Time machine corrupts all old back ups

This is possibly the straw the breaks the camels back!
We had issues with smb in Lion almost causing a complete a complete breakdown in our rendering at the studio, now we have a complete and utter failure of time machine in Mavericks!!!
We had 4tb free on the back up 8tb thunderbolt drive with a small back up of 40gb needed after installing Mavericks. The back up failed stating not enough disk space avaialble as 4.2tb was needed!!!
I can only assume after upgrade mavericks decided to back up the entire disk again, it failed and has now deleted all old data.
In this case luckily we didn't actually lose any critical data as this is backing up a raid 5 drive as a secondary line of safety.
That said this a getting very worrying, every update from Apple in the last 4 years has caused us one issue or another. We are getting to the point where we simply can't trust Apple with Enterprise level support or relaibilty.
I can only assume from other cases on here this is a known issue but was realeased anyway?
Think we are at the point where we simply won't upgrade any Apple products until 12 months after release, hopefully giving them time to iron out all the bugs. Which is not what I expect from Apple, and kind of ruins the point of why one might use Macs in the future.

Can anyone suggest a more reliable back up software solution?

Similar Messages

  • Time Machine not deleting old back ups?

    I keep getting the error
    "This backup is too large for the backup volume. The backup requires...."
    I use the same 500GB volume for backups all day, every day. I thought the program was supposed to automatically delete old back ups to make room? I do not see any additional settings to confirm this but if you manually delete back up files, it really kind of screws things up. I see back ups that are 4-6 weeks old on the back up volume so there are plenty it could delete. Has anyone else seen this and how do you resolve this problem?
    TIA

    mqcarpenter wrote:
    I keep getting the error
    "This backup is too large for the backup volume. The backup requires...."
    I use the same 500GB volume for backups all day, every day. I thought the program was supposed to automatically delete old back ups to make room? I do not see any additional settings to confirm this but if you manually delete back up files, it really kind of screws things up.
    Do you mean via the Finder? If so, yes, it does.
    If you have deleted any this way, do the following:
    1. Turn TM Off.
    2. Use Disk Utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder) to do a +Repair Disk+ (not permissions) on your TM drive. If it finds errors that it can't fix, try again until it does or you get the exact same results. If they can't be fixed, stop here and post back with the results.
    Download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget from: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/timemachinebuddy.html. 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 (be sure to get them all, as sometimes they overflow the small window).
    Also, is there other data on your TM drive? If so, is it in the same partition as TM's backups?

  • HT201250 Does Time Machine delete files in back-ups that are deleted on my Mac?

    Does Time Machine delete files in back-ups that are deleted on my Mac?  IOW....if I need to restore a whole back-up, I don't want to restore previously deleted files.

    Does Time Machine delete files in back-ups that are deleted on my Mac?
    Not immediately. When space starts to get tight, Time Machine will start to delete the oldest file(s) to make more room, but this won't occur for some time.
    if I need to restore a whole back-up, I don't want to restore previously deleted files.
    You won't if you choose to restore from a backup that occurred after the date that you deleted the file.
    If you absolutely do not want to keep the file in your Time Machine backups at all, you do have the option to go into Time Machine, find the file, and manually delete all versions of the file from past dates.

  • Time Machine deleted all the back up files on my TimeCapsule

    My computer required an erase and install. I was using 10.5.8. I reinstalled the OS but I did not do a restore from my Time Machine when I first booted it up. However, I wanted to continue to use my time machine back up (basically continue to add files to the existing backup), but it would not allow me to point to the existing Time Machine back up.
    As a result, Time Machine tried to create a new backup folder. I thought this would be fine, and that I would worry about why I could not use the current back up file on my Time Capsule later on. Well, Time Machine has deleted my old Time Capsule and all the information that was inside it and now I have only a back up of one day.
    What happened? How could Time Machine over write a backup that I had previously?

