Time Machine backups seem to stop being active prior to 13th December 2009

Hi,
The earliest date on my TM backup time-line (on the right hand side of the screen) is "July 2009" - when I installed the Lacie 1TB backup drive on my iMac.
The bar icons are "light grey" back to "Sunday 13th December" and then "dark grey" prior to this date. The driver has 400GB+ free space available and I have never had a "need to delete earliest backup" message.
I am sure this must be "dumb question" - but why can't I got back further than last Sunday?
The dates all pop-out of the bar back to July - but it will not scroll back in time to let me see those files?
Thanks in anticipation
Mark

There are a couple of possibilities:
If what you're looking at when you enter Time Machine wasn't available at the time of every backup, that backup will be grayed-out. For example, if it's backing-up an external HD, that isn't always attached, you'll see all the dates in the timelines, but the backups done while the disk wasn't attached will be grayed-out. Similarly, if you made a new folder on 12/13, and start with a Finder window set to that folder, you can't select a backup prior to 12/13.
You'll see similar conditions if you rename your internal HD: TM treats it as an entirely different disk. The same will happen if you rename any folder.
The other possibility is, TM started a new "sequence" of backups for some reason. See #E2 of the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.

Similar Messages

Time Machine backups seem to be being randomly deleted

I was away in May-June and my time capsule was disconnected. When I left I had daily backups for most but not all the days in the previous month (a few days were missing due to absences from home). The first backup since my return was on Saturday 16th April. In the three days since then, backups for the month prior to my departure seem to have been deleted in a random fashion. All that remain are those for 28th April, 5th and 12th May, all Saturdays. Until yesterday I had a backup for Sunday April 15th, as the last one that had been kept prior to the 28th. That was deleted overnight. I now have weeklies going back from Wednesday April 11th: namely April 4th, March 27th etc. But I am getting worried that those too might go. Can anyone explain what is happening?
Just to point out that my time capsule is currently connected via ethernet cable and I am using TimeMachine Scheduler to restrict backups to the wee hours.

Londinense wrote:
I think I can rule out the fact that my MacBook has been connected via ethernet
Yes, that makes no difference.
So could the problem have been caused by TimeMachien Scheduler, which I have only been using since March or thereabouts? What do you think of that app?
I don't think so, but anything's possible. All those apps do is start a backup; all the actual work is done by the normal OSX programming -- there's no way to alter the "thinning" schedule.
I don't recommend altering Time Machine's default schedule of hourly backups. Unless you're making lots of changes to large files, the backups should be fast and unobtrusive. If they do cause performance problems, then something else is wrong. Reducing the schedule is just dealing with the symptoms.
If the backups are too large, considering what you've done since the last backup, see #D4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
If the sizes seem reasonable, but the backups are slow and/or affect the performance of your Mac, see #D2 there.

Time Machine Backup seems to run constantly

My Time Machine backup seems to run constantly. When it happens, performance is also affected. Although a system restart will seems to get everything back to normal, the problem comes back. Any thoughts on what I am doing to cause the problem?

Thanks Mike,
I'm a bit new to Macs really and thought that once backed up, on my NAS system I would be able to view the photos etc. but I presume this isn't the case and I should not back up the photos as part of the Time Machine backup and back these up seperately in order to view them remotely etc?
Thanks in advance for any advice.

Time machine backup seems to only have a Sparsebundle folder

I have had my MacBook for a couple of years and have only just got round to backing it up. I set off Time Machine lat night for a 200Gb backup. This morning I checked it and the Time machine backup seems to only have a Sparsebundle folder of 1000s of small files but apparently no iTunes or photos??
Any ideas????

Thanks Mike,
I'm a bit new to Macs really and thought that once backed up, on my NAS system I would be able to view the photos etc. but I presume this isn't the case and I should not back up the photos as part of the Time Machine backup and back these up seperately in order to view them remotely etc?
Thanks in advance for any advice.

