Time Machine deleted my first backup to make space for a new one, is there anyway to recover it?!?!

So I had all my stuff backed up to December 23 on an external hard drive with Time Machine, then I deleted it all so that the next automatic backup didn't have any of these older files. Today Time Machine deleted my original backup to make space for a new one and so I lost Decemer 23, now I am screwed..HELP?? I accidently let it delete or something, I don't really know, I know this was just a series of mistakes and now I'm desparate ):

Have a look at this article http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427 and section "backup drive fills up".
It's a normal behavior that Time Machine is deleting oldest backups when drive is filling up.

Similar Messages

  • HT3275 My Time Machine deletes ALL previous backups

    Every so often, Time Machine deletes ALL previous backups and starts over from scratch. It has done this several times in the last year.  I have not changed any hardware or the name of the computer. Why is this happening?  Makes me very concerned that I now have NO backups while it chugs away rebuilding a 210 GB backup. 
    Just got an error message:
    Time Machine couldn’t complete the backup. Time machine could not delete the backup disk image "/Volumes/Joe's iMac.purgeable"
    HELP!
    iMac 27: 8GB, 2.9 GHz Intel Core I5
    OS X Yosemite 10.10.1
    Backup volume is Western Digital MyBookLiveDuo with 2TB and 1.8TB available

    Hi Joe,
    Have you Repaired both drives first, then Repaired Permissions on both?
    Have you looked through Pondini's extensive TM help site?
    http://Pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
    http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
    Can't imagine something not being covered there.

  • Time Machine deleted my old backups and crapped out midstream

    I had just gotten my failing hard drive replaced, and restored from Time Machine backup. So far so good.
    So a week later, I wanted to upgrade to Mountain Lion, but figured I should be responsible and run Time Machine backup again before doing the upgrade just in case something goes wrong.
    The Mac has a 4TB drive, which has 2TB free. The backup drive is a 4TB external drive, which has (or had) Time Machine backups going back two years or so. It still had over a TB of space left. I clicked on Backup Now and let it run overnight. I noticed it said "Deleting old backup to make room" or something like that, which I thought was normal.
    I woke up in the morning to find that Time Machine had crapped out in the middle, and said that it couldn't complete. I realized that it had deleted all my old backups. It didn't need to do that, since the only files that had changed would have been less than a GB, and it had over a TB of space to work with.
    It must have thought that everything on the drive had changed since the last backup, and it wanted to backup the entire drive. As such it tried deleting all my old backups! But it failed, and stopped in the middle.
    Now I have a drive that still says there is only 1.2 TB of space on the drive, but I can't see the files! Even with Tinkertool, I can't see anything beyond the one most recent backup.
    Can these files be recovered? I am totally ticked that there isn't some kind of confirmation like "Are you sure you want to delete X?"
    I actually need to have some of these older backups, as they include files that had been deleted before the latest backup that I may need to retrieve. Any hard drive experts out there? Any terminal commands that can make these files accessible, even if I have to retrieve them manually?

    To clarify, this all happened under Snow Leopard as I had said. My profile lists Tiger, since I haven't cared to update my personal profile since using that OS, and in fact I still use Tiger among other versions. I manage a lot of users. And I never got to upgrade to Mountain Lion on this system, as explained in the post above. So I don't see the confusion.
    I don't think the model of Mac makes a difference for this type of problem, but in case it does, the incident was on a 2010 Intel iMac with a 4TB hard drive and 8GB of RAM. I would have mentioned that if this was a problem with hardware specific to the model of Mac. But this is more of a universal issue.
    But to stay on topic, I'm guessing my old backups are toast. But if anybody has any experience with recovering from Time Machine deleting their old backups, I would be happy to hear from them. In the meantime, I am going to try to do some old fashioned file recovery, and see what I can salvage.

  • Time Machine deleted 4-5 backups...

    Time Machine deleted 4-5 backups that were from a different computer to make room for the an update. How can I get back 1 or more of those backups?

    Unfortunately, you can't, since they have been permanently deleted and the drive space has been overwritten with new data.

  • Help! Time Machine Deleted My Oldest Backup!

