Time machine didn't backup all of my fonts. Where are they?

Hi.
My Macbook was getting really slow, so I took it to the genius bar, where they wiped it and returned everything to factory settings to hopefully solve the speed issure. It's a one year old computer that shouldn't behave this way. Anyway, I backed everything up using Time Machine before my harddrive was wiped. I was told to bring things back to the computer manually, to avoid whatever problem existed on the hardrive. Everything has been brought back in place except for my fonts. I went into the fonts folder in Library in Time Machine, and the fonts there are just a fraction of the fonts I had before. I've been going back and forth between different backup versions, used Tinker Tool to try to uncover invisibale files, but they are simply not there. About 100 fonts have gone missing, some of which I paid a lot of money for. I'm a graphic designer, and working with fonts is my bread and butter. I would be eternally grateful for some help. Can my fonts be restored somehow? Am I looking in the wrong place?
Thanks,
Stina

Make your user library visible in Finder and see if they are in the Library/Fonts.
In Finder hold down the option/alt key while selecting the Go menu item. Select Library.
If you want to make your user library permanently visible, run the below command in Applications/Utilities/Terminal.
chflags nohidden ~/Library/
You will need to do that after any updates.

Similar Messages

Time Machine does not backup all of my files

Hi,
If I compare my Dropbox folder to what Time Machine backups there are differences which means that Time Machine does not backup all files:
diff <(cd "/Users/phil/Dropbox" && ls -R | sort) <(cd "/Volumes/TimeMachineBackup/Backups.backupdb/Computername/Latest/Macintosh HD/Users/phil/Dropbox" && ls -R | sort)
There are also differences if I compare my user folder to the Time Machine Backup:
diff <(cd "/Users/phil/" && ls -R | sort) <(cd "/Volumes/TimeMachineBackup/Backups.backupdb/Computername/Latest/Macintosh HD/Users/phil/" && ls -R | sort)
I did not exclude the folders affected from the Time Machine backup.
I have verified this behaviour on other computers as well.
Does anybody else have this kind of problem?
Philipp

These commands solved the problem for now:
1) Stop the Dropbox desktop application (if needed)
- Click on the Dropbox icon.
- Choose Quit/Stop/Exit
2) Open your Terminal app (Located at /Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
3) Copy and paste the following lines into the Terminal, one at a time, and press RETURN after each one. PLEASE make sure you copy and paste these commands (don't type them by hand), as getting them wrong could cause some harm. You'll be prompted for your computer user's password (not your Dropbox password) after entering the first command. Keep in mind that the password field in the terminal will remain blank as you type your password. After you type it, just press ENTER.
sudo chflags -R nouchg ~/Dropbox ~/.dropbox ~/.dropbox-master
sudo chown "$USER" "$HOME"
sudo chown -R "$USER" ~/Dropbox ~/.dropbox ~/.dropbox-master
sudo chmod -RN ~/.dropbox ~/Dropbox ~/.dropbox-master
chmod -R u+rw ~/Dropbox ~/.dropbox ~/.dropbox-master

Time Machine does not backup all files

I recently did a clean install and to my horror i can see that Time Machine does NOT back up all my files.
It seems to be worst in my music library which fortunately is pretty easy to rebuild do to itunes index.
But is there any way to make sure that Time Machine does in fact back up all files?
Or is it just broken and should be avoided?
I have 1,5 year old Macbook Pro Retina 15 inches 500 GB SSD

If you use the third-party application "Dropbox," you may see files in the Finder that are not present locally, but are actually on a network server. Those files won't be backed up and won't appear in Time Machine, even though they show in a Finder window. If the files in question are in a Dropbox folder, disable the software or refer to its developer for support.
Continue only if you've ruled out Dropbox or any similar product as a possible cause of the issue.
Open the Time Machine preference pane and unlock the settings, if necessary. Click the Options button. If there is one particular folder with items that are not being backed up reliably, add it to the list of excluded items. If there are many such folders, add your home folder to the list, or add a whole volume (i.e., what Apple calls a "disk.") Save the changes.
Start a backup, or wait for one to happen automatically. When it's done, open the preference pane again and remove the exclusion(s) you made earlier. Back up again and see whether there's a change.

