Time Machine breaks thumbnails?

I've got a 14GB Aperture library (12K+ images) where about 98% of the images are referenced (I use Aperture for keywords and adjustments and keep the files on a NAS). My library has started acting very odd of late - sometimes I'll open it and a few previews will be missing (seems totally random). Other times I'll open it and nearly all previews will be blank.
I've tried many of the troubleshooting tips - consistency check, rebuilding the database, etc. and sometimes it seems to fix it, but it comes back very quickly. If I try to force rebuild previews, nothing happens inside Aperture.
I get the feeling that Time Machine might be messing things up - is Time Machine smart enough to sense the following scenario: If Time Machine is backing up (and presumably aperture too) and I open apterture as this is happening, does it know how to stop that part of the backup?
The one thing that does NOT happen is the vicious rebuilding of previews on every start up of Aperture.
I'm kind of at a loss...

My images aren't referenced, and I never have Aperture running when I use Time Machine, and I have the Aperture library excluded from Time Machine, but I still have a bunch of my thumbnails missing. I've also tried rebuilding the library and doing a consistency check, and the generate thumbnail option doesn't do anything. I just have grey thumbnails with a dotted line around them. If I move my mouse cursor over them I see "Generating thumbnail" status message flicker in the status area, but the thumbnail never gets generated. I'm not sure what caused this, but I think the first time it happened was after updating to 10.5.6.
I have reported this as a bug on bugreporter.apple.com and I suggest you do too, so Apple is aware of the issue.

Similar Messages

After restore backup from time machine, all thumbnails in photos are blank. How to fix ?

After restore backup from time machine, all thumbnails in photos are blank. How to fix ?
I'm using Yosemite 10.10.3 and Photos. i have tried repair database, but no success .

Try these for the first attempt:
First be sure to have a backup copy of the library if you already don't have one.
OT

HT3275 Time Machine Breaks in Mountain Lion after 1st backup

I have been having great problem within both Lion and Mountian Lion and Time Machine. After only a single backup the next backup will ALWAYS FAIL!. When I run Disk Tools to repair the disk for it, I am also always have to do a force eject to remove it from the desk top in order to repair it. It alway finds some errors. I had thought that perhaps the disk may have bad sector but checked this with Drive Genious 3 and fouund this was not the case. I even used a brand new drive and this problem sitll occurs.
This same problem is present on both my Mac Pro and a mac mini that are runnning 10.8.2. I am so frustrated at this point I have been investigatin commercial back up products. I wish and hope that Restropect is still around. It is a day I thought that would never happen to see Apple go down hill so far with the qality of thier software.
I have tried all trouble shooting steps provided by apple at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3275?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US and none of this will fix this problem. If anything is accomplished, the next back up will work only once and then fail on next back up.

lukemac77 wrote:
I would like to perform a clean install of Mountain Lion
Why? That rarely accomplishes anything good.
I do not wish to use setup or migration assistant.
Why not?
If you want to leave apps behind, do the clean install, then use Setup Assistant to transfer your home folders, but omit Applications. You can also omit some broad categories of things in your home folders if you want. See Using Setup Assistant on Mountain Lion or Lion.
1. After the clean install, will I be able to browse AND copy filed from the old backups manually?
If you mean via the TM browser (the "Star Wars" display), perhaps. If the user account(s) you set up have the corresponding UIDs as on the backups, yes. (See the pink box in Problems after using Migration Assistant for an explanation.)
2. If I do copy the files, will I have permission errors?
If you copy them via the Finder, possibly. Especially if the UIDs don't correspond, the new user account may not have permission to change or delete things. You may be able to put default permissions on them via
Resetting Password and/or User Permissions.
Basically, I wish to copy only select files from the Home Folder and re-install everything else anew.
If you skip Applications, and reinstall them, your best bet is to use Setup Assistant, omitting any broad categories you can. Otherwise, let it all transfer, then delete what you don't need.
After that, I want to restart Time Machine in Mountain Lion and start a new backup.
If you don't use Setup Assistant or Migration Assistant, the next backup will be a full one. Plus, the previous backups will be treated as if they were made from a different disk. You can still see them, but via the procedure in #E3 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
You may be able to avoid that by manually telling Time Machine to "associate" the erased drive with the old backups, per #B6 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

Why does restoring a Hard Drive from Time Machine break all my software registration?