    So, time machine deleted my oldest backup (because it ran out of room)
    I know it's supposed to do this -- but I didn't want it to.
    On my oldest backup, I had a folder with lots of pictures and documents. Does time machine delete files that can't be found anywhere else?
    I don't know what to do! Those pictures meant a lot to me!

    Time Machine isn't meant to be used as an archiving utility, as you've now noticed.
    If a file isn't on your internal hard drive, eventually TM will delete the copy in its backups.
    If you wanted an archiving utility, you needed to look elsewhere
    You may be able to use a data recovery software to get the files back--I suggest you turn off TM until you get this sorted.
    Take a look at Data Rescue II here:
    http://www.prosofteng.com/
    ~Lyssa

  • How do i delete my first icloud account and set up a new one to be my main icloud account?, how do i delete my first icloud account and set up a new one to be my main icloud account?

    how do i delete my first icloud account and set up a new one to be my main icloud account for photostreaming and document synching?

    Welcome to the Apple community.
    Settings > iCloud, scroll down and delete account, create a new account and add it back.

  • Time machine deleted all my backups instead of the one selected

    I have a one year old Macbook Pro with 16 GB of RAM, running OSX v10.9.5 (Mavericks).  I use a LaCie 2TB external hard drive for my time machine backups, and I needed to delete some of the old TM backups to make space.
    Following the instructions at pontini.org (http://pondini.org/TM/12.html ), I opened TM, navigated to the external HD and selected the oldest folder in backups.backupdb, right clicked it and selected 'Delete all backups in [the oldest folder's name]'.  Then I went home for the weekend, and when I got in this morning, Voila!  ALL files in the backups.backupdb folder were gone!  Not only that, but there was nothing in the trash to restore!
    Has anyone else had this wonderful experience?
    Thanks,
    Casey

    Wow -- thanks for all the comments, folks, I must have struck a nerve!  I'll try to respond to all of them here, in sequence:
    John Galt: I loved your comment about "no user serviceable parts inside"!  It was echoed by etresoft, too, later in the chain; sounds like good advice if this ever happens again.  You mentioned that Yosemite incorporated a lot of changes to TM, but I'm not using Yosemite (have been avoiding this upgrade, as it sounds too buggy).  But apparently your advice holds with Mavericks, too. 
    Etresoft (3:17am): very good point -- I think that's exactly what I did.  What I'm still not clear on is: are the backup files themselves (ie the actual data being backed up, as opposed to hard links) stored in the backup folder that TM creates, or are they kept in a separate file or folder?  It sounds like it's the former, as I had originally thought.  But pondini led me to believe that, if the data WAS stored in the folder, it would not be deleted if there were any links to it in future backup folders.  From what you said, I'm thinking that's probably true IF you are dealing with a backup that's INSIDE TM, but not if its a folder OUTSIDE TM.  Is that right?  If so, this really is a pit that's ripe for idiots like me to fall into.
    Lex Schellings (3:52am): I don't think I understand your comment -- you said "All these instructions are to delete a specific file... You should never deleted a dated FOLDER".  But instruction #2 says "One or more individual backups -- it's best to use Time Machine, per the green box below" --  then, in the green box, it says " Locate the backup or item you want to delete via the Timeline or "cascade" of Finder windows".  Since I was trying to delete a "backup", what was I supposed to select, if not a folder?
    Etresoft (4:15am): that's an interesting thought, but I don't think I used the sidebar to navigate to the backup I deleted.  When I opened TM, it showed me a sequence of Finder windows with the Star Wars background, but the external hard drive in the Finder window was grayed out and inaccessible.  So I checked pondini again, and it said I could get to it by right-clicking on the TM icon in the task bar (after exiting TM), selecting 'Browse other TM Disks', and selecting the one I wanted.  After I did that, I could see the external hard drive in TM was not gray anymore, and I navigated to the first backup folder.  Apparently, that's what took me "outside" of TM, even though I thought I was inside it.  I will definitely follow up on your suggestion to go to Apple's bug report site and file a report; thanks!
    Lex Schellings (4:39am; do you guys ever sleep?): I didn't hear that pondini had died -- I hope you folks weren't close to him; sounds like he was very thorough, and trying to do the right thing.  He just didn't realize there were people like me out there.   
    I'm surprised at your comment that "the behaviour of deleting one of the TimeMachine dated folders in Finder has always been the wrong way, leading to unhappiness."  That is exactly what our tech support department (which is run by Lockheed Martin; they're supposed to know what they're doing -- at least they certainly charge JPL enough for their service) said was the approved way to delete old TM backups, and in several cases in the past, it has worked for me.  In any event, I didn't think I was deleting the TM dated folder through Finder -- I thought I was doing it through TM, as pondini recommended.  Silly me.
    Etresoft (5:24am): It's a little scary that you said "I don't know of anyone who knows Time Machine well enough to actually update it."  Were you joking?  I definitely agree with your (and John Galt's) advice that "I wouldn't recommend any kind of interference with Time Machine, especially with the Finder".  In the future, I think I will just set up a separate partition on my external drive for TM backups, and let TM figure out how to thin itself out.
    Lex Schellings (5:43am): "a magic black box" -- that's a very good take-away from this misadventure. Thanks for your advice.