Time Machine runs huge backups all the time. Any Idea Why & How to Fix It?

Right now System Preferences for TM says there is 881MB of available space on my Time Capsule with 998GB of storage. The TM system preferences has been stuck for hours saying it's backed up 31GB out of 68GB. No error messages. My wife and I only use the TC for TM backups.
Any idea why I'm not getting the much smaller incremental, hourly backups that I"m expecting? This is really slowing down my system.
Thanks,
Bob
Late 2008 MacBook, Mac OS 10.7.4

bobair1 wrote:
Thanks for the info. Yes, I am running Windows XP with VMware Fusion. I keep my data files segregated from the "dark side". So if I opt out of backing up VMware, will my data files still be backed up?
Yes. See #D4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting

Time Machine dong full backup all of a sudden - why?

I have had time machine going for months, from both my Macbook and my Mac Mini, and this AM I noticed that it is doing a full backup, instead of the incremental backup it normally does. Yesterday, I updated this Macbook with the latest iDVD update, and I installed iLife '11 on my Mac Mini, but that's it. My Mac Mini uses a referenced iPhoto library on a NAS, but that is a different NAS drive than the time capsule. The only thing the time capsule is used for is or backup.
Could the upgrading of my iPhoto library on my Mac Mini have messed something up?
I will see if my Mac Mini does a full backup also.
Thoughts anyone?

Hi moviewbuffking - this could have a number of reasons, so have a look at these:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1964018
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2057525
Cheers
Michael

Time Machine Won't Backup All of iMac's Partitions

I have an OWC 2TB external drive which is factory formatted for Intel based Macs, and I am running the latest Mavericks platform on a 27" iMac Intel i5.
I just started using Time Machine for the first time. My Mac is partitioned into two parts, and for some reason, Time Machine backed up both of them at first, but now my 1st partition is no longer there. Only the 2nd partition is showing up when I go to the drive in Finder as well as within Time Machine's restore mode.
It's as if Time Machine is no longer recognizing that I have 2 parts to my HD. What am I doing wrong?
Thanks!

This procedure is a diagnostic test. It makes no changes to your data.
Please triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
{ diskutil list; echo; diskutil cs list; echo; ls -@Oaen /Vo*; mdutil -as 2>&-; } | pbcopy
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.
Launch the built-in Terminal 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 Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window by pressing the key combination command-V. I've tested these instructions only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, you may have to press the return key after pasting.
Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign ($) to appear below what you entered.
The output of the command will be automatically copied to the Clipboard. If the command produced no output, the Clipboard will be empty. Paste into a reply to this message.
The Terminal window doesn't show the output. Please don't copy anything from there.
If any personal information appears in the output, anonymize before posting, but don’t remove the context.

My iMac can't update to 10.7.5 yet i've had 10.7.5 i was having panic attacks now i want it back i've got 10.6 because apple said to erase the drive and restore to 10.7.5 my time machine didn't backup 10.7.5 can apple erase and reboot my iMac to 10.7.5?

help me please!

Andre R 1st wrote:
... this 10.6 will not let me do the 10.6.2 update combo
I do not understand why that would be so.
This should update any version of OS X 10.6 to 10.6.8: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1399
After that you should have the App Store available to you, so that you can download and install Lion again.
If that does not work I guess you will have to go back to Apple and have them straighten it out.

All Addresses Wiped Out - Where Are They?

My wife is a new Mac user, with a nice, new Core Duo iMac. She's been busy populating all her applications with data.
She has not been busy backing up.
Last night, she was adding addresses to Address Book 4.0.3 (Build 477.6). She got tired of using the "add to address book" command, so she created an empty group in Address Book and dragged a number of highlighted addresses from a Mail message to the empty folder.
Dragging one address at a time worked.
Dragging sixty together crashed Address Book and all other open applications. After force-quitting Address Book, all the new addresses were gone (of course)- but so were all the old ones.
There was also an interesting,new (to me) Finder crash - the Dock animation was frozen, while the cursor was working fine.
All of her Address Book data, Groups and Names, is gone. Is there a place to look for this data?