I've just upgraded the hard drive in my MacBook Pro using a Time Machine backup. (In the past I've used Carbon Copy cloner to duplicate the drive before installing it, but this seemed like an easier option.) The restore from TM went fine... but now all my apps are acting as if I've just installed them for the first time. Mail and Dropbox went thru their first time startup screens, and are reimporting all my files/messages. Word and Photoshop are asking for the registration serial numbers. What a hassle!
Does anyone know what Time Machine is doing, and why? Why aren't my apps fully restored? And is there any workaround?

I imagine it is because of the way CCC does makes an exact clone of your drive.
Time Machine restores the drive file-by-file and doesn't necessarily restore support files. Most apps know when they've been moved and ask for serial numbers.
However, I have never restored a complete hard drive with Time Machine, so I don't know exactly what to expect.
Pondini may have some info here: http://pondini.org/TM/14.html

Time Machine breaks WiFi

I just got a 17" 2.66GHz Core i7 8GB MBP (wahoo!). I restored from the Time Machine from my old 1,1 MPB just fine.
When I connect the Time Machine to a USB port, it kills my WiFi connections, but works fine itself. To regain WiFi connection to the world, I must disconnect the Time Machine drive from the USB port.
I've repaired permissions on the new MBP drive. I've repaired disk on the Time Machine disk. I've reset PRAM. I've done a full, new Time Machine backup, in case the first backup was too resource-intensive, but maybe subsequent incrementals might not be so resource-intensive. I've tried each of the 3 USB ports. None of these tricks have had any effect.
What have I missed? What can I do to regain being able to leave my Time Machine drive plugged into a USB port, and let 'er rip, as intended?

Your question has to be the most unusual I have seen on this forum. Since your Mac is new, I suggest you contact Apple to discuss this issue.

Time Machine breaks at "Indexing Backup"

Hello!
After I upgrade to 10.6. Snow Leopard I can not backup my TM.I have try many times,but every time TM breaks by "Indexing Backup" and don't go forward.What shoud I do??(Sorry about my English)

Pondini wrote:
When you double-click the TC/sparse bundle, does it appear on your Desktop? Drag it from there. (I have an Airport Extreme, not a TC, and it works a bit differently: when my iMac is connected to the AEBS, the sparsebundle appears in the DU sidebar automaticaly. The instructions came from a TC user).
I guess I'm a bit confused on what the sparsebundle is as opposed to a partition as opposed to the disk image as opposed to the...
Feel free to (and please do) correct any terminology that I am using incorrectly.
The disk image (assuming that is the icon that shows up on the desktop when accessing the TC) of the sparsebundle (assuming that is what is labeled "Backup of David Nash's MacBook Pro") does automatically appear in my disk utility sidebar when the TC disk image is mounted on the desktop. I am guessing from your last post that the "dragging the sparsebundle" step is unnecessary in light of this fact.
If the format matching is as big of a deal as the "User Tips" author makes it sound...
That would be me.
That's funny.
So format matching doesn't seem to matter for TC? To be honest, It wouldn't be the end of the world if I had to completely erase my TC and start over. I am tempted to just do that and start over fresh if that would solve the problem. I'll hold off on that for now...
I assume you've tried removing it from the Spotlight > Privacy box, then re-adding it? If you can't, it's a bit of a conundrum: when you dismount the TC/sparsebundle, it will disappear from the Privacy display, but come back when it's remounted.
I originally just added the whole time capsule disk image to the privacy list. I later noticed that the "Backup of David Nash's MacBook Pro" disk image was automatically added to the privacy list when the spotlight is trying to index, and the "Backup..." disk image is removed from the privacy list when the spotlight is not trying to index. I have since tried to remove and re-add the sparsebundle to the list. It was in the process of trying to index, and re-adding it to the list didn't stop the indexing. I don't know if I was supposed to stop the indexing by restarting the computer or what, but as far as I can tell, being on the privacy list doesn't seem to have any effect on spotlight indexing.
If you can't do the +*Repair Disk,+* and nothing else works, you may have to delete the sparsebundle and let TM start fresh.
Like I mentioned above, this would not be the end of the world to delete the sparsebundle (or the whole TC, for that matter). I haven't yet tried to do the Repair Disk, because I don't know if it is something that I have to do just right or I'll mess something up. Does it matter if spotlight is trying to index? Is there any other considerations I should take? As you can probably tell, I don't really know what I'm doing, so I appreciate your help.
One last question about terminology - you said that it is not possible to "partition" the TC's drive; I was under the impression that the separate sparsebundles for the different computers (mine and my wife's) were "partitions". So this is incorrect terminology?

