a folder. I know the pictures taken from my camera produce JPGs larger than 1 MB and smaller than 5 MB, so I sorted them by size and moved the smaller and larger files into seperate folders. I took the remaining folder (100 GB) and just dragged it into iPhoto. It imported them overnight. Auto-Split by events and I got my library back, alas with different file names, originals and edited versions side by side, lots of duplicates, some damaged, some not. But hey, all the pictures in chronological order. Okay there was also one large event with all the JPGs without valid EXIF data landed inside, iPhoto just takes the file creation date (i.e. the date where the recovered file was copied). As far as I can tell, these are all just data corpses, halfway overwritten copies, random pictures from the internet, desktop pictures, etc.
I started to work my way back through the events, deleting the duplicates and renaming the events. There's an app called "Duplicate Annihilator" which apparently can find duplicate pictures in iPhoto and mark them for you. The free version only does 500 pictures but if it works, I'll get the full version. It can mark th eduplicate photos by adding something to the picture comment in iPhoto so you can manually review it all. Good stuff!

Does a Time Machine backup include the Apple_Boot Recovery HD?

I've done a Time Machine backup with the Apple_Boot Recover HD on my internal drive. (Mid 2011 MacBook Air - OS X version 10.7.2 - single user)
Two questions:
Did the Time Machine backup include the Apple_Boot Recovery HD?
If I subsequently need to restore the backup will Time Machine recreate the Apple_Boot Recovery HD on the internal drive?
Thanks in advance for your help,

If you run the command "diskutil list" in terminal, it will show if you have the rescue partition on your disk or not:-
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk2
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.2 GB   disk2s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot                         650.0 MB   disk2s3
if you see the "Apple_Boot 650.0 MB" then you have the rescue partition.
I have just restored my machine from a Time Machine backup, and the Apple_Boot partition has dissapeared.

I accidentally deleted my media files from iTunes and Trash when I was trying to move the files to an external hard drive. Is there a way to restore the media files from a Time Machine backup or from iTunes Match? What are the steps to do this?

I accidentally deleted my media files from iTunes and Trash when I was trying to move the files to an external hard drive. Is there a way to restore the media files from a Time Machine backup or from iTunes Match? What are the steps to do this?

If you have been backing up on Timemachine.
All you need to do is enter time machine... Then the rest is obvious.
Find the iTunes folder and hit 'Restor'.
If not the only way to get all your iTunes music back is to enter iTunes Store.
On the right hand side you should see 'Purchased'.
Click 'purchased' and there you have it.

The iPhoto library is a Time Machine backup, and so cannot be used as the main library. Reopen iPhoto with the Option key held down to choose another library.

I recently tried to look up my pictures on my time machine back up on an external hard drive. As soon as I try to open it I get the following message.
"The iPhoto library is a Time Machine backup, and so cannot be used as the main library. Reopen iPhoto with the Option key held down to choose another library."
I have tried holding down the option key but still couldn't few the photos.
I want to know if there is anyway I can actually view these photos. I have over 85gbs of photos on the hard drive. I have tried googling and looking at pervious forums with the same problem but nothing is working.
Please help!

Select Mac Help from the Finder's Help menu. Search for "Restore items backed up with Time Machine."

HT201250 (1) Where is the "Time Machine menu" and the choice to "Enter Time Machine" (mentioned in the "Restoring data from Time Machine backups" section)?

1) Where do I find the "Time Machine menu" and the choice to "Enter Time Machine" (as mentioned in the "Restoring data from Time Machine backups" section in the Mac Support article "Mac Basics: Time Machine")?
2) How would I restore e.g. a particular photo from a backup I made with Time Machine? I can see how this is done with Word documents, but can't see how to do it with photos?

Welcome to Apple Support Communities
1. The Time Machine icon is on the menu bar.
2. If you want to do that with individual photos, it's the same way as for documents. If you want to do it with iPhoto, you have to restore the whole iPhoto library, not only one photo

I am trying to upgrade from Tiger to Snow Leopard. When I insert the disk and install starts, it states "This disk is used for Time Machine backups" and Mac OSX can't be installed. Does anyone know how to correct this (since Tiger doesn't have Time Mach

I am trying to upgrade from Tiger to Snow Leopard. When I insert the disk and install starts, it states "This disk is used for Time Machine backups" and Mac OSX can't be installed. Does anyone know how to correct this (since Tiger doesn't have Time Machine)?