  • Time machine Deleted old computer backups

    Hey,
    I have been using a mac pro for about a year and a half now and as all computers get it has become slow and full of garbage. So i used my time machine back up and successfully backed up all my files. I put in the OS disk and wiped the computer clean and reinstalled the OS. I plugged the time machine back up in and began to copy over only the files that i wanted. A few days later I had not yet copied over all of the files that I needed, i was prompted me to set up this computer with a time machine back up. I began the process thinking that it would create the backups in a new file on the drive or append it to the current list of back up images. It stopped half way though saying there was not enough free disk space. on the 1 TB HD there was only 5 GB remaining. So I just canceled it and was going to finish copying over all of the files i wanted and they delete the old backups. However when I went to get my old backup files, they had all been deleted.
    I was using this hard drive to store other media files as well as time machine backups. taking the HD into the local computer shop i was informed that that is a terrible thing to do and perhaps the reason that my backups have been lost. the tech said there was nothing to be done but reformat the drive and start again. I am hoping this is not the case. the drive still says there is only 5GB of free space however I can only fine 300GB of files on the drive. so i believe that the files are still there. Does anyone know a solution to this issue. There are many valuable things on this hard drive that i would hate to loose.
    I have tried holding the option key and clicking on the icon to view other backups, but my original backups are not there.
    Thanks in advance.

    Before I make any reply, note that you are responding to a topic that has been inactive for more than two years, on a system two versions out of date. In the future, you would do better to start your own topic in an appropriate forum, specifying what system you're running and what hardware you're running it on, among other things.
    this exact thing happened to me as well and I must say that I find it totally unacceptable...
    Well, without more information, it's impossible to say what might have happened or how you can recover. You may find some answers on Pondini's excellent site:
    http://pondini.org
    However, it's important to understand that this may or may not have anything to do with Time Machine. Perhaps your backup drive is dying, perhaps its directory structure became badly corrupt, perhaps one of any number of other things could have happened. Because there is no such thing as storage that is completely stable, it's important to keep more than one backup, as noted previously on this topic.
    Carbon Copy Cloner seems like a much better solution at this time.
    Carbon Copy Cloner is an excellent solution. Is it better? No. It is simply different, and that makes it better in some aspects and worse in others than Time Machine. The best backup strategy will involve two different backup programs. I frequently recommend using both Time Machine and CCC. I use TM with a Time Capsule for one backup, which has certain advantages over CCC. I use CCC for a couple other backups, one of which is in a safe deposit box at all times, and that has some advantages over TM. Using both, with multiple backups, means that I'm extremely unlikely to lose much data, if any at all... unless a meteor hits and destroys both my home and my bank, in which case I've got bigger problems!
    Anyway, with regard to recovery, take a look at Pondini's site. If that doesn't help, or you need assistance with something, start your own topic in the appropriate forum for your system and provide additional details that may help us better assist you.

  • Why did time machine delete all my backups ??

