Time Machine deletes entire previous backup and then back it up from zero!

my configuration :
Time Machine : USB external HD 500G
Backing up : 1. internal 160G (90G used) 2. USB external HD 500G (290G used)
the problem is, every time I hook up the TM, it backup the internal HD smoothly but deletes its entire previous backup of the external HD and starts all over ... and naturally it takes forever to do 290G....
anybody get any idea where the problem seem to be ?
Thanks!!

Welcome to Discussions.
It could be that your drive isn't formatted correctly for Time Machine. Launch Disk Utility which is in your Applications > Utilities folder. Choose the upper icon (the one that is not indented) for your Time Machine drive. At the bottom of the window the Partition Map Scheme should be GUID for Intel Macs and Apple Partition Map for PPC Macs. Next click on the indented icon for your Time Machine drive. The format should be Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
If the formatting is not correct on your Time Machine drive you will need to reformat your drive which will erase everything on it. Copy any files you might need from your Time Machine drive. Then format your Time Machine disk following the directions in this article. People with PPC Macs should substitute Apple Partition Map for GUID when following the directions.
If your Time Machine disk is formatted correctly there might be some hints in the Time Machine log as to what has gone wrong. Launch Console which is in Applications > Utilities. Choose All Messages in the left pane of Console and type in "backupd" without the quotes in the search window. Post back any errors or complaints that you find in the log.

Similar Messages

  • HT3275 My Time Machine deletes ALL previous backups

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    OS X Yosemite 10.10.1
    Backup volume is Western Digital MyBookLiveDuo with 2TB and 1.8TB available

    Hi Joe,
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    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.

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  • How to avoid Time Machine deleting my previous backups?

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    Not one of Apple's more direct messages.  What it should say is, "your backups are corrupted." 
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  • HT3275 Time Machine deleting all previous backups?

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    No. See:
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  • Time machine deleted all my backups instead of the one selected

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    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.   
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    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.

  • Time Machine Loses All Previous Backups(!)

    Hi folks,
    If anyone can shed any light on this, I'd be eternally grateful. I had been using TM for some time to backup my personal documents and downloads. Until, that is, I got the 'There is not enough space...' error.
    "OK", I thought, "I'll do some house-keeping in a day or two and clear out some unnecessary files on my laptop's hard drive." After I did, however, Time Machine kept saying that the space required to perform the backup was 43Gb, when I had only 11Gbleft. Had I let my backup folders (previously totalling 10Gb) balloon up to 43Gb? Surely not. I looked closer at my TM backups and all I could see was a half-backup that had failed to complete. The worrying thing though is that it contained top level folders e.g. <mymac>/Applications, <mymac>/System etc. I had excluded these in the backup folders list, so why had TM tried to back them up? Why did it ignore/override my exlusions?
    Most worrying of all though, where had all my previous backups gone? My drive still showed the same capacity. If they'd been deleted, wouldn't the drive show greater capacity? So, if they haven't been deleted, where are they?
    Also, it's a little disconcerting that if TM comes to the end of a backup drive, it'll behave just like a teenager - it'll complain, then go quiet, become uncooperative and hide information from you.
    Any suggestions/things I may have overlooked?

    MrLinguaFranca wrote:
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    James, thanks firstly for your response. To answer your questions, no I didn't see the backups that I had lost when I entered Time Machine afterwards. You're right, the partial ones didn't appear.
    I'm not superstitious, (just experienced I suppose), but I kept making manual backups throughout, so, fortunately, I haven't lost that much. Hence, I'm looking more for answers as to why it failed more than practical steps to recover the lost data.
    1. After it ran into trouble with disk space, why did TM try to back up items I had excluded?
    2. What had happened to all the backups PRIOR to the error? Why weren't they preserved?
    TM may have been trying to do a full backup of the 5 GB. As TM needs some workspace, that would actually require about 6 GB.
    Does TM have it's own, exclusive partition on that drive? If not, that could contribute to the problem, along with any manual deletions you may have done (you didn't answer that question, by the way).
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    This couldn't have been what HG Wells had in mind.
    No, it wasn't what Apple had in mind, either. I suspect you've used other backup apps, and have assumed that TM is similar, which may have caused, or at least contributed to, your problems. Since you're using it in a very different way than it was designed for, you may want to reconsider either your strategy or what's the best app for it.

  • Time Machine deleted ALL my backups

    I was using time machine for quite a while to backup my hard drive and then stopped it for a while. When I turned it back on today, it backed up my ENTIRE hard drive (50 GB) and deleted ALL the old files & time machine backups.
    The files and information on those old backups were extremely important. Is there any way of getting these back? Or am I SOL.
    Thanks in advance, I really appreciate any help.

    If TM completed what was most likely a new, full backup (which it will do after a long period without backups), then much (or most) of your old backups have already been overwritten.
    It is possible that you might be able to recover some data from the rest of the disk with a +Data Recovery+ app, such as Data Rescue II, or a 3rd-party service. Neither is cheap or certain.
    If you want to try that, stop using the disk immediately. To find such apps & services, look for +Data Recovery+ or +Disk recovery+ via Google, VersionTracker.com, or MacUpdate.com

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