Time Machine creates backups from excluded folders. Tried everything

I configured TM to exclude some folders that I do not want it to backup. A few days ago, all of a sudden, it told me that there is not enough space on my backup disk (Airport Extreme with USB hard drive). I found out that it had deleted the old backups and tried to backup also the folders that I excluded.
I already did:
- deleted the entire backup hard disk using disk utility
- deleted TM preferences
- setup TM from scratch
- Moved the excluded folders to other locations and renamed it (added the folders once again to the exclude list after that, of course)
- repaired file permissions
- repaired volume after having started the system from the 10.6. install DVD.
When I start the backup after resetting it, it shows at first a correct amount of data (approx. 90 GB, which fits the real amount of data that I want it to backup). But when it reaches 100% of the 90 GB after several hours, it does not stop: It continuously adds GB by GB to both values "90 GB of 90 GB copied" in the status window. The status bar keeps showing 100%. When I stop the backup manually and look into the sparsebundle, I find all the data that I excluded before in the TM preferenes.
I have no idea what to do now. I tried a new backup setup from scratch already three times.
P.S.: Im not new to OS X and TM. I have used TM for years in 10.5 without any problems. It seems that such problems occur after the upgrade to 10.6. BTW, I did a clean install of SL, not an update from 10.5.

miflo wrote:
In the meantime I fixed the problem by re-installing the Combo update for 10.6.2. It then has been working for a few days.
But today, it deleted all my old backups and then told me that there is not enough space available. It would need approx. 150GB for about 10MB that I have "really" changed on the hard disk.
Since I have upgraded to SL, I only had problems, problems and problems. It's TM, it's the over-all performance, it's the stability of many applications... I cannot understand why Apple has not managed to fix these annoying bugs for so many months. Apple, what's going on there? Are there no researchers available for OSX since everyone is working on the iPhone?
First, you are not talking to Apple here. This is a user-to-user forum.
Second, several million folks are using Snow Leopard without significant problems. Whatever is going wrong on your Mac is not common. It is something in your setup. The fact that loading the "combo" update helped the TM problem is a good indication of that. Apparently, something in your installation of OSX got corrupted. The other problems you mention may have a similar cause.
It's not clear from your first post whether you did verify/repair disk (not permissions) on both your TM and internal HDs. If you didn't, do them both again.
If that doesn't help, I'd recommend reinstalling OSX from your SL disc, applying the "combo" again, then repairing permissions.
Your first post says you did a "clean" install. How did you get your data back onto your system?
The best way will probably be to go back to 10.5. I think it's the only solution that is available yet.
That's your call, of course, and not an easy transition after you've been on SL for a while.

Similar Messages

How to save SOME time machine Mac backups from the TM disk to other disk WITHOUT formatting the destination disk?

Hi,
How to save SOME time machine Mac backups from the TM disk to other disk WITHOUT formatting the destination disk?
I have a Time Machine disk (A) including the backups of several different Macs (B, C, D & E) generated with an old Mac OS X 10.5.8 (iMac PowerPC) over the years.
I have transferred the old Mac contents to a new Mac with OS X 10.8.3 using Migration Assitant. All OK.
Now, I want to erase such TM disk A to use if for other purposes, but first, I would like to RECOVER the backups of some Macs inside it (D and E). Is that possible WITHOUT formatting the destination disk and selecting only some Macs from the TM disk and not the fulll TM disk? How?
Thanks.

Thanks for the reply. I do not think that is messy, anway. I simply used the same external disk as Time Machine disk for different Macs. And that worked OK all the time for years.
The ExternalTimeMachineDisk contains the folder Backups.backupdb
which contains the following folders (each one corresponding to the Time Machine backup made from each Mac):
Mac1
Mac2
MacBook1
MacBook2
In relation to my message above, is it possible to select specific files, folders or full Mac backups from such Time Machine disk and save them to other disk? How?
Thanks.

Time Machine deleting backups from several months ago (but not the oldest)?

During its "Cleanup" phase, Time Machine has recently been deleting backups from several months ago—even though these aren't the oldest backups, and my backup drive isn't full.
My backups go back to January 2012, yet just today, Time Machine deleted backups from May 21, June 11, July 2, and July 23 (all in 2012). And plus, my Time Machine drive still has 200 GB free.
Why's it doing this? Shouldn't it just either delete my backups from January 2012 first (if it needs the space), or just delete the expired backups in the past 24 hours or 30 days (based on its normal rules)?