Actually, after I posted to your question I found several more strings with the same general discussion. No answers, however. Look under the addressbook category

Time Machine shows a backup this morning at 11:58 but I didn't have the external hard drive plugged in. How is this possible?

Time Machine shows a backup this morning at 11:58 but I didn't have the external hard drive plugged in. How is this possible?

Because the drive was disconnected Time Machine made a local snapshot on your Mac.

I am trying to confirm the time at which a particular backup occurred using an external hard drive that I have since misplaced. Although time machine lists the backup times for some backups, it does not list them for all. Can someone help?

I am trying to confirm the time at which a particular backup occurred using an external hard drive that I have since misplaced. Although time machine lists the backup times for some backups, it does not list them for all, including the one in question. Can someone help?

Okay, I've sussed it. I saw a link to another discussion that hadn't turned up in any of my searches before I posted the question above.
My Tosh HDD was formatted to FAT 32 and therefore would not be backed up by Time Machine. I removed all data from it - nightmare as I hadn't enough space to put it on the macbook HDD, but, after trawling through numerous photos and deleting rubbish for hours, I finally made enough space and copied all data across. Then, after clearing the data from the Tosh HDD, I used disk utilitity to reformat it to Mackintosh OS Extended. Chose the option without kournalling because I'm not baking up onto this disk and so don't need it - according to some other discussions I found.
When it was done I check on time machine in system prefs and once I selected options, I was able to remove it from the excluded from backups list. Hey presto. Now I'm moving my photo library and my music library onto the Tosh HDD and my macbook should start to breath again. Hurray.

Restore from time machine does not list all my backups. I know they exist but there dates are not present on the restore list. Any help appreciated.

Restore from time machine does not list all my backups. I know they exist but their dates are not present on the restore list. Any help appreciated. If I must use one of these older dates to restore, how do I then get the more current data off time machine?

Ok, so am i correct in saying that the steps to fix are as follows.
That's one option, but not what I meant by restoring in the time-travel view. The latter is what you get when you enter Time Machine.
is the fresh install not going to be able to "see" the time machine backups that I have at the moment.
It should, but sometimes people report that it fails. I'm not sure why that happens.

Leopard applications all hang while Time Machine prepares for backup

I'm sure others have posted about this but I can't find a usable solution. I have the most recent version of Leopard, a 1TB external FireWire drive dedicated to Time Machine storage and about 400GB of backups on it. Every day at some point, Time Machine starts a backup, pauses while preparing, and the entire Mac grinds to a halt. New processes won't launch, open applications hang, Finder becomes unresponsive, menus and dock freeze in whatever position they were in at the point of launch, and I can't cancel the backup process.
The only solution is to turn off the backup drive while its running and wait for the Mac to wake up again (which it does in under a minute). I have no virus protection running. I have erased the drive and started fresh at least once to no avail.
Since I am effectively breaking a live connection every time I turn the drive off without unmounting it first (an obvious no-no), the data has great potential to be getting more and more screwed up. What can I do?