I cannot see my photos in iphoto library - I tried to restore with Time Machine and that doubled the number of photos (copies) but I still cannot see the images - the events are there but no thumbnails although the number of pics per event is correct...

Can someone help me see my pictures again in iphoto? 3 weeks ago while uploading a video from iphoto to Facebook, my events thumbnails all disappeared and were replaced by black squares - the event names and number of pics in each remain but when I click on the event, I only get squares where the pics should be - when I click those squares, I get a square with a triangle and an exclamation mark in middle.
Apple had emailed me about defective disks in iMacs so I took mine to the Apple Store and they replaced my HD then reinstalled from my backup via Time Machine - I still cannot see my pics! I tried to reinstall from an earlier Time Machine date - that copied everything and now my HD has double the amount of data but I still cannot see my pictures!
I would be thankful for any guidance on how to retrieve my pictures...
Thank you.

iPhoto 6 and later: Rebuilding the iPhoto library

How do I stop Time Machine from backing up Aperture thumbnails?

Hi,
My 2TB backup drive recently became full, and I became curious as to what was filling it up. I wrote a perl script to analyze the Time Machine backups, and I noticed that over 50% of my backup was filled with AP.Thumbnails and AP.Minis from the Aperture project directory. In particular, the AP.Thumbnails files in the backup consumed 737 GB of disk space!
The problem with the thumbnails files is that they are a single file that contains all of the thumbnails for all of the 40,000 photos I have in Aperture and it is now 20gb in size. Every time I add a new file to Aperture, the thumbnail file changes, and I get a new 20gb of data added to my backup. I add photos often which means that most of my backups have 20gb of Aperture files (which are easy to rebuild and don't need to be backed up).
I decided to try and stop Time Machine from backing up these files, and there seems to be no way of doing so (without telling Time Machine to skip backing up my entire Aperture project which I don't want to do). In Finder, you can do a "show package contents", but the Time Machine GUI doesn't allow this.
I tried to tell Time Machine to exclude the files via the GUI, but Time Machine sees the Aperture Library as a single package and won't let me exclude individual files from within the package.
I googled around, and found the attribute that Time Machine puts on files to exclude them from the backup. I used xattr to set the attributes:
xattr -w com.apple.metadata:comapple_backupexcludeItem com.apple.backupd <filename>
I also used this command on the iPhoto thumbnail files.
I used spotlight to find all of the files with this attribute using this command:
sudo mdfind "comapple_backupexcludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"
This command returned the iPhoto files, but did not return the Aperture files.
However, if I run "xattr" on the Aperture files, the attribute does exist!
During my next time machine backup, the iPhoto files were skipped as I wanted them to be, but the Aperture thumbnails were backed up again
I thought that maybe time machine was looking at the aperture package as an atomic unit, but iPhoto is stored as a package as well, and the attributes worked there on files inside the package.
Does anyone have any idea why time machine is still backing up these files? Is there any way I can get around this?
It seems to me to be an incredible oversight on Apple's part since both tools are Apple. The thumbnails files are very expensive to backup, and they are not necessary for backup since the are easy to rebuild from the original photos which are also backed up.
Thanks,
Ron