See Pondini's TM FAQs for starters.

Time Machine with backups from 2 computers

My husband has a new computer (mac_new), he connected the disk with the old computer's TimeMachine backup
(Mac_old)
By mistake, he started a backup for Mac_new, instead of restoring from the Mac_old backup
From Mac_new I can't figure out how to access and restore from the Mac_old backup
It looks like there are two top-level folders containing the two backups. I can see the Mac_old files but can't access them through Time Machine.
Hope someone can help.

Did you open migrate and try?
Does the old Mac still exist..?? If so you do not need the TM backup you can simply use the old Mac directly. Migrate can work with either TM backup or a computer on the network..
BUT you need to be extremely patient.. over wireless it can take days.. to actually index the old backup.. Yosemite is slower than molasses in winter.

Using Time Machine to backup FROM a network drive

Can time machine be configured to backup files that are stored on a network drive? Drive is mounted via SMB.
Thanks
Simon

disconnected wrote:
although it is now capable of backing up TO a network device, there must be a work around.
It will back up to some network drives, but not reliably to one connected to your Airport Extreme, and possibly not your NAS, either. See #2, especially the pink box, in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
Possible solution: mount a networked drive as a local volume so that as far as time machine is concerned, it is seen as a local drive. How could one accomplish this?
No such hack has been posted here, and it's doubtful there is one.

Time machine: remote backup from internet to my Time Capsule

Hi,
I don't know how configure my TC and my icluod account in order to have backup of my mac on TC by internet. In my local network all is working fine but from internet I can access to my time capsule but when I try to backup there is a error message: backup disk is not available.
Do you have any idea?
tnx

before I was able to do it...after remove of TC (iCloud version) by TM I cannot
There might be a very good reason for it.
Try using it without iCloud.. link directly to the TC using AFP over internet.
See example here for how to setup with TC behind a router.
http://gigaom.com/2009/05/14/access-your-time-capsule-over-the-internet/
Even easier if the TC is the main router.. just turn on wan access for AFP.
But you are going to need to run a computer to locate the TC via dyndns if you don't pay the extra for static IP from your ISP.

Time Machine nuking backups, starting from scratch!

ok, i just received this warning:
and now i't doing a backup that is slated to take more than "several hours."
is this common? how often can i expect this?

Hello,
Should you click “Start New Backup”? Not yet! If you see the dialog above, your existing Time Machine backup is corrupt, and you might not be able to recover data from it. But you can save a copy of the corrupt bundle and, perhaps, extract some data from it if needed.
Ask yourself if Time Machine has saved data you might need before deciding what to do next:
If you are sure you won’t need anything backed up before today, click “Start New Backup” and let Time Machine do its thing.
Otherwise, click “Back Up Later” and save a copy before letting Time Machine start a new backup. Just look for a file called “computername.sparsebundle” (for network backups) or “Backups.backupdb” (for local ones) and create a copy with a different name. You can open sparsebundle files with DiskImageMounter and browse them like any other disk. More information is available here.
There you go. If you click “Start New Backup” when you see this dialog box, Time Machine will erase all of your old backup data and start a new bundle. It won’t be corrupt, but it will be empty.
Note that you can manually initiate a Time Machine backup integrity check by option-clicking the “Time Machine” icon in the menu bar and selecting “Verify Backups.”
http://blog.fosketts.net/2010/08/11/time-machine-completed-verification-backups- improve-reliability-time-machine-create-backup/
According to This Time Machine resource “This appears only on Snow Leopard, and started with the Time Capsule Backup Update 1.0 in mid-May of 2010. It also seems to have been included in the 10.6.3 v1.1 update and 10.6.4.”
So, what can you do about it? Grin and bear it, it seems, until Apple fixes it.
One thing you can do to make the backup take less time is to connect your machine to your Time Capsule or other backup drive via Ethernet for the duration of the initial backup.
http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/the-dreaded-time-machine-has-completed-a-verifi cation-of-your-backups-to-improve-reliability-time-machine-must-create-a-new-bac kup-for-you-message-and-why-you-are-seeing-it/
Time Machine: About "Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you."...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4076