Message logs:
October 12, 2009, 1:43:25 AM
Volume at path /Volumes/Racer BU does not appear to be the correct backup volume for this computer. (Cookies do not match)
Backup failed with error: 18
October 12, 2009, 11:32:32 AM
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/Racer BU/Backups.backupdb
Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Racer X
Node requires deep traversal:/ reason:kFSEDBEventFlagMustScanSubDirs|kFSEDBEventFlagReasonEventDBUntrustable|
No pre-backup thinning needed: 984.2 MB requested (including padding), 443.72 GB available
Copied 21948 files (368.1 MB) from volume Racer X.
No pre-backup thinning needed: 548.2 MB requested (including padding), 443.35 GB available
Copied 961 files (965 KB) from volume Racer X.
Starting post-backup thinning
Deleted backup /Volumes/Racer BU/Backups.backupdb/Eric’s Mac Pro/2009-10-10-215828: 443.35 GB now available
Deleted backup /Volumes/Racer BU/Backups.backupdb/Eric’s Mac Pro/2009-10-10-205855: 443.36 GB now available
Deleted backup /Volumes/Racer BU/Backups.backupdb/Eric’s Mac Pro/2009-10-10-195856: 443.40 GB now available
Deleted backup /Volumes/Racer BU/Backups.backupdb/Eric’s Mac Pro/2009-10-10-185908: 443.46 GB now available
Deleted backup /Volumes/Racer BU/Backups.backupdb/Eric’s Mac Pro/2009-10-10-175907: 443.51 GB now available
Post-back up thinning complete: 5 expired backups removed
Backup completed successfully.
October 12, 2009, 12:18:32 PM
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/Racer BU/Backups.backupdb
No pre-backup thinning needed: 954.4 MB requested (including padding), 443.51 GB available
Unable to rebuild path cache for source item. Partial source path:
Copied 16717 files (339.6 MB) from volume Racer X.
No pre-backup thinning needed: 569.5 MB requested (including padding), 443.17 GB available
Copied 634 files (18.7 MB) from volume Racer X.
Starting post-backup thinning
Deleted backup /Volumes/Racer BU/Backups.backupdb/Eric’s Mac Pro/2009-10-10-225832: 443.24 GB now available
Deleted backup /Volumes/Racer BU/Backups.backupdb/Eric’s Mac Pro/2009-10-10-165828: 443.25 GB now available
Deleted backup /Volumes/Racer BU/Backups.backupdb/Eric’s Mac Pro/2009-10-10-155855: 443.30 GB now available
Deleted backup /Volumes/Racer BU/Backups.backupdb/Eric’s Mac Pro/2009-10-10-145857: 443.36 GB now available
Deleted backup /Volumes/Racer BU/Backups.backupdb/Eric’s Mac Pro/2009-10-10-135852: 443.38 GB now available
Post-back up thinning complete: 5 expired backups removed
Backup completed successfully.
October 12, 2009, 4:46:51 PM
Starting standard backup
Volume at path /Volumes/Racer BU does not appear to be the correct backup volume for this computer. (Cookies do not match)
Backup failed with error: 18
etc...
The long periods between backups are when it is "preparing for backup" and nothing is happening. Sometimes this is while I'm not using it and the machine is asleep.