Shadow99999 wrote:
Hi,
My 2TB backup drive recently became full, and I became curious as to what was filling it up. I wrote a perl script to analyze the Time Machine backups,
No need to write your own script for that. there are a couple of already made nice GUI tools for this - TimeTracker http://www.charlessoft.com/ and BackupLoupe http://soma-zone.com/BackupLoupe/
and I noticed that over 50% of my backup was filled with AP.Thumbnails and AP.Minis from the Aperture project directory. In particular, the AP.Thumbnails files in the backup consumed 737 GB of disk space!
The problem with the thumbnails files is that they are a single file that contains all of the thumbnails for all of the 40,000 photos I have in Aperture and it is now 20gb in size. Every time I add a new file to Aperture, the thumbnail file changes, and I get a new 20gb of data added to my backup. I add photos often which means that most of my backups have 20gb of Aperture files (which are easy to rebuild and don't need to be backed up).
I decided to try and stop Time Machine from backing up these files, and there seems to be no way of doing so (without telling Time Machine to skip backing up my entire Aperture project which I don't want to do). In Finder, you can do a "show package contents", but the Time Machine GUI doesn't allow this.
I tried to tell Time Machine to exclude the files via the GUI, but Time Machine sees the Aperture Library as a single package and won't let me exclude individual files from within the package.
I don't have aperture but I think most people exclude the whole thing from TM backups and back it up separately. but if you want to exclude a subfolder in a package that's easy too. just select the package in finder, control-click on it and select "show package contents". in the resulting finder window drill to the folder you want to exclude and drag it to the TM exclusion list in TM system preferences->options.
I googled around, and found the attribute that Time Machine puts on files to exclude them from the backup. I used xattr to set the attributes:
xattr -w com.apple.metadata:comapple_backupexcludeItem com.apple.backupd <filename>
I was not aware of this method for excluding stuff from TM backups. could you provide a link to where you found this?
I also used this command on the iPhoto thumbnail files.
I used spotlight to find all of the files with this attribute using this command:
sudo mdfind "comapple_backupexcludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"
This command returned the iPhoto files, but did not return the Aperture files.
that's because Spotlight never looks inside packages unless you start a search inside a package directly. iphoto seems to be the only exception. I don't know how it's done.

Faces thumbnails missing after recovery from time machine

I got a new harddisk in my iMac via Apple's harddisk replacement program. I recovered all my data via a Time Machine backup (from a Time Capsule). All seemed fine after recovery of backup. When firing up iPhoto after the recovery iPhoto asks for updating all the thumbnails (don't know why). After a while everything seems fine - all photos are available with thumbnails in the events view. However all Faces thumbnails are missing - all persons in the faces view are black boxes. I can see that all the faces tagging are intact - when clicking a person I can see all the tagged images as black boxes. When switching the little "Faces - Photos" control to "Photos" I can see the photos containing all the tagged persons all right. I seems like it's only the face thumbnails that are missing.
So far I have tried the following without succes:
Repaired the iPhoto database with iPhotos own tool (holding Command and Option down when starting iPhoto)
Updating the entire library from an earlier backup
Updated the faces database files from an earlier backup as explained in this post
I'm out of good ideas now - can anyone help?

Using iPhoto Library Manager to Rebuild Your iPhoto Library
Download iPhoto Library Manager and launch.
Click on the Add Library button,
and select the library you want to add from those in the selection window.
Now that the library is listed in the left hand pane of iPLM, click on your library and go to the Library ➙ Rebuild Library menu option
In the next window name the new library and select the location you want it to be placed.
Click on the Create button.
Note 1: This creates a new library based on the LIbraryData.xml file in the library and will recover Events, Albums, keywords, titles and comments. However, books, calendars, cards and slideshows will be lost.
Note 2: Your current library will be left untouched for further attempts at a fix if so desired.
OT

I lost a video in iphoto. When I restore from Time Machine I get a thumbnail that says the file fork doesn't exist. How do I get it back?

I shot a video on my iPhone. This got downloaded into my iPhoto during a sync. It has been there for months and worked fine. Recently the video was accidently deleted and the trash has been emptied. I just popped open Time Machine and went back and restored my iPhoto from a back up. It appeared to restore the video as the thumbnail reappeared where it had been before. BUT, when I click on it, I get a message that says "the file fork does not exist". I was also restoring a couple of pictures as well and those restored fine. How do I get this video out of time machine with a working file fork?

How did you restore your library from Time Machine? Did you go into your Pictures folder and then enter TM, go back in time to find the library you want and use the Restore button?
OT

Can iPhoto (or iPhoto Library Manager) identify thumbnails that no longer connect to a full image. I can restore these from Time Machine (I've done so for 3 images) but don't fancy manually clcicking on every photo in my library to find which need restore

I have been preparing photos for export and found some have a thumbnail but no image, only the exclamation mark upon selection. I have restored three 'broken' thumbnails via Time Machine. I want to indentify all the broken thumbnails so I can choose which to restore and also find them quickly in Time Machine. The only way I currently know is to select each thumbnail, individually, and see if it brings up the exclamation mark 'image'. Is there a way to find only the 'broken' thumbnails?
Thanks