Time machine backups seem to be gone

I have been running time machine flawlessly for a while. However, on April 26, I created a new user account. I dragged a very large file (clone of a different computer and time machine backup of a different computer) to that user desktop. Those files were previously being excluded from backups. Apparently, wehn I moved them to the new user it tried to include them and I got a warning about the External Drive not being large enough for the backups. I sorted out excluding that user completely but now I can not access any backups prior to the new user being created. Are they lost forever? Did it delete the External Drive to try to make room for the backup? I would think that it would have to check the size before it even does any deleting and then if it knew the backup was too big it wouldn't delete and it would just abort the backup. Can anyone help? When I enter into time machine the last backup shown is April 26, when I browse the drive the oldest folder is April 26 and when I look at the time machine menu it says the oldest backup is April 26.
I am using an iMac with Snow Leopard installed.
Also, I tried looking at the logs in the console but I could not seem to go back far enough.

Are you going into Time Machine from the old user? If you enter Time Machine from the new user, you won't see any files created before that user existed.
You can manually go into your Time Machine volume from the Finder, just to verify that your backups are all there. Don't make any changes in the Finder. Even if Time Machine's "starfield" interface isn't functional, you could still restore files manually if you had to. If Time Machine is really confused, best option is usually to just erase the Time Machine drive and start a fresh one.

Time Machine Backup seems to freeze after a few megabytes saying Estimating TIme Remaining

My MBP (mid 2009, osx10.8.5) seems to take forever to Time Machine Backup. I'm backing up to an external (USB) disk that has plenty of memory. THe backup starts (Status window opens), Status says "Backing up 1,314,593 items", climbs to about 310 MB of 325.01 GB and then just sits there with a line that says "Estimating time remaining". I've let this sit for 2 hours so far and no other messages or errors. I haven't done this in a while and a previous , partial, Time Machine Backup was on this USB drive but I deleted everything on it because there wasn't enough space to do the new Time Machine Backup. It will have to do a full backup I'm sure, so I expect it to take a while to back up over 300GB but I don't see anything being copied to the backup disk, except the "Backups.backupdb" folder. It stays at about 265MB.

Try D4/3 in the 1st linked article.
Time Machine Troubleshooting
Time Machine Troubleshooting Problems

Time machine backup done but hard drive activity continues

I backup infrequently my macbook pro to an external firewire hard drive. Prior to today's backup, I changed a setting in the control panel to exclude the system, applications and library. I happened to notice that the prior backup failed. So today, I initiate the backup and when it finishes (as seen in the control panel window and with a still icon at the top of the screen, the hard drive continues to have activity. It is still going at the same level of activity now for over 90 min. A second time machine backup has taken place as well.
Why is this happening. I am not using the drive for anything else. If I unmount the drive, will the backup fail? Is the backup still progressing, even though all other indications say it is finished? Could this activity be the computer indexing the drive? I am not using the drive for any other reason today. I am not looking at folders or moving any files. 214 of 465 GB are available as seen from the time machine preference window.
I am using Leopard with the latest software updates.

andrew70301 wrote:
I backup infrequently my macbook pro to an external firewire hard drive. Prior to today's backup, I changed a setting in the control panel to exclude the system, applications and library. I happened to notice that the prior backup failed. So today, I initiate the backup and when it finishes (as seen in the control panel window and with a still icon at the top of the screen, the hard drive continues to have activity. It is still going at the same level of activity now for over 90 min. A second time machine backup has taken place as well.
Time Machine will do a "second pass" backup if more changes have occurred while it was doing the first one. Ordinarily, that's very quick and most folks rarely notice it. But if there's trouble on either your internal or TM disk, it can take a while.
Could this activity be the computer indexing the drive?
Possibly. Spotlight and Time Machine both use the mds process, and on occasion the two conflict, especially on large backups, slowing or even hanging the backup. Exclude your TM drive from Spotlight indexing, at least temporarily, via System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy.
It could also be that your drive is beginning to fail.
Part of your problem may lie in the word "infrequently" -- TM usually works best if you let it do it's hourly backups. After several days, especially if there have been lots of changes, it may do a new, full backup.
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 here, along with details: how frequent is "infrequent;" how much data is on your internal HD; how big is your TM disk.
And please update your profile, so we know what kind of Mac you have, and which version of Leopard you're on (it now shows 10.4.11!)

Time Machine Backups Seem to take a long time

I'm running OS X 10.5.8 on a G5 iMac, and I've noticed some strange behavior recently when Time Machine does it's back ups. I back up to a LaCie external drive with a capacity of 465 GB and it currently has 65GB available. When Time Machine does it back ups, it seems to take a very long time, eventhough not much has changed. It might go for 30min to an hour. Sometimes the back up fails. I've tried to stop the back up, but that doesn't stop Time Machine, and also System Preferences becomes unresponsive. I can't quit or force quit System Preferences. I have to turn off the iMac to quit System Preferences by holding in the power button. I'm not sure if this is a Time Machine issue, or an issue with the external HD. I know the iMac is a bit dated, and due to be replaced. The HD is also at least 3-4 years old, and has only been used as my Time Machine back up. Any ideas on how I might fix this? Thanks!!