    In time machine, I wanted to delete an old Lion backup to make more space for my new Mountain Lion. So within the "Star Wars" interface, I selected a few old backup directories (with the date on them), from year 2012. I had several backups from year 2013 I still wanted to keep... So i used the action button (the icon with the wheel) and asked to delete the selected directories of year 2013... But after waiting about 15 minutes to complete, all the backup including from year 2013 are GONE ! And the automatic backup from the new Mountain Lion started.
    How come ?

    Natael wrote:
    @Pondini : yep, everything. 4 weeks ago was the most recent backup of all the Lion's ones.
    Maybe.  How did you do the upgrade?  If you erased and installed, that could explain what seems to have happened, depending on how you put your stuff back.  If so, there may be a fix, and you may not have lost the backups.
    If you don't put things back in just the way Time Machine expects, it treats the drive as a different one, so does a full backup.  And you've got messages for a full backup.
    We have seen a few reports that TM occasionally does that even on a normal upgrade "in place" but I'm not sure how accurate they are.
    See if the procedure in #E3 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting will display the old backups.
    Now i'm reluctant to remove some old backups of my other macbook Snow Leopard's time machine... they are saved on the same HDD that i'm using for the ML.
    In the same partition? 
    The widget doesn't "recall" removing anything. It seems to mention the error because of the lack of space, and/or a mounting problem.
    No, no space problem.  If it deleted backups, each one would be documented, although that might have been done on an earlier backup.
    Could not back up OS X Recovery to /Volumes/MACDATA/Backups.backupdb: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=-69737 "Unable to mount recovery partition" UserInfo=0x7fd01438a350 {NSLocalizedDescription=Unable to mount recovery partition}
    That's Time Machine trying to copy the Recovery HD to the Time Machine drive.  Either there isn't one, or it may be damaged.
    Error: Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-50 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (OSStatus error -50.)" (paramErr: error in user parameter list) deleting backup: /Volumes/MACDATA/Backups.backupdb/Macintosh/2013-06-06-114031.inProgress/BD2B91 A4-6790-42E6-AEBE-E631D990D253
    That's a bogus message; trying to delete something it couldn't find from the work file.
    Message was edited by: Pondini

  • Time Machine : Deleting all local backups of one of several computers leaves files behind

    Hi,
    I'm in the process of transitioning my Time Machine setup. For the moment, I have a local Time Machine volume backing up three Macs to the same Backups.bakupdb folder (I had set that up two years ago before reading Pondini's Time Machine FAQ).
    Basically what I want to achieve is have a partition per computer that I'm backing up. So what I did was I partitioned a second external drive into 3 partitions, and I copied my TM partition to each of these 3 temporary partitions. I did that using Disk Utility's Restore tab. My plan was then to delete the backups of two computers off each temporary partition (per question 12 of Pondini's FAQ), to get 1 computer per partition on the temporary drive, then partition my main external drive in 3 and copy back each temporary partition to the main drive.
    (The second external drive is lent, I can't just switch to using it.)
    From what I read on question 12 of Pondini's FAQ and this reply by Pondini to a similar thread, I thought that deleting all backups of one computer via the Time Machine interface would leave me with an empty folder for that computer under Backups.backupdb, and that I could just delete this folder via the Finder. This is * not * what happened.
    After all backups for the first computer I wanted to delete off the first temporary partition are deleted, the folder for this Mac is not empty ; it still contains all the 15 dates folder of the individual backups. What's more, these date folders aren't empty either. The first 12 of them I deleted (the most recent ones) each contains a Macintosh HD folder, under which remains a System/Library/CoreServices hierarchy. The (locked) boot.efi file is alone in the CoreServices folder. The last 3 dates I deleted (the oldest backups), however, still contain an even bigger hierarchy. Applications, Library, System and Users exists in all three, with a lot of subfolders and lots of files, totalizing around 2 GB of data. Most of the files are locked, even logged into root (very diverse files : plists, dylibs, rtf files, fonts, etc) but some are not (apps, and other diverse files : colorsync profiles, dashboard widgets, bundles...). Seems like Time Machine could not delete everything. (Why ?)
    Note that I deleted the backups for one computer using that same computer, first using an Admin account for the first 3 or 4 dates and then using the root account to avoid having to always authenticate. (I didn't think it would create a problem... maybe it has?)
    When I go back into Time Machine for this computer, no backups remains. It's like if Time Machine doesn't see the data that it could't delete... This is all very strange.
    My question is : can I delete these leftover files and folders bia the Finder without fear it's going to break the backups for the other computers on the same partition ? If not, what should I do ?
    Sorry for the long post, but I hope I was clear...