I went to TM and "Browse Other Backup Disks", selected the USB drive used for TM, browsed for the most recent backup and, one by one, copied each of the folders within /Users/NAME in the TM backup to /Users/NAME on the freshly installed MBP hard drive. The folders I'm referring to are Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Movies, Music, Pictures, Public. I overwrote the existing (empty) folders.
That's not how you restore. Might work for other material (pure fluke that,) but iPhoto is a database and the back up is stored in increments. Time Machine needs to reassemble it from the increments.
Enter the Time Machine interface, go to the Pictures Folder. Locate the iPhoto Library you want to restore and click restore.
Regards
TD

I've lost my photos (crashed hdd, iPhoto library on Time Machine corrupt too). Is there a way to create a picture from the thumbnail that remains in iPhoto? The quality is obviously poor, but better than nothing.

I've lost my photos (crashed hdd, iPhoto library on Time Machine corrupt too). Is there a way to create a picture from the thumbnail that remains in iPhoto? The quality is obviously poor, but better than nothing.

Time machine should have a good copy - how are you determining that it is corrupt
If you want the thumbnails as photos right click on the iPhoto library and make a copy of the data folder and then import it into a new iPhoto library - it contains your thumbnails
LN

IPhoto6 - after a full reistall of Snow Leopard, iphoto does not display thumbnails. I've restored from time machine, rebuilt the library and run through the rebuild thumbnails function with no success. The files are there, I just get a dotted outline.

iPhoto6 on iMac running SL - after a full reistall of Snow Leopard, iphoto does not display thumbnails. I've restored the library from time machine, rebuilt the library from iPhoto and run through the rebuild thumbnails function with no success. The files are there, I just get a dotted outline instead of the thumbnails. Does anyone have any other ideas on how to restore the thumbnails?

Try the following:
Using iPhoto Library Manager to Rebuild Your iPhoto Library
Download iPhoto Library Manager and launch.
Click on the Add Library button, navigate to your Home/Pictures folder and select your iPhoto Library folder.
Now that the library is listed in the left hand pane of iPLM, click on your library and go to the File ➙ Rebuild Library menu option
In the next window name the new library and select the location you want it to be placed.
Click on the Create button.
Note: This creates a new library based on the LIbraryData.xml file in the library and will recover Events, Albums, keywords, titles and comments but not books, calendars or slideshows. The original library will be left untouched for further attempts at fixing the problem or in case the rebuilt library is not satisfactory.
OT

HT201250 How do I restore photos from Time Machine? All of my photos have been imported within iPhoto and therefore are exported to Time Machine via an iPhoto file. I can't figure out how to break individual photo files out of the iPhoto file. Any idea

How do I restore photos from Time Machine? All of my photos have been imported within iPhoto and therefore are exported to Time Machine via an iPhoto file. I can't figure out how to break individual photo files out of the iPhoto file. Any ideas?

You might post this query on the iPhoto forum and perhaps someone there can provide an answer.
I tried this on my MBP and it seems that you have to restore the entire iPhoto Library. What I did was put the current library in a separate folder on the desktop and then I restored the library from a prior date. If you were to do that, you then could extract the desired photos and then delete the restored library. Then place the current library back to the original location and import the desired photos.
Not tidy but it seems it will work.
Ciao.

Blank thumbnail image previews after time machine restore

I recently used time machine to restore my system after replacing my mini's hard drive. I'm running 10.6.2 Since restoring I noticed that the finder's thumbnail image preview when clicking on a jpg or nef file is blank. I found another thread suggesting to move com.apple.finder.plist and com.apple.QuickLookDaemon.plist (from ~/Library/Preferences) to the trash and restart my system. I tried this with no luck.
Any suggestions?
thanks,
Mike

I installed the new (blank) hard drive, then started up the system with the SL install DVD. Then I chose restore from time machine as an option. It found my time machine disk without problem but before it could find my newly installed drive I had to go to disk utility and partition/erase. Once that was done it could see my new drive and I proceeded with the restore from time machine option.
When I open a finder and use grid view (I think that's the correct terminology), I can see thumbnails of the pictures. However, when I'm in column view (which is what I normally use) and select the file, when the rightmost column opens up giving file information, there is room at the top of the column where the preview would normally be, but the space is blank. Also, if I hit space bar the quicklook view is blank as well. I tried the menu->view option and the box to show icon previews is already checked. I will try the new user account approach and write back later.
thanks

Time Machine breaks thumbnails?

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