ELFritzen wrote:
I had problems verifiying and repairing the LaCie HD. At first the the computer would hang on "verifying" the HD. I finally got the HD verified by switching the on/off/auto switch on the HD from auto to on. At this point verification went quickly.
That doesn't sound good.
Try different port(s), cables, and combinations of the two (a plug that works fine in one port may not make good contact in another).
Do you have (or can you borrow) another HD you can try?
Or another Mac you can try with that drive?
As an extra measure, I tried to repair the HD, but again the program hung up and I had to reboot.
Just for future reference, there's no point to verifying an external HD -- just run Repair. They both do all the same checks. Starting with Verify on your startup drive makes sense, since, if there's a problem, you have to start from another source to repair it.

Why does time machine backup seems to freeze iMac

Have just attached external hard drive to my new iMac - backup appears to have worked (although no confirmation). However, when clicking on icon in desktop, time machine is entered then freezes. Only way to get out is by disconnecting the hard drive from the USB port. Additionally, even if I'm not in Time Machine, but with the hard disk connected, I appear to be unable to turn the iMac off.
What am I doing wrong - have I not left things long enough to backup?

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
Sounds to me your hard drive doesn't have the appropriate firmware to be compatible with your version of Mac OS X. See my FAQ*:
http://www.macmaps.com/firewirebug2.html
Fortunately you can take the hard drive out and put it inside another case that does work. You can purchase these cases from http://www.macsales.com/ even in the UK.
- * Links to my pages may give me compensation.

Can I reconnect Time Machine backup after drive swap on OS X 10.6?

Hi,
I swapped my MacMini's HD few days ago (previous one was dying, had hardware issues). I used CCC and replaced with a hybrid drive. So far, so good. However, when I plugged back the external USB drive were I keep my Time Machine backups, it is not being recognized, TM wants to run a new full set.
I did some research and discovered that TM may use the HD or machine's UUID and that's why it's triggering the new FULL.
I also found this article by Pondini (which seems to be a guru on the topic, lol ):
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090213071015789
But attrb is not working, I guess such command it's not available on 10.6.8 ? ...
How can I reconnect Time Machine backups to the new HD? Or ... I simply cannot and I will have to delete and run a FULL set? I would prefer to keep my old backups, if possible, but it seems that with my OSX version that's not possible without workarounds.
Thanks in advance,

** EDIT **
The trick did not work :-(
I entered into TM and while I can see the old backups , I can't select them or do anything with them. Clearly, they have not been identified as previous backups, hence the reason for Today's FULL.
Ohh boy ... I'm about to give up ...

Time machine backup, now all applications are gone and cant reinstall anything

My computer froze earlier today and I rebooted and I kept getting the grey loading circle. Nothing seemed to work so I loaded in safe mode and reinstalled from an earlier version of a backup i had on time machine. When the computer booted back up, all the applications on the computer were gone, replaced by little grey question marks. I had no access to the internet and none of my other time machine backups seem to have applications either.
I have tired command R to reinstall, and that doesnt work either. I have a copy of 10.6.3 Snow Leopard on disc but that doesnt work either because when I try to launch it, i get a message saying the application needed to launch snow leopard is not available.
I am at a loss as to what to do. I cant install any applications that i know of to let me install snow leopard so I am left with a brick.
I was running Lion at the time, but i have no backup copy of that, and no way to put it on here. I would like to do a clean install with snow leopard, any tips you could give me to help would be great.

What happens when you try to start holding Command and R keys?
From what I see, it looks like you restored a Snow Leopard backup onto Lion, which damages OS X.
Now, what I recommend you to do is to insert the Snow Leopard DVD you have and hold the C key while your computer is starting. Then, choose your language, go to Utilities menu (on the menu bar), choose the option to restore a backup and follow the steps.
After restoring the backup, open  > Software Update, and install the latest version. Finally, upgrade to OS X Lion by downloading it from the Mac App Store

Unable to install Lion. Installer says disk is used for Time Machine backups. But it's my Mac's HD.

