Time Machine deleting files on drive

I have an external drive which had all of my photos stored on it. I then decided I would use this drive also for Time Machine. I have just gone to find my photo files and all that is on there is "bakups", I am so so hoping that I have not lost all my files...but I am not confident!

Time Machine itself DOES NOT delete any other files which may be on the same drive as its backups.
I advise you to immediately disconnect the drive, turn OFF Time Machine for now, and use data recovery software such as Data Rescue (you can download a trial version) or talk to a professional data recovery service such as Drive Savers.
And hopefully lesson learned about making backups of EVERYTHING that's important to you! You can't use Time Machine to backup what's already on the backup drive.
Matt

Similar Messages

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.

HT3275 TIme Machine deleting files I deleted from my home drive

This seems like a very basic problem but I cant find an answer and am no longer able to use Apple Support. I am trying to erase files from my very crowded home drive. I bought an external drive and backed up all fikles there. However, now when I delete files from my home drive and plug in the external drive, Time Machine delets the files I deleted from my home drive on the external drive which defeats my purpose. Can anyone help a hopelsessly tech savvyless stranger.
Thanks So much

Copy the files to the external drive in the Finder instead of going through Time Machine. If you want that drive to have a bootable OS, you'll need to use software such as Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper.
Time Machine backups are designed for recovery of accidentally or inadvertently deleted files. They aren't meant for primary storage of files you don't want on any other drive. In any case, drives eventually fail; anything you want to keep shouldn't be on only one drive.
(70364)

Will Time Machine delete files on external hard drive?

I have all my itunes music and videos on my external hard drive. Will Time Machine delete these files. The hard drive is already formatted for mac.

Note from Time Machine Help files:
Time Machine works best if you use your backup disk only for Time Machine backups. If you keep files on your backup disk, Time Machine won’t back up those files, and the space available for Time Machine backups will be reduced.
So it will not overwrite the files but it also will not back them up.

Does time machine delete files that you delete on hard drive

On my mac HD I have files "A", "B" and "C". Time machine has backed them all up. Later, I decide I don't want "B" on my mac HD anymore. Does this data get deleted on time machine as well? If not, is there an easy automated option to do this?

Jason,
While it is not automatic, you can still remove said file from the backup quite easily (there is consideration for doing so). Open Time Machine, navigate back to a point where the unwanted file exists, select it, then choose "Delete from all backups" in the "Action" menu (looks like a gear).
Scott

Time machine deleted files on external HD

Ok so I bought an external hard drive to not only backup my computer, but to have a place to put some video footage on. So I opted for the time machine backup of course. First thing I did was add over 90 gb of film to the hardrive directly before backing up my whole computer. I then deleted the files off of my computer in order to save space. Sounds great right? No!!! As soon as I deleted the files off of my computer they also disappeared from the external hard drive!!!!! WHAT HAPPENED PLEASE HELP ME!!!

This means that the drive was formatted incorrectly for use with TM and it had to reformat it. it warns you before doing so. your chances of recovering your data are not great as it may have been overwritten by TM backups. stop using the drive ASAP (turn TM off) and try data recovery software like Data Rescue II or Filesalvage.

Time Machine - deleted files disappeared in one day

I may be misunderstanding TM, so maybe someone can clarify, or tell me where I'm using TM wrong. I'm trying to use TM to keep a copy of files in case of accidental delete or HD failure.
Here's what I'm doing:
I'm backing up from an external hard drive (call it "original") to another ("backup").
Original has my iTunes library + other things.
I did my first TM backup (original to backup) on the 15th Jan and it's been running since.
To check I'm understanding how it all works, and I know how to restore, I created a "test" folder with a "test file" in it on my original drive and ran TM, all fine.
Then, today, I deleted the test file (not the folder) on the original drive, purged the bin. Backed up with TM again.
Then I went in to the TM to find the deleted test file and restore it. But TM won't let me go back in time past the time I deleted it.
Seems strange, I thought the point was exactly that - I could go back to a previous time and restore mistakes, deletes etc?
Or am I misunderstanding what TM is supposed to do? What's the purpose of it, if it only lets me restore things that are still there? Is it just to be able to look at earlier versions/ iterations of documents (e.g. a word doc), but not restore screw-ups like deleting the whole document/ file itself if you didn't mean to?
As I say, this is all today's delete, so it can't be that the test doc was deleted from TM for space reason etc.

If you delete a file from your hard drive, TM will eventually delete it from the backup set, when it needs the space. So, unless the backup drive is full, it likely should not have deleted that copy this soon.
Time Machine is not an archival backup solution. It is a snapshot of your current HD so that you can recover from physical loss (ie hard drive crash).