Time machine won't backup

I've been having a lot of issues with time machine lately.
A couple of days back I suddenly got the message that time machine didn't make backups for over 22 days! The first thing I thought was: why am I just now learning about this but okay let's check out why. Every time TM wanted to make a backup it would hang in the "calculating changes" phase. What I tried was the following:
- Disconnection the TM disk, restarting my Time capsule or macbook didn't work.
- Niether did turning TM on and of and reselecting the disk.
I went searching on the web and there I found a recommendation to scan the sparsebundle file and my harddrive for defects so I did that today. No defects were found in the sparsebundle file but something was found on my MacBook's harddrive so I booted with the Snow Leopard disk to have this repaired with Disk uitility. This all went fine so I went ahead and enabled TM again. At first I thought nothing had changed since it was still spending an awfull lot of time in the "calculating changes' phase but then I saw that at least my network connection was beeing used so I waited some time and after a while TM progressed to the "scanning xxx.xxx files" phase and the "preparing xxx.xxx files" phase. Then the "cleaning up" phase began and was displayed for at least 15 minutes. I thought everything was going well but then the backup was suddenly cancelled and everything started all over again.
In my syslog the following sequence is showing:
Jul 23 22:18:39 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Starting standard backup
Jul 23 22:18:39 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Network destination already mounted at: /Volumes/Time capsule-1
Jul 23 22:18:41 Simons-MacBook hdiejectd[14652]: running
Jul 23 22:18:42 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN
Jul 23 22:18:45 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Disk image /Volumes/Time capsule-1/Simon’s MacBook.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
Jul 23 22:18:45 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
Jul 23 22:18:59 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: MAC OS-X
Jul 23 22:18:59 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Waiting for index to be ready (101)
Jul 23 22:19:45 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Node requires deep traversal:/ reason:must scan subdirs|new event db|
Jul 23 22:37:05 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Starting pre-backup thinning: 135.24 GB requested (including padding), 819.5 MB available
Jul 23 22:41:51 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Deleted backup /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Simon’s MacBook/2011-04-26-195931: 819.4 MB now available
Jul 23 22:46:04 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Deleted backup /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Simon’s MacBook/2011-04-25-233005: 819.4 MB now available
Jul 23 22:46:04 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Stopping backup.
Jul 23 22:46:11 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Backup canceled.
Jul 23 22:46:23 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Ejected Time Machine disk image.
Jul 23 22:46:23 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Compacting backup disk image to recover free space
Jul 23 22:46:32 Simons-MacBook diskimages-helper[15821]: Reclaimed 7.3 MB out of 1.3 GB possible.
Jul 23 22:46:33 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Completed backup disk image compaction
Jul 23 22:46:33 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Starting standard backup
It looks like TM is going through a backup cycle, establisching the fact that not enough space is availeble and trying to clean up the sparsebundle file to make room for the new backup. After two tries though it discovers that no space is reclaimed but that in fact only space is lost. It then tries to create some space by using the diskimages helper.
Every run the free space on my time capsule is getting less and less:
1:
Jul 23 21:55:36 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Deleted backup /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Simon’s MacBook/2011-04-28-234240: 893.3 MB now available
Jul 23 21:58:31 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Deleted backup /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Simon’s MacBook/2011-04-27-184038: 893.3 MB now available
2:
Jul 23 22:41:51 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Deleted backup /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Simon’s MacBook/2011-04-26-195931: 819.4 MB now available
Jul 23 22:46:04 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Deleted backup /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Simon’s MacBook/2011-04-25-233005: 819.4 MB now available
3:
Jul 23 23:06:59 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Deleted backup /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Simon’s MacBook/2011-04-30-003802: 768.4 MB now available
Jul 23 23:09:56 Simons-MacBook com.apple.backupd[2417]: Deleted backup /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Simon’s MacBook/2011-05-11-102159: 768.5 MB now available
In the meantime I'm getting some messages from mdworker, they seam to be related to TM's activity to me:
Jul 23 22:22:24 Simons-MacBook mdworker32[14757]: kCGErrorFailure: Set a breakpoint @ CGErrorBreakpoint() to catch errors as they are logged.
Jul 23 22:30:40 Simons-MacBook mdworker32[14808]: kCGErrorFailure: Set a breakpoint @ CGErrorBreakpoint() to catch errors as they are logged.
Jul 23 22:30:53 Simons-MacBook Safari[507]: Periodic CFURLCache Insert stats (iters: 946) - Tx time:0.040067, # of Inserts: 1, # of bytes written: 69, Did shrink: NO, Size of cache-file: 53553152, Num of Failures: 0
Jul 23 22:31:44 Simons-MacBook mdworker[14642]: iCal.mdimporter: could not parse ICS file: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Simon’s MacBook/2011-04-23-100234/MAC OS-X/Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/OutlookCore.framework/Versions/14/Resources/en.lproj/Timezones.ics
Jul 23 22:34:40 Simons-MacBook mdworker32[14986]: kCGErrorFailure: Set a breakpoint @ CGErrorBreakpoint() to catch errors as they are logged.
It seems that TM is stuck in some never ending cycle... I'm out of idea's on how to solve this apart from deleting the sparsebundle file and starting all over again but this would mean losing all previous backups.
Do you guys have any leads?

No idea's?
I'm starting to think I just need to delete the sparsebundle file altogether and start over again...