    Phil_6379 wrote:
    After all backups for the first computer I wanted to delete off the first temporary partition are deleted, the folder for this Mac is not empty ; it still contains all the 15 dates folder of the individual backups.
    It shouldn't; when you delete a backup, the date-stamped backup folder and all it's contents should be deleted.
    Most likely, there was some sort of corruption, either on the original or the copies, that left some pieces.  On occasion, that will happen even when Time Machine is doing it's normal "thinning:" there will be a message in the log about finding a "partially-deleted" backup, and trying again.  Sometimes the second try will do it, sometimes not.  In that case, you might be able to delete it after running Repair Disk;  if not, sometimes you can delete it via the Finder.
    Under Lion only, deleting backups via the Finder is supported by Apple;  you'll get a message about how it can't be undone.  But it doesn't always work, so is recommended only as a last resort.  Holding the Option key while deleting may help with the locked files.
    If you can't get rid of the detritus, however, I'd recommend erasing the affected partition(s) and starting over.  I'd not continue backing-up to a set of suspect backups -- the way they're all linked together, there's just no telling whether you could do a full system restore successfully.
    In addition, as Linc says, even if you have some things off-site, I'd strongly recommend getting another external HD for "secondary" onsite backups.  Externals are getting much less expensive all the time, and if there's a problem with the old one (either the drive itself or the backups on it), you'll be in a large pickle.  Plus, of course, drives don't last forever.  See #27 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions for some suggestions.

  • Time Machine deleted ALL my backups prior to 4AM this morning.

    I had been using time machine and time machine editor to backup once a day at 4am. Somehow this morning instead of a normal backup it received an 'unknown instruction' and thought that there was no more room on the disk partition. Actually as of yesterday there was a huge amount of room compared with what it had been using.
    When I looked in the TM folder it showed that my backup drive and edrive had been backed up every hour since 4am, so it's no wonder that it ran out of room. I looked in the console's system log and this is what seemed Germain:
    Aug 5 04:00:24 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Starting standard backup
    Aug 5 04:00:32 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Backing up to: /Volumes/TimeMachine/Backups.backupdb
    Aug 5 04:00:32 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Ownership is disabled on the backup destination volume. Enabling.
    Aug 5 04:00:32 Macintosh-2 KernelEventAgent[63]: tid 00000000 received unknown event (256)
    Aug 5 04:05:29 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Starting pre-backup thinning: 30.75 GB requested (including padding), 4.80 GB available
    Aug 5 04:05:29 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: No expired backups exist - deleting oldest backups to make room
    Aug 5 04:06:13 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Deleted backup /Volumes/TimeMachine/Backups.backupdb/Office-omputer /2008-07-07-041140: 4.90 GB now available
    My questions are these:
    1. What the heck was the 'unknown event' that screwed everything up and lost all my b/u's since april?
    2. How do I delete the copies of emachine and the b/u drive from TM? They take up far to much room and were never backed up before 4am today. Do I have to remove TM entirely and reinstall?
    3. Is it possible to recover the backups that were deleted?
    Is TM really this sensitive to random bits flowing around the system? And if so what good is relying on a backup system that can be wiped out by a random and unknown bit or series of them?