    I updated to 10.5.8 and then I got a blue screen. I tried to do an erase and install and then I could not get beyond the grey screen. I took it in to the genius bar and had to get them to start things working again. They used their external drive to boot me up from 10.5.8.
    I did not use my time machine backups to put my information back on my computer. I used the files for documents movies and photos which I had dragged and dropped on to a USB external HD (A Western Digital Passport).
    I did not want to lose all the incremental past back ups on my Time Capsule (the white 1 TB box with the apple logo - definitely a time capsule). I wanted to keep using the old time machine back ups in case I ever needed to restore an odd file here and there.
    Well, that day has come and I can not restore from my Time Capsule. I actually deleted this entry (albeit too late) and I have realized I do have 700 GB backed up.
    You were right, if I do #17 I can access the old "sequence" of back ups, I suppose that TM thinks that I have a new computer after my erase and install.
    So when I click and hold on TM in the dock I can browse other time machine disks. However, whenever I try do do a restore, computer hangs and I can't actually use the back up.
    How can I get my MBP to go back to the old sequence TM files? If I go to system preferences, it says that my oldest back up is January 8, 2009. That would make me think TM machine knows those files are there. BUT! When I click on TM in the dock and I start TM, when I get to the Star Wars style screen where you can see the windows go back in time, it only has backups as far as yesterday.
    So ultimately, my question is, how do I permanently get back to that old sequence of back ups and why does it always hang on the restore?
    Thanks so much for your help - my lost files depend on it!

  • Time Machine lost all old backups

    I have an iMac 24" with a 750GB drive that only has about 200GB full. I have been using Time Machine to do backups onto a 400GB hard drive, and it has been working fine for a few weeks. Last week I copied 250GB of material onto my Mac's HD (as a backup of an external drive), but set that folder NOT to be backed up in TM (this worked fine). Then yesterday I renamed that folder... and Time Machine tried to include it in the next backup... and that backup failed, of course, since there is now more that 400GB of material to backup. Ooops... I have put that renamed folder onto the exclude list.
    BUT, in the process of failing to backup, Time Machine appears to have deleted all of the previous backups from the 400GB Time Machine drive. The weeks of backups are gone. THAT was very disappointing. I thought Time Machine wasn't supposed to delete old backups without warning me (I have that option checked). Why did it do that??
    (Happily, I have also been making backups manually onto other drives, and my main drive is still happy, so no files were lost... but I want to understand what happened before I trust my backups to Time Machine. I realize that I accidentally asked Time Machine to do an impossible thing by suddenly dropping that extra 250GB folder into its world, but why did it fail so ungracefully and delete all my old backups? This could be very bad if it happed to someone who was counting on Time Machine.)

    This is TRULY a serious software design bug IMO and should be reported to Apple via their Feedback procedure. I also have seen this bug and I've reported it to Apple. You should also to add more weight to the bug report and to hopefully have Apple resolve this soon for all of us.
    TM does fail to alert the user with a request that to free up backup space some older backups will need removing. Not only this but it silently removes the oldest backups trying to free up space only to find there's still insufficient space. This is clearly a very serious problem as you've discovered.

  • Why does Time machine not delete old backups

    I dont understand Why time machine is not deleting old backups. As it worked first time with the same size backup drive as the drive its backing up, I assumed it would just delete the old backup as needed. Do I need a bigger backup drive?

    Roglee wrote:
    I just want it to delete the old backup & replace it so i just have a copy. I guess i could just re format the drive each time but that just seems a waste of my time when TM should do this for me!
    If this is all you want to do, turn off Time Machine, download SuperDuper! and use it for free. This will clone whatever drive you want and the free trial will erase your back up drive each time. I can't remember if it will let you choose what to back up or if it wants the entire drive. Also, I'm not sure if the Scheduler works with the free trial. Below are some verbiage for SuperDuper!. Looks like if you want Scheduling you will have to purchase a license.
    Download Now! 
    You can download SuperDuper! v2.7.1 right now and back up and clone your drives for free— forever! 
    Buy Now!
    Buy now to unlock scheduling, Smart Update (which saves a lot of time), Sandboxes, scripting and more!
    Time Machine will keep making back ups and when it determines it needs space, it will delete older back ups. But it doesn't delete older ones each time it backs up.

  • I recently took my imac in for a recall on the hard drive, they replaced my hard drive, i used time machine to restore all my files. Now when I turn time machine on it says back up failed not enough space, it is not overwriting old back ups.

    I recently took my imac in for a recall on the hard drive, they replaced my hard drive, i used time machine to restore all my files. Now when I turn time machine on it says back up failed not enough space, it is not overwriting old back ups. Why? Please help