Time machine/delete files

I have files on time machine backup that I want to delete; (the original files I've deleted in the internal drive. When I try to delete, I get a message saying the I can't delete backup files???
GH

You need to delete the files from within "Time Machine". In any folder activate Time Machine. When the starry night background appears, in the foremost folder window, navigate to the item you want to delete and highlight it. Then in the little gear drop-down menu select "delete all instances" for the item and you'll get rid of every backup of that item. I think if you use "cmd-delete" on the individual file you'll delete only that one instance of the backup, leaving the rest of them on the Time Machine drive.

Time Machine Deleted Files From A Non-Full Backup?

OK... I just noticed something strange... I had some movie files that I deleted sometime yesterday (don't need them anymore)... just now, I wanted to see to retrieve one of them with TM and they're gone!
My backup drive is nowhere near full and TM didn't warn me about deleting anything... looking at my backups, I noticed that I only have backups for yesterday at 8:03AM and from 8:09PM (and on)... I'm guessing that's the case because anything before 8:09PM is now more than 24 hrs old... hence, it's 'thinned out'... I also noticed that I only have my initial backup from Friday... not the several it made afterwards... and that backup from Friday is missing some data I had that was captured by the later backups...
What's going on here? Seems to me that it should have all of my stuff, no?

jdelima wrote:
If you have all of the hourly data essentially versioned and incorporated into the daily, then Joe wants to restore from 3 days ago, if he has a file there that he has changed every single hour for that particular day, then he has 24 possible files to restore! It becomes a versioning nightmare. Though my example is extreme it's possible.
Yeah, but that is what computers are good at, though. You can even put a simple UI on this, where the most recent version (the last edited version before its untimely deletion) is the only thing you see, unless you want to delve deeper into the depths of versions of the file.
Also consider what is currently done for backups. People manually, or to a schedule, do point in time backups. Not as frequently as time machine, but it still happens. They have the exact same issues, with the exception that TM may have people becoming relaxed about their data, falsely believing it always going to be in a backup set somewhere.
Yeah, point-in-time backups are always an issue, because they are just a snapshot, and not a journal of things done to change a file, so you can't recover something if it was never in a point-in-time backup.
Sure it has it's flaws, but overall it's better there than not.
I totally agree with that. Getting people to use some backup (even if flawed) is way better than the dismal state of backups for end users. I guess I'm just advocating for improving even further the state of backups, to a point where you can actually rely on them 99.999%.
In case anyone is interested, I have been participating in an Open Source backup project "Box Backup" for the last few years. It supports the keeping of deleted files as long as the backup server has space left. It also solves another TM problem, in that it backs up only what changed in a large file (like a Parallels virtual Disk), so you don't need to do full backups of every file every time it changes. It has many other features as well, such as network backups, encrypted backups, and multiple platform support (Windows, Mac, Linux, and more).
Go to http://www.boxbackup.org/ to check it out.
This, however is not a solution (yet) for the average Joe to use. It requires a server on which to run the backup server (which could be a Mac), and some setup, and use of Terminal.app, etc. But it does solve many of the issues with TM.
Thanks,
Per

Time Machine Deleting Files with 20Gbs Remaing

Time Machine is starting to delete files when there is still 20Gbs remaining on the hard drive. Its a 500gb hard drive partitioned into two sections with 350gbs allotted for Time Machine. I understand that it deletes older files when its full but 20gbs remains hardly should be defined as full.
Thanks
Bryan

Are you sure it's deleting them to make room for new ones, or doing it's normal "thinning" of expired backups?
If it's deleted your oldest backup, then yes, that's because your TM disk is getting near full, as NeroWolfe explained.
If not, it's just TM's normal process of deleting hourly backups after a day, and daily backups after a week.
The easy way to tell is from your logs. 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. Among all the other messages, every backup TM deletes will be identified, and it will be clear whether it's making room for new ones, or deleting expired backups.
And even if it is deleting your oldest backups, TM will always retain it's copy of any item that's on any other backup and/or still on your internal HD. So your present system is always backed-up; all you lose is copies of things that were changed or deleted long ago.

Will Time Machine delete files already on my external HD?

The title pretty much sums it up. I have a 3TB HD and I use it for saving render files and raw video footage, but now I need to use it for Time Machine too. If I use it for TM, will all of my files alredy on the HD disappear, or stay put? One more thing... If I need to partition the external HD and use the new partition for TM, can I still restore my computer from that partition? Any help will be gladly accepted!