    I had been using time machine and time machine editor to backup once a day at 4am. Somehow this morning instead of a normal backup it received an 'unknown instruction' and thought that there was no more room on the disk partition. Actually as of yesterday there was a huge amount of room compared with what it had been using.
    When I looked in the TM folder it showed that my backup drive and edrive had been backed up every hour since 4am, so it's no wonder that it ran out of room. I looked in the console's system log and this is what seemed Germain:
    Aug 5 04:00:24 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Starting standard backup
    Aug 5 04:00:32 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Backing up to: /Volumes/TimeMachine/Backups.backupdb
    Aug 5 04:00:32 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Ownership is disabled on the backup destination volume. Enabling.
    Aug 5 04:00:32 Macintosh-2 KernelEventAgent[63]: tid 00000000 received unknown event (256)
    Aug 5 04:05:29 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Starting pre-backup thinning: 30.75 GB requested (including padding), 4.80 GB available
    Aug 5 04:05:29 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: No expired backups exist - deleting oldest backups to make room
    Aug 5 04:06:13 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Deleted backup /Volumes/TimeMachine/Backups.backupdb/Office-omputer /2008-07-07-041140: 4.90 GB now available
    My questions are these:
    1. What the heck was the 'unknown event' that screwed everything up and lost all my b/u's since april?
    2. How do I delete the copies of emachine and the b/u drive from TM? They take up far to much room and were never backed up before 4am today. Do I have to remove TM entirely and reinstall?
    3. Is it possible to recover the backups that were deleted?
    Is TM really this sensitive to random bits flowing around the system? And if so what good is relying on a backup system that can be wiped out by a random and unknown bit or series of them?

  • Time Machine Deleted ALL the backups!

    Today, TM was cleaning up the old backups as it does every so often, however it inadvertently deleted ALL of the backups.
    1) Can I recover my backups?
    2) If so, how can I recover said backups?
    3) How can I prevent this from happening again?
    Thanks.
    What a bummer....

    TheChemist wrote:
    May 30 15:12:50 francoisimac com.apple.backupd[500]: Starting pre-backup thinning: 423.93 GB requested (including padding), 123.83 GB available
    The "padding" is workspace, etc., that TM needs on the backup drive. It's about 20%, so Time Machine estimates it needs to back up about 350 GB. That's the symptom: there isn't enough room for that.
    The one question I would love answered is what would trigger a pre-backup thinning?
    Not enough room for the new backup. In that case, Time Machine first deletes "expired" backups, then your oldest ones.
    Unfortunately, there's no way to tell what that 350 GB was. After a backup finishes successfully, you can see what was backed-up, but not before.
    So, you need to start with #D4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum). Something you're running is apparently causing a very large, but not full, backup (a full one would need about the 500 GB that's on your internal HD, plus another 100 GB temporarily).
    If you still can't figure it out, erase the drive and do a full backup. Then immediately do another. If it's quite large, see #A2 in Troubleshooting to download +Time Tracker+ or BackupLoupe to see what's causing the huge backups.
    If it's small, turn Time Machine off. Periodically, run a backup manually. (Select +Back Up Now+ from the TM icon in your menubar, or by right-clicking the TM icon in your Dock). Sooner or later, you should see a very large one, and hopefully it will complete so you can see what caused it, via +Time Tracker+ or BackupLoupe.

  • How to avoid Time Machine deleting my previous backups?

    I´ve been using Time Machine on my MacBook Pro with Lion to back it up in a WD My Book Live network drive. So far everything had gone smooth, and my files were incrementally backing up.
    But recently I got a message that said the following (translating the attached pic from Spanish):
    Time Machine has finished verifying your backup files. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new back up.
    Click on "Start new backup" to create a new one. Previous back up history will be deleted.
    Click on "Create back up later" to get a reminder tomorrow. Time Machine won´t be executing any backups until then.
    I don´t want to lose my previous back ups, since they´ve got files that I don´t have now in my laptop but would like to conserve. However, with this message, it seems that if I don´t make a new one and subsequently delete previous back ups Time Machine won´t be making new ones - which is a pain.
    Can anyone advise on how to overcome this, and have Time Machine carrying backing up my files without deleting previous backups?
    Thanks in advance!!!