    http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html

  • Time Machine deleting too many old back-ups

    I connect Time Machine (external drive) and start the back-up. TM takes a while to clean old back-ups to create space. Fair enough, as I have not been backing up since a month ago. This takes too long though, I get suspicious and I check Console and see that TM has deleted 5 old back-ups. It does not make any sense, I know that deleting one, at most two, would have been enough. I check the Console log and see the text below:
    1/10/15 10:19:33.109 PM    com.apple.backupd[415]    Deleted backup /Volumes/LaCie/Backups.backupdb/John Doe’s MacBook Pro/2013-09-29-211629 containing 1.76 GB; 140.71 GB now available, 194.75 GB required
    This is curious as I am sure a single TM back-up is much larger than that, at least 130GB. I get into TM via Finder and notice that each back-up for a given date has the expected size there, with all the many files from my laptop correctly saved in the back-up. And yet, when TM deletes a given back-up, it frees up only much less in terms of space and so it keeps deleting back-ups.
    I have had some issues in the past with this external drive and I recently had it fixed. I have another one and I plan to switch to it as TM. Yet, I do not understand why this happens.
    Macbook Pro OS X 10.9.5, 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3
    Time Machine External Drive: La Cie Porsche 500GB

    140.71 GB now available, 194.75 GB required
    It appears Time Machine needs 194.75 GB to do the latest backup, but only 140.71 is available. So it keeps deleting more in an attempt to make enough space available.

  • How to recover old Back ups made with time machine?

    After a recovery with time machine to a very early back up, it completly deleted my old back ups from my back up drive? I had almost everything there. how can i get it back? is there any way?

    Hi Patsmith7,
    i think I understand what you're asking. You'd like to move the current Time Machine backup to a new HD so that it will never be written over as you continue to use the current HD where the data resides. If that is correct, then just follow the below link which will show you a very simple way of accomplishing this.
    If you only want to move a specific date then you will have to follow the same instructions in the link but click on the drop down arrow on the current backup which will show you each instance (date) of the backups. Grab the date that you're interested in and complete the move as instructed in the link to the new HD.
    http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5096?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
    Good Luck and let me know if you have any other questions.

  • Time Machine doesn't back up anymore due to a failure during copying. Get this message for several weeks. And all my back ups are lost!

    Can anybody help me, because suddenly all my back ups on the the time capsule are gone, and time machine cannot make any back up due to a failure during copying. I already installed the latest firmware on the time capsule, but nothing seems to help. I also changed the back up disk to the HDD in my Mac (programs and mavericks are running on an SSD. Hope someone can help me out.

    Check the TC disk with finder. The sparsebundle should still be there.. simply open it from Finder and mount the backups.
    Follow Pondini's instructions to see if your files are there.
    Q15 here http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
    You don't have to restore the files.. you are just checking the backup is accessible and intact.
    http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
    I would also recommend you do a verify.. A5 in the reference above.
    TM is problematic on Mavericks.. some of the problems are due to its poor networking.
    Exactly how is the TC setup?? By that I mean is it wired to the main modem and doing either router or bridge?
    Is the computer using wireless to the TC? If not please make sure the wireless connection is via the TC and not via modem router or extender.
    I strongly recommend you reset the TC to factory. No files are deleted.
    The Factory Reset universal
    Unplug your TC/AE. Hold in reset. and power the TC/AE back on..  all without releasing reset and keep holding in for about 10sec. The time is not important.. it is the front LED rapid flashing that indicates you are in factory mode.
    Release reset.
    If it doesn’t flash rapidly you have released reset at some point and try again.
    Be Gentle! Feel the switch click on. It has a positive feel..  add no more pressure after that.
    TC/AE will reboot after a couple of minutes with default factory settings and will wipe out previous configurations.
    No files are deleted on the hard disk.. No reset of the TC deletes files.. to do that you use erase from the airport utility.
    Redo the setup of the TC.. please use all short names, no spaces and pure alphanumeric. Do not use the names the airport utility setup wizard will recommend to you. eg TCgenx (base station name.. x can be a number which is your gen TC). Wireless name.. TCwifi.
    Wireless Security will be WPA2 personal and use 10-20 character pure alphanumeric password with mix of case and numbers.
    Reset TM as per A4 in the Pondini reference above.
    If you still have issues.. manually mount the TC in the computer.. in Finder use Go, Connect to server.
    AFP://TCgenx or AFP://10.0.1.1 (where you replace my example name with your actual name.. or replace the IP which is default with your actual IP).
    The computer should find the network resource and request a password. Type that in (your disk access password) and save it in the keychain.
    Then try again with TM.
    Strongly also recommend even if you get TM to work.. it is problematic on Mavericks.. buy CCC or one of the other 3rd party backups.. With CCC you can do a bootable clone to a USB drive.. easily the best way to get a dead Mac going again.

  • Can I use the harddisk that I used for Time Machine on my previous computer on my new computer without deleting the old back-ups?

    Can I use the harddisk that I used for Time Machine on my previous computer on my new computer without deleting the old back-ups?