Yes, that's an OK solution for what you need to do. In fact, if you can partition off just enough space for all the files on your hard drive, then you can just clone to the newly made volume. Much faster than a Time Machine backup.
To resize the drive do the following:
1. Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
After the main menu appears select Disk Utility and click on the Continue button. Select the hard drive's main entry then click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
2. You should see the graphical sizing window showing the existing partitions. A portion may appear as a blue rectangle representing the used space on a partition.
3. In the lower right corner of the sizing rectangle for each partition is a resizing gadget. Select it with the mouse and move the bottom of the rectangle upwards until you have reduced the existing partition enough to create the desired new volume's size. The space below the resized partition will appear gray. Click on the Apply button and wait until the process has completed. (Note: You can only make a partition smaller in order to create new free space.)
4. Click on the [+] button below the sizing window to add a new partition in the gray space you freed up. Give the new volume a name, if you wish, then click on the Apply button. Wait until the process has completed.
You should now have a new volume on the drive.
Clone Lion using Restore Option of Disk Utility
Boot to the Recovery HD:
Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
Select Disk Utility from the main menu then press the Continue button
Select the destination volume from the left side list.
Click on the Restore tab in the DU main window.
Check the box labeled Erase destination.
Select the destination volume from the left side list and drag it to the Destination entry field.
Select the source volume from the left side list and drag it to the Source entry field.
Double-check you got it right, then click on the Restore button.
Destination means the new external backup volume. Source means the internal startup drive.

Time Machine deletes my external drive backups

I have my laptop's internal drive, an external 1.5TB data drive, and another external 2TB Time Machine drive. OSX 10.6.8.
As long as they're all connected and mounted, I'm all good. But if I ever make the mistake of connecting the backup drive without the data drive, it instantly deletes all backups of the data drive. Bam - gone - and I have no backup for that drive until I spend the 15 hours it takes to back it up again.
Is this normal behavior?(!)

You can't do better than check out Pondini:
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html

Time Machine deletes oldest backups?!

So I'm starting to use Time Machine, now that my tape drive went south. I decided to rotate drives and use Time Machine.
I'm reading threads about rotating drives and it seems straight forward. Swap drive, tell Time Machine to use the drive that you swapped in.
Two questions:
1. Does Time Machine know that the 2nd and subsequent backups are incremental?
2. Is there a way to set Time Machine to ask *BEFORE* it starts deleting files?
Time Machine is cool. No doubt. What's not cool is how we have to jump through hoops to get decent backups, with very little "best practice" guidance from Apple.
I want to swap drives and hot have to poke through System Preferences > Time Machine each time I do.
I don't want to worry about being told *AFTER* the fact that Time Machine "deleted files to make space" which is absurd.
System Preferences > Time Machine > Options > [x] Notify after old backups are deleted
It's unacceptable that Time Machine does not warn *BEFORE* deleting oldest backups. That's a decision only the user should make.
Don

don montalvo wrote:
If you swap drives, Time Machine SHOULD be intelligent enough to know where to begin (based on what's on the drive). But it's not.
Yes, it is. A new drive will, of course, get a new full backup. Thereafter, if you swap drives, Time Machine will back up the changes made since the last backup to that particular drive, independent of any others.
If you swap, say, once a week, the first backup after the swap will be relatively long, of course, as there's a lot to "catch up." Time Machine might even have to do a "deep traversal," comparing everything on your system to the backups, which takes a while, too, but it will catch up.
So the issue of data being deleted automatically (where users are only told AFTER data is deleted) is still unresolved.
And it will remain the way it is; Apple clearly changed it because the downside to having backups fail was much larger than the after-the-fact notification. There were many, many threads in the Leopard forums where folks didn't understand or didn't heed the messages, and ended up with outdated backups when their HDs failed or were hopelessly corrupted.
And the issue of swapping drives being quite tedious is STILL an issue.
Yes, and there's no indication that will be changed, either. Apple seems to want to keep things as simple as possible. There are some workarounds, none entirely successful. Here's one: http://www.gearz.de/howto/OSX5/changeTMvol-sh-X6
can't wait for Lion to be released so we can see if things got any better.
There's no indication of anything like the things you're looking for in any of the published documents or even the rumor sites. That's all I can say.
While Time Machine has some elements of a traditional "Archive" type backup app, it just basically isn't one. Never has been, never will be. The main audience is the novice to casual user, or even the power user, who either won't, or doesn't want to, manage backups.
If you really want an traditional archive type system, get one. You can't make Time Machine into one.
See Kappy's post on Basic Backup for links to a number of various types.

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

Will Time Machine delete existing files on hard drive

A coworker is running OS X 10.6.8 on a MacBook Pro, and the computer is running very slow. I told her she should back up all her files with Time Machine, wipe her drive, upgrade to 10.10 and reimport all her files once that's done and see how things run then.
The problem is her existing hard drive has a lot of files on it already, that she doesn't want to risk losing.
So if I back up her hard drive with Time Machine to this hard drive, will it automatically erase all the existing files on the hard drive? Or can the Time Machine back up coexist with those existing files?

If the drive's already formatted as Mac OS Extended or Xsan, the files will remain as is. If not, they'll be erased.
In any case, all of the files you want to keep should be on at least two drives so that they won't be lost in the event that one of them fails.
(116250)

Time Machine deleting files on drive

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