    Not one of Apple's more direct messages.  What it should say is, "your backups are corrupted." 
    See #C13 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

  • Time Machine stalls on first backup of new iMac with 3TB Fusion Drive

    I've got a brand new 27" iMac with latest patches up to OS X 10.9.1. I've loaded about 500GB of data onto this machine and wanted to make an intial Time Machine backup, so I connected a brand new 4TB Seagate Backup Plus USB 3.0 external hard drive, formatted the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), pointed Time Machine at it, and let it go. It ran up to about 30GB before I walked away. When I came back maybe 8–10 hours later it was still stopped at about 30GB. I stopped it, and tried again. This time it just went a couple of GB before halting. I can hear the external drive stop spinning because it isn't being accessed.
    I also have a new 2TB Western Digital My Passport USB 3.0 external drive, so I formatted that as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and tried setting it as the Time Machine drive instead. Again Time Machine gets a little way into the backup before stalling and proceeding no further. I think this rules out the drive, since both drives behave the same way.
    I also have Super Duper installed on this machine, so I tried doing a full disk copy to the WD drive and this worked flawlessly. This suggests that nothing is wrong with the drives themselves, as does the successful check of all three disks with Disk Utility.
    I've checked "Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off" in Energy Saver. I've unchecked "Put hard disks to sleep when possible". I've checked "Enable Power Nap". I set Time Machine back to using the 4TB Seagate Drive and have been letting it run as long as it wants to. It got up to 13.32GB this morning before seeming to stall this morning. 10 hours later when I got from work it's still at 13.32 GB and it still says "About 7 hours remaining", just as it did at 8:30am.
    I've read a bunch of discussions on here about issues like this, which is where I came up with some of the things I've tried. So far, nothing has worked. Can anyone suggest a working solution? It seems like the Time Machine software just isn't workin

    Pondini's site is excellent, but didn't happen to cover this problem (or Mavericks in particular as of yet). But I did call AppleCare support as you suggested, rkaufman87, where I was quickly escalated since I'd already tried the things the first tier support people start with. After some investigation via screen sharing and inspection of my system log (which suggested the stall involved issues with the index) the main change we made was to clear out the Time Machine preference files and Spotlight's cache before rebooting and trying again. This time the backup completed without stalling, and has continued to work ever since. Thanks for encouraging me to call support!

  • Time machine deleting many more backups than necessary - how to stop it?

    I did something that I expected to cause a full backup and might require TM to do some cleanup. Time machine has started eating my old backups and has quite a healthy appetite. I'm quite afraid it's going to wipe out my entire backlog of backups.
    So here's what I did:
    - turned off TM
    - defragmented my boot disk* by using SuperDuper to create a clone of my boot disk, reformat my boot disk, clone back to my boot disk
    - Selected "Choose Disk" in TM
    - Selected "Backup Now"
    (I expected TM to do a full backup do to changed i-nodes on the file or whatnot)
    TM thinned out the backups as expected by removing weekly backups for the prior month. It then proceeded to start deleting old backups.
    At last count, my TM Disk had 452.87GB of 999.86GB. My boot disk is using 142.49GB free of 319.73GB. So, there would be room for a full backup even if my boot disk was completely full but it's not.
    What can I do to get TM back on track without losing all my old backups?
    Thanks,
    Dean
    * Yes, I know I don't NEED to defrag, but even Apple recognizes that if you do a lot of video work, it's possible you might actually benefit from a defrag.

    Dean Thompson wrote:
    I did something that I expected to cause a full backup and might require TM to do some cleanup. Time machine has started eating my old backups and has quite a healthy appetite. I'm quite afraid it's going to wipe out my entire backlog of backups.
    So here's what I did:
    - turned off TM
    - defragmented my boot disk* by using SuperDuper to create a clone of my boot disk, reformat my boot disk, clone back to my boot disk
    Any time you replace everything on a disk (or the disk itself), it's considered changed and will be backed-up in it's entirety. This even happens if you do a full system restore from TM backups: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1338
    The new backup will require as much space as the data on your internal HD, plus 20% for workspace.
    At last count, my TM Disk had 452.87GB of 999.86GB. My boot disk is using 142.49GB free of 319.73GB. So, there would be room for a full backup even if my boot disk was completely full but it's not.
    So the backup should require about 170 GB of free space.
    To confirm what's going on, 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. Navigate to the backup in question, then copy and post the messages (but only to the first deletion) for that run here.

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