Time Machine "preparing backup" eternally upon wake from sleep

at a bit of a loss here...
iMac 24" (version which offered 7300GT as BTO option)
10.5.5 with all updates applied
LaCie 500 gig USB 2.0 drive directly attached.
Up until about two months ago, Time machine functioned fined. Then for some reason, the following started to happen. (no known reason, no software update related etc, that I know of)
scenario... Time Machine functions correctly EXCEPT when waking from sleep. If iMac wakes from sleep and attempts a backup immediately (e.g. more than one hour has passed), it gets stuck "preparing backup" forever. I've let it run overnight (actually as long as about 30 hours), it never stops. Finder and other programs become extremely non-responsive, machine is almost unusable. Literally, the only way out is to manually shut down external drive, with attendant warnings/errors.
What I've done:
1) deleted the time machine .plist file
2) erased, repartioned (as a single partition) external drive
3) started brand new time machine backup (takes about three hours)
At this point, time machine will backup up fine... I can force a successful backup, if I leave the machine running, at one hour it does a successful backup.
BUT, as soon as it goes to sleep, time machine is hosed.
The only workable method for using time machine is to turn the external drive and time machine off when not using it, and turn the whole shootin' match on to do what essentially becomes manual backups. These backup are fairly lengthy, as time machine also does lengthy "preparing backup", but they complete in about 30 minutes to one hour.
Given that time machine doesn't give mountable/cloneable backup, I'm probably going to go back to Carbon Copy Cloner. Still, I like the ease/regularity of Time Machine, and would use it if it works.
Any ideas?
thanks

It could be a number of things. There are lots of things that Time Machine does in order to "manage" backups -- apart from just copying data to the backup drive.
It has to manage the transition of hourly backups into daily backups and must also transition daily backups into weekly backups. Each time it does this it has to move a lot of data around. It also has to maintain indexes of everything so you can quickly find backups should you want to perform a restore.
I've also noticed that there are circumstances that can cause TM to question whether it can trust it's existing backup database... I've caught Time Machine saying that it needs to do a "deep traversal" of the backup (basically it wants to check and see what it really has) and this can take a very long time.
Still... 30 hours is an extremely long amount of time. I'm almost wondering if there's a problem with either your USB bus or your drive when they wake up such that you may be getting a huge number of retries on something that should have happened quickly.
I'd suggest you start the "Console" utility, select "All Messages" at the left, and then watch the messages being written to your log file. Not only does Time Machine log all of it's progress messages to the system.log (in more detail than you'd see in the Time Machine UI), but so do lots of other system processes. If you're getting USB bus problems the error messages would likely show up in the same log. I'm especially suspicious about non-TM related causes since you said you've already blown away your TM backups & preferences and started from scratch and you're still getting the problem.
Try re-creating your problem with the Console log messages being displayed and see if you can't see something in the log that would let you get a little closer to the root cause.
Regards,
Tim

Time machine created new backup file

After migration, time machine created a new data file in time capsule. How do i instruct it to access the original? Thanks!

I ejected the USB drive and turned it off, erased the Timemachine.plist file from the shared directory and then turned back on the USB drive. I then went into Timemachine and turned the program back on. Timemachine then started a count down sequence and then automatically started the scheduled backups. The problem is fixed.

Time Machine error: backup disk image could not be created

Iet up my new time capsule day and it's working great. Now that I've got everything sorted out, I'm ready to do the initial time machine back up on it. I went into preferences, changed the backup location to my TC and clicked 'back up now'. Very quickly I get a message that the backup failed: "Time Machine Error - The backup disk image could not be created".
I've searched the apple support area but haven't been able to figure this one out. Can anyone help, please? This is an initial backup. (FYI, it worked great on my old external drive.)
Many thanks

I had the same problem. I installed my Time Capsule, fired up Time Machine and got an error that said "The backup is too large for the backup volume. The backup requires 436.8 GB but only 182.2GB are available."
Coincidently, these are the same sizes as the space used and the space available on my iMac's drive.
I looked in /Volumes and saw that the sparsebundle was being created on the local disk and not on the main disk. Trying to backup again gave me the "Time Machine error: backup disk image could not be created." message.
I poked around the forums, and found a post about the machine name setting in sharing. I decided to give it a look, and lo and behold, I did not have a machine name. So I gave my box a name, kicked off Time Machine again, and it worked.