Time Machine does not backup home/user directory (on separate drive)

I recently installed a SSD into my Mini. Due to size restrictions, my home/user directory has to be kept on another drive. I retained the stock 1TB drive that came with the Mini for this.
Ok, installed the SSD, restored a Time Machine backups (sans user data). Used a different admin user and configured my user to use the 1TB drive for it's home directory (/Volumes/1TB/home/<user>). Restart, log in as my user, all is good. All data, settings, etc is there. Everything looks normal.
Time Machine REFUSES to backup this directory. It will backup the 1TB drive and anyting else I create in it, but not the home directory. I tried every permission trick I could think of or found online. I even tested it further by formatting the 1TB drive fresh, adding a new user, configuring the user to use the 1TB for their home directory and it still won't back it up (this was a test of permissions the OS set, to make sure I didn't change my data perms somewhere along the way). Time Machine would not backup the new user's home directory on the 1TB drive.
Any thoughts? I can't be the first person to have their home directory on a non-OS drive.
If I were to create a folder/file in /Volumes/1TB/<test file> ... Time Machine gets it perfect. It just will NOT touch /Volumes/1TB/home/<anything here>
Thanks!

Open the Time Machine preference pane and unlock the settings, if necessary. Click the Options button. If there is one particular folder with items that are not being backed up reliably, add it to the list of excluded items. If there are many such folders, add your home folder to the list, or add a whole volume (i.e., what Apple calls a "disk.") Save the changes.
Start a backup, or wait for one to happen automatically. When it's done, open the preference pane again and remove the exclusion(s) you made earlier. Back up again and see whether there's a change.

Time machine makes 30 backups for the last two days, no backups for any earlier times: is there a way to control it?

I've been running Time Machine in the background for as long as I've owned my current Mac--- a few months. It is a completely generic set-up: it's a desktop (rarely shut off or asleep) connected to an external hard drive that is much larger (1 TB) than my internal hard drive (0.5 TB), and Time Machine is configured to save backups of my whole internal drive to the external drive. The external is half-full, and the internal is a little more than half-full. I often hear my external crunching away, working on something.
I recently needed to access an old file, so I went into Time Machine mode on the folder where it had been deleted a few weeks ago. While I'm not upset that it isn't available (it's my own fault for deleting it), I didn't expect the Time Machine to have such a bad distribution of saved backups. There are 30 backup snapshots of the past two days, and nothing earlier. I was expecting something more like a few from today, a few from this week, a few from this month, and a few going all the way back in time--- a broader distribution.
I don't see any way to control this in the Time Machine Preferences (in fact, very little control at all). Is there a secret way to control it, or some tip to ensure a more useful distribution of saved snapshots?
Thanks,
-- Jim

Thanks, but it doesn't exactly address my question. TimeMachineEditor allows me to set the intervals or times when backups occur, but it doesn't control the algorithm that decides which snapshots should be deleted. My problem was that Time Machine chose to delete all of the old snapshots and keep only the most recent ones: I'd like it to keep more of the recent ones than the old ones, but still keep some old ones.
In fact, the (unmodifyable) text on the Time Machine control panel says that it keeps:
hourly backups for the past 24 hours
daily backups for the past month
weekly backups for all previous months
That would be perfect if it were true.
Perhaps the algorithm did the wrong thing because the size of my internal hard drive varied quite a lot a few days ago: a process got out of control and used up all of my internal disk space. I killed the process and deleted its output (several times), so my internal disk eventually went back down to normal. Perhaps in the intervening hours, Time Machine made a backup, once an hour, and used up all of the external drive space. When it had to choose between keeping "weekly backups of previous months" and "hourly backups of the past 24 hours", it chose to keep hourly backups of the past 24 hours. This was the wrong choice in my case (it was the unwanted output) and is probably the wrong choice in most cases.
Is there a way to control the algorithm that decides which backups to keep and which to delete? I would have it delete the hourly, daily, and weekly backups in a way that preserves their relative distribution.
By the way, while I have made it sound like my problem was a runaway log file (something that would be easy to put in an excluded directory with Time Machine's "Options" button), it was a VirtualBox snapshot merge. The data in question are precious, but were unnecessarily copied many times while VirtualBox failed to merge them properly. I can't simply exclude a directory: I'm talking about a more general problem.
Thanks!
-- Jim

Time machine didn't backup all of my fonts. Where are they?

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