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2986

I restored a Macbook Pro from a Time Machine backup and now none of my passwords are working (and I know they are the correct passwords). What can I do?

I restored a Macbook Pro from a Time Machine backup and now none of my passwords are working (and I know they are the correct passwords). What can I do?

First, make sure caps lock is not on.
Another reason why the password might not be recognized is that the keyboard layout (input source) has been switched without your realizing it. You can select one of the available layouts by choosing from the flag menu in the upper right corner, if it's showing, or cycle through them by pressing the key combination command-space or command-option-space. See also this support article.
If the user account is associated with an Apple ID, and you know the Apple ID password, then maybe the Apple ID can be used to reset your user account password. In OS X 10.10 and later, this option also works with FileVault, but only if you enabled it when you activated FileVault. It's not retroactive. Otherwise, see below.
Note: If you've activated FileVault, this procedure doesn't apply. Follow instead these instructions.
Start up in Recovery mode. When the OS X Utilities window appears, select
Utilities ▹ Terminal
from the menu bar at the top of the screen—not from any of the items in the OS X Utilities window.
In the window that opens, type this:
resetp
Press the tab key. The partial command you typed will automatically be completed to this:
resetpassword
Press return. A Reset Password window opens. Close the Terminal window to get it out of the way.
Select the startup volume ("Macintosh HD," unless you gave it a different name) if not already selected. You won't be able to do this if FileVault is active.
Select your username from the menu labeled Select the user account if not already selected.
Follow the prompts to reset the password. It's safest to choose a password that includes only the characters a-z, A-Z, and 0-9.
Select
 ▹ Restart
from the menu bar.
You should now be able to log in with the new password, but the Keychain will be reset (empty.) If you've forgotten the Keychain password (which is ordinarily the same as the login password), there's no way to recover it.

Can the time capsule be used as both a time machine backup and NAS storage

Can the time capsule be used as both a time machine backup and NAS storage? I want to use the drive as external, wireless storage for all of my files so all my PCs, MACs and iOS devices can access the files. Plus, I want to use the drive for backing up my iMac via time machine. Can the time capsule device be used for both these purposes simultaneously? If not, are the other suggestions on how I can do this?

Can the time capsule device be used for both these purposes simultaneously?
It can, but is really not recommended. Sooner or later there will be a fight for space on the drive between Time Machine and the other files.
If you have plenty of free space on the drive, you can do this......but.....have you thought about how you will back up the "other" files that are stored on the Time Capsule?

I have already used time machine backup and I last used on june 2012 . Today when I tried to backup the time machine is still stuck on preparing my backup?What shallI do?

I have already used time machine backup and I last used on june 2012 . Today when I tried to backup the time machine is still stuck on preparing my backup?What shallI do?

See Section C here > http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
From Here > http://pondini.org

Time Machine backup and Manual Backups

I currently am using a external drive for Time Machine backups and was wondering if I could take say my iTunes library that I have on another External drive and store it on the same drive that Time Machine is backing up to. Is this possible or will Time Machine take over the whole drive not letting me add different files and folders I want to back up myself? Thanks in advance.

Krasi wrote:
I currently am using a external drive for Time Machine backups and was wondering if I could take say my iTunes library that I have on another External drive and store it on the same drive that Time Machine is backing up to. Is this possible or will Time Machine take over the whole drive not letting me add different files and folders I want to back up myself? Thanks in advance.
You can do that.
(with this caveat):
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/11421.html
Note: Time Machine works best if you use your backup disk only for Time Machine backups. If you keep files on your backup disk, Time Machine won’t back up those files, and the space available for Time Machine backups will be reduced.
-mj
[email protected]
Message was edited by: macjack

Time capsule as time machine backup and NAS?

I've read the TC section of the website and notice a blurb about computers able to connect to it as a HDD.
I realize the device has yet to be released but was wondering about this. I have a handfull of macs and a handfull of xp machines on my network (wired and wireless)
1 of my XP machine is just used as a file server. (1.5TB NTFS formated holding all video/audio/docs as well as having iTunes running to download HD podcast) All computers (Mac/XP) can access this. Five of my XP computers are MCE2005 which are configured to record SD and HD shows directly to this box.
I have yet to have a HFS formated drive to actually do time machine backups and I would like to start. I understand that going with TC I will loose some abilities I currently have by running a dedicated computer/file server but I like the fact that it is small and self contained.
I just want to make sure I understand the specifiations correctly. Can I make a various folders on TC and then map it to my Mac/XP machines via windows naming convention (ie \\TimeMachine\RecordedTV\)
I am in the process of upgrading my file server so this would be a perfect time to think about going this route. Should TC not meet my needs I will continue with my build of a Raid 5 server.