Updating Time Machine after restoring from backup

Hello,
I use both SuperDuper and Time Machine to back up my MacBook Pro to an external drive. My computer's internal hard drive recently died, and my most recent backup was from SuperDuper, so after I replaced the internal drive, I restored my system using SuperDuper.
With the new internal drive, Time Machine still recognizes my previous backups and lets me access my old files -- but when I try to create a new backup, it wants to delete nearly one year and 100 GB of old backups from the external drive to make room for new ones. I'm not sure why it feels the need to do that; all the Created and Modified dates on my files appear to have been preserved, so only the usual incremental update should be needed, and I have over 50 GB of free space on my backup drive for it.
I'd prefer not to lose that archived content. Any idea how I can continue using Time Machine without starting from scratch?
-Ken

kengagne wrote:
With the new internal drive, Time Machine still recognizes my previous backups and lets me access my old files -- but when I try to create a new backup, it wants to delete nearly one year and 100 GB of old backups from the external drive to make room for new ones. I'm not sure why it feels the need to do that; all the Created and Modified dates on my files appear to have been preserved
That's not what it uses to determine what needs to be backed-up (since they can be changed), but it doesn't apply to this case anyway.
Since you have a new drive, even if it has the same name as the old one, Time Machine knows it's a different drive and will back it up completely. You cannot prevent it.
This is actually for your protection; if you had a drive named "Music" and replaced it with a different drive, with different content but also named "Music," surely you'd want Time Machine to know it was different and back it up?
In fact, you can have two or more drives on the same Mac with the identical names; OSX (and Time Machine) know they're different, and can keep them separate without a problem.
If you really need backups kept that long, you need a bigger drive for Time Machine. Your best bet is to let it start fresh on the new one, and keep the old one "on the shelf" until you're sure you don't need it anymore. You can always view and restore from the old one, via the +*Browse ...+* option, per #17 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
Or, if you really want to, you can copy the backups from the existing drive to a larger one, then continue backing-up to them. See #18 in the FAQ.

Where did this backup window come from on my desktop. I have always used time machine to backup to an external disc and within the last 2 weeks, this backup window keeps appearing. Where did it come from? Thanks for any help

where did this backup window come from on my desktop. It specifies personal data & settings and tells me when the next backup is scheduled [which I never set up]. I have always used time machine to backup to an external disc and within the last 2 weeks, this backup window keeps appearing. Where did it come from? Thanks for any help

To check your S.M.A.R.T status open disk utility and click on your drive and then click on the info icon.

I got this error while my mac was backing up to time machine: he backup disk image "/Volumes/Data/Sanjeev's iMac.sparsebundle" could not be created (error (null)). Please could someone help

I got this error while my mac was backing up to time machine: he backup disk image “/Volumes/Data/Sanjeev’s iMac.sparsebundle” could not be created (error (null)). Please could someone help

Has the backup been working ok??
If that is the case simply reboot the TC.. or if that fails, reboot the whole network, restarting in correct order..
modem.. wait 2min
TC.. wait 2min

When installing maverick mailboxes disappeared, only have current emails. All the folders and content missing. Could anyone be of help. I do have Time Machine for backup.

When installing maverick mailboxes disappeared, only have current emails. All the folders and content missing. Could anyone be of help. I do have Time Machine for backup.

Solved the problem by clicking the gray triangle next to "On My Mac" and drilled down!

I would like to access an old Time machine back up from a Core 2 Duo Macbook, but no longer have a Mac. Can I access the backup from a cheaper old ibook, or would I need a Macbook. Is the OS important?

I would like to access an old Time machine back up from a Core 2 Duo Macbook, but no longer have a Mac. I am going to buy a used machien to acess this. Can I access the backup from a cheaper old ibook, or would I need a Macbook. Is the OS important?

right click on the folder that shows with the red negative sign, and select to "get info". In the long skinny window that appears, look in the "sharing and permissions" section. In the "name" column, you should see your current user name. Ensure the "privilege" is set to Read and Write. If your user name is not in the name column, click the + sign, and add it, ensuring the privileges are set to Read and Write

Time Machine creates backups from excluded folders. Tried everything

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for