    Yes.  See:
    http://pondini.org/TM/4.html
    My only concern is that you may not have enough free space on the drive.

  • I was trying to back up my mac by using my external hard drive.  Without realizing it, time machine erased all my backups from my other computers.  Is there any way to recover these files?  I can't even get the external hard  drive to work on my pc.

    I was trying to use my external hard drive to back up my mac computer.  It had files on it from my pc computer.  Time machine erased all my existing files. (I thought it was only going to erase the duplicate files and rewrite them).  Is there anyway to recover these files from my external hard drive.  My mac has renamed the hard drive time maching and it will no longer show up on my pc.  What can I do?

    Yes, the Old Master file has a folder for each year where I find all photos from that specific year. I am attaching a screen shot of the file.
    In the meantime i have managed to download all photos (it did not download any video files though in mpg, avi, 3gp, m4v,mp4 and mov format) to a new iphoto library. Unfortunately the photos are quite mixed and often doubled up. I ma considering to purchase iphoto library which checks all duplicates in iphoto. this will save me a lot of time. What do you think?

  • Time machine eliminating all of my old backups

    I have Time Machine Backing up to an external 4T hard drive. TM is also set to back up another extenral hard drive that contains just photos to the same TM drive. It's been working seamlessly. Lost some photos today on the photo drive  and found them on an old time machine backup and dragged them to the external drive (the icon on the desktop, not the icon in the Time Machine backup). All good. There were about 111g left on the Time Machine  external drive and the imac has about 225g of data on it.  So Time Machine started eliminating old backups one month at a time and looked like it wasn't going to stop....month after month. I turned off TM when it reached 400g of available space. How much extra room does a backup require and will it just keep going - eliminating ALL of my backups? Something just didn't feel right...

    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 that corresponds to a failed backup. Now
    CLEAR THE WORD "Starting" FROM THE TEXT FIELD
    so that all messages are showning, and scroll back in the log to the time you noted. 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 text field.
    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 capsule full - will not delete old back ups

    When a back up is attempted on time capsule, I get this message:
    Time Machine Error
    This backup is too large for the backup disk. The backup requires 2.52 GB but only 1.53 GB are available.
    Latest successful backup: 10-01-20 at 3:09 PM
    The option to delete old back ups is checked.
    Any ideas? Thanks!

    Kaalass wrote:
    Ok, update. It would seem that I cant access the backups. I can see the disk image of the back up on my desktop, but cant seem to select it as the back up disk. The only one that I can select is "Time Capsule". There is only one Mac that is being backed up. It says that 784.38 GB of 998.06 GB is available.
    So there's about 214 GB used on your internal HD?
    Again, please: How large is the Time Capsule? Is there other data on it, besides backups? If so, how much?
    Attempting to mount network destination using URL: afp://Firsname%20Name@Computer Names-Time-Capsule.local/Time%20Capsule
    Mounted network destination using URL: afp://Firstname%20Vanasse@Computer Names-Time-Capsule.local/Time%20Capsule
    Disk image /Volumes/Time Capsule/Computer Name’s Computer_001b6392bd73.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Backup of Computer Name’s Computer
    Time Machine, for some odd reason, sometimes gets cranky about some particular names. Change yours per #C9 of the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
    Network destination already mounted at: /Volumes/Time Capsule-2
    Are there two (or more) +sparse bundles+ on your Time Capsule's internal disk? It looks like Time Machine has started a whole new set of backups (thus the "-2" in the name). If so, it won't delete any backups in the first set to make room for new backups in the second one.
    Since you started backing-up to this Time Capsule, have you had any hardware repairs done to your Mac? If so, what?

  • Time Machine will not let me restore from backups after June, 2013.  I can see the files on the external hard drive but Time Machine skips all of them and goes back to June, 2013. Does anyone have any idea what the problem is?

    Time Machine will not let me restore from backups after June, 2013.  I can see the files on the external hard drive but Time Machine skips all of them and goes back to June, 2013. Does anyone have any idea what the problem is?

    rtilghman wrote:
    telling me to buy a new router is NOT a solution.
    And why not? Apple is selling these things like BigMacs. They can't make enough of them. You've been suffering since May because you refuse to get a decent router.
    Can you imagine if a company that makes a refrigerator told me that I needed to upgrade my electrical system to rectify a problem with their device? What kind of response IS that?!?!
    What if the problem with their device is that it requires a new-fangled "grounded" outlet and your circa 1890 house doesn't have grounded outlets. Would you refuse to purchase a $ 25 adapter on principle?

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