Until we get more information, at the present time the only certain thing we know about Time Capsule is that it will support TimeMachine backups.
What we don't know:
1. whether TimeMachine backups to network drives other than Time Capsule will ever be supported
2. whether the Time Capsule internal drive can be used for general file storage, or only Time Machine backups. Current information on Apple's web site could be interpreted either way. I suspect it can be used for general file storage - but that is just my opinion.
If it is not essential that you make a purchasing decision before Time Capsule ships within the next month (and more detailed information becomes available) I suggest you wait. My two cents worth of opinion - if it is general file storage that you want, and Time Machine automated backups are not a priority on the "wish list", then I think you would be far better off setting up your own network file server rather than using Time Capsule for this purpose.

Corrupted time machine backup and Migration tool

Thanks in advance to anyone that is able to help. Sorry for the long read.
Recently I replaced my hard drive because it was slowing down and had a very large number of bad sectors. After replacing the HD with a new one I tried to use migration assistant to move my information from the old one. As has happend with many bad hard drives it could not detect the old drive. This always happens if I try to migrate from a drive with bad sectors. The healthy ones always work.
So in an attempt to make the migration tool see the files and migrate them I am trying to use the old drive to spoof a Time machine backup.
First I set my old HD as the location of the new mac's TM backup just to get a TM backup file in place. The fist problem I ran into was that time machine backups are write protected at the kernel level and can't be modified. I found a helper module in the TMsafetynet kext that does this write protection and so, I can delete files in the backup like so.
sudo /System/Library/Extensions/TMsafetynet.kext/Helpers/bypass rm -Rfv /Volumes/TIMEMACHINEDRIVE/Backups.backupdb/whatever files to delete
And so, I removed and modified the files in the time machine backup slightly and migration assistant as well as time machine reflected the changes perfectly without error.
Next I deleted all that was in the time machine backup, I then moved the entire contents of my old drive into this time machine backup file in such a way as to mimic a normal time machine backup.
The good news is that time machine reads my jimmy rigged backup perfectly (which looks pretty wierd since there is no continuity between past and present), But migration assistant now does not see it.
If anyone is able to help that would be awesome. I replace bad hard drives all the time that won't copy with migration assistant, transferring the files manually isnt easy or clean. It's a pain.
Thanks a million for any advice!

Thanks in advance to anyone that is able to help. Sorry for the long read.
Recently I replaced my hard drive because it was slowing down and had a very large number of bad sectors. After replacing the HD with a new one I tried to use migration assistant to move my information from the old one. As has happend with many bad hard drives it could not detect the old drive. This always happens if I try to migrate from a drive with bad sectors. The healthy ones always work.
So in an attempt to make the migration tool see the files and migrate them I am trying to use the old drive to spoof a Time machine backup.
First I set my old HD as the location of the new mac's TM backup just to get a TM backup file in place. The fist problem I ran into was that time machine backups are write protected at the kernel level and can't be modified. I found a helper module in the TMsafetynet kext that does this write protection and so, I can delete files in the backup like so.
sudo /System/Library/Extensions/TMsafetynet.kext/Helpers/bypass rm -Rfv /Volumes/TIMEMACHINEDRIVE/Backups.backupdb/whatever files to delete
And so, I removed and modified the files in the time machine backup slightly and migration assistant as well as time machine reflected the changes perfectly without error.
Next I deleted all that was in the time machine backup, I then moved the entire contents of my old drive into this time machine backup file in such a way as to mimic a normal time machine backup.
The good news is that time machine reads my jimmy rigged backup perfectly (which looks pretty wierd since there is no continuity between past and present), But migration assistant now does not see it.
If anyone is able to help that would be awesome. I replace bad hard drives all the time that won't copy with migration assistant, transferring the files manually isnt easy or clean. It's a pain.
Thanks a million for any advice!

Time machine backups and the iTunes library

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