On attempt to install Lion from CD, the installer says: "Mac OSX cannot be installed on "Macintosh HD". This disk is used for Time Machine backups."
I have an external drive that I've been using for Time Machine backups, but it stopped functioning recently and I have not replaced it.
Is there a workaround?
Thx in advance. Bryant

Maybe this http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2986 can help you.
Stefan

Can a Server install alter a Time Machine backup's permissions?

I'm trying to change a server from Advanced to Simple, so I'd planned to:
1) Run a final Time Machine backup
2) Shut the server down
3) Reinstall Leopard Server from scratch
4) Reinstall any/all needed apps or files using Time Machine.
The first snag I ran into was that after step 3) all files in the Time Machine backup seemed to have had their permissions altered so that I could not access the folders and could not make changes to the files.
Based on help from someone else I was able to find out that an ACL is in effect on these files.
I also had some files stored on the Time Machine Backups drive as regular files....these do not appear to have the ACL applied.
When I couldn't figure out how to deal with that I went ahead and did a Full Restore using the Leopard Server Install DVD. This went without a hitch and the Time Machine backup files no longer appeared to have the ACL applied.
So can installing Leopard Server using all defaults where possible (excl. server name and such) and using the Simple server options alter the existing backups on a Time Machine Backups disk like this? Is there something I can/should be doing differently to get this to work "correctly"? Reinstalling from scratch again is still an option if there's something different to try.
Thanks in advance!
-Matt
P.S. I was expecting to have to do some manual reconstruction on the mail server that runs on this box, but didn't expect issues like this so any help is appreciated!

Hi, if I understand correctly yes, but may I ask the purpose of doing so?

I am trying to do a full Time Machine Backup to a new external disk. The backup starts, and it says "Time remaining about 4 days." That seems like a very long time, but the real problem is that the computer "logs off" after a few hours, and the b.u. stops

I am trying to do a full Time Machine Backup to a new external disk. The backup starts, and it says "Time remaining about 4 days." That seems like a very long time, but the real problem is that the computer "logs off" after a few hours, and the backup stops. The system preferences are set to "Never" for Computer sleep and Display sleep. The computer does not ordinarily log off automatically, but it has done this twice since I started the Time Machine backup.

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Enter the word "Starting" (without the quotes) in the String Matching text field. You should now see log messages with the words "Starting * backup," where * represents any of the words "automatic," "manual," or "standard." Note the timestamp of the last such message. Clear the text field and scroll back in the log to that time. Select the messages timestamped from then until the end of the backup, or the end of the log if that's not clear. Copy them (command-C) to the Clipboard. Paste (command-V) into a reply to this message.
If all you see are messages that contain the word "Starting," you didn't clear the search box.
If there are runs of repeated messages, post only one example of each. Don't post many repetitions of the same message.
When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Some personal information, such as the names of your files, may be included — anonymize before posting.

Time Machine backup shows "stopping backup" after just a few Gb.

Time Machine backup shows "stopping backup" after just a few Gb.
Finder shown as "not responding" in Activity Monitor.
1. How to escape from that situation?
2. How to prevent it happening again?
Thanks in advance for help.

Thanks for the suggestion, and apologies for the delayed response.
I have had a couple of looks through Pondini's site, but haven't (so far) found exactly what I am experiencing.
In the meantime, I am becoming suspicious of the disk (a Toshiba e-Stor 1Tb) and/or the cable connection. A couple of days ago I set it up with the cable in one of the USB ports on the computer itself, which I understand is supposed to be preferable (to using a hub).
Initially, straightforward copying of folders via the Finder seemed to work, although some failed because the system thought they were 'in use' (another apparently known problem). However, I managed to copy three folders earlier this week, but today, they have simply disappeared from the external disk! The partial backup (from TM) is still visible.
Finder's behaviour is also still rather odd. When I clicked on the external drive to see what content it included, Finder took ages, and Activity Monitor said it was 'not responding' for a time, though that did sort itself out this time, after a few minutes.
To ensure that I have covered everything, I should point out that I have partitioned the disk using the Mac Disk Utility, so that there is a Mac partition and a Windows (FAT) partition that I intend to use for a Windows computer. Apologies for using such bad words on a Mac forum!

Time Machine backups seem to stop being active prior to 13th December 2009

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for