Time Machine, does it backup the MacOS too?

I haven't played around with TM.
Does TM work like cloning the entire machine including the OS? So like if I erased the entired HDD and have a TM backup, will it TM bring back the mac OS together will all the personal stuff I have there before I erased and formatted it?

From Apple:
"Time Machine automatically backs up your entire Mac, including system files, applications, accounts, preferences, music, photos, movies, and documents. But what makes Time Machine different from other backup applications is that it not only keeps a spare copy of every file, it remembers how your system looked on any given day—so you can revisit your Mac as it appeared in the past."
However, you cannot boot from a Time Machine backup. You use it to restore your entire system, if necessary.

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Time Machine does not backup the HD, but an old version on itself!

I had to find a file in a Time Machine backup of my Macbook Air running Lion, to transfer it to my desktop computer.
To my horror, the entire TM backup was NOT of my Air as it was when I did the backup yesterday, but of 5 months earlier! So I checked a whole string of TM backups over the last couple of months and they were all the same! Even though 100's of files have been added, deleted and edited since then. TM seems to be copying old backups from its own folder on the backup drive! I've had to manually copy my Air onto a new folder in the backup drive, to be safe.
I cannot find anything about this problem in the forums or on http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
Can anyone help please?

Time Machine will only back up HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) formatted drives. Reformatting will erase the drive so make sure everything on it is safely copied elsewhere and verify a few test files before erasing the drive. Getting rid of the FAT32 formatting has been problematic for quite a few people. The directions in this article are for good for getting rid of the FAT32 formatting. They are for formatting a Time Machine disk but the directions will work just as well for your purposes.

Since installing Lion, I have not been able to utilize Time Machine (does not recognize the back-up drive); my wireless mouse does not function properly; I have experienced unreasonable delays in the system. Is there a fix or upgrade coming?

Is there a fix or upgrade to deal with the many problems I am experiencing since I installed Lion? I can no longer utilize Time Machine (Does not see the back-up drive); my wireless mouse does not work properly; my iMac has slowed down considerably. I am reminded of having a PC machine again. Bummer!

Either downgrade to Snow Leopard or try reinstalling Lion.
Reinstalling Lion Without the Installer
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. Alterhatively, 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.
Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions: Upon startup select Disk Utility from the main menu. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions as follows.
When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the main menu.
Reinstall Lion: Select Reinstall Lion and click on the Continue button.
Note: You can also re-download the Lion installer by opening the App Store application. Hold down the OPTION key and click on the Purchases icon in the toolbar. You should now see an active Install button to the right of your Lion purchase entry. There are situations in which this will not work. For example, if you are already booted into the Lion you originally purchased with your Apple ID or if an instance of the Lion installer is located anywhere on your computer.
Downgrade Lion to Snow Leopard
1. Boot from your Snow Leopard Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Quit DU and return to the installer. Install Snow Leopard.
This will erase the whole drive so be sure to backup your files if you don't have a backup already. If you have performed a TM backup using Lion be aware that you cannot restore from that backup in Snow Leopard (see below.) I suggest you make a separate backup using Carbon Copy Cloner 3.4.1.
If you have Snow Leopard Time Machine backups, do a full system restore per #14 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions. If you have subsequent backups from Lion, you can restore newer items selectively, via the "Star Wars" display, per #15 there, but be careful; some Snow Leopard apps may not work with the Lion files.

When time machine does a backup I get an error message

Added a new Seagate 3T external as a backup drive Every time Time Machine does a backup I get an error message that the disk was not ejected properly, no bid deal just a pain. System 3.5GHz Intel Core i7... 16GB DDR# memory ... OSX 10.8.4. How do I get rid of this error??

Notes/Tips on OS X 10.8.5 External Drive Eject During Sleep:
Updated the previous page on OS X 10.8.5 Problems/Notes and Tips with more info regarding external drive 'eject' in sleep and on drives going to sleep/spinning down despite ES settings. I ran some tests with drives I had but so far have not seen those problems with my setup/drives at least. Apparently many have based on the still growing number of threads on the subject in Apple's Mountain Lion forum.
... you posted inaccurate information about a Mac that I pointed out.
Posts from and about Hackintosh do get removed.

Time machine does not backup anymore

Hello all,
I've been using my time machine for a month now, I kept it turned off and only connected the disk when I wanted to make a backup. Then I just hit Back Up Now from the menu and it always backed up everything (I used to check it afterwards). FYI, I've got a 500GB drive and for backups I use a 500GB partition on an external disk, where about 100GB is still free. All of a sudden, my time machine does not backup anymore. It does its run, whether a scheduled hourly one when turned on, or an on-demand one, but it only lasts a split second as though there is nothing to backup and when I enter the time machine, the files are really missing. I can't make it backup anything anymore. What is going on?
thanks everyone

cukerko wrote:
Hello all,
I've been using my time machine for a month now, I kept it turned off and only connected the disk when I wanted to make a backup. Then I just hit Back Up Now from the menu and it always backed up everything (I used to check it afterwards). FYI, I've got a 500GB drive and for backups I use a 500GB partition on an external disk, where about 100GB is still free.
It's not related to this problem, but that may not be large enough. What's important is not the size of your internal HD, but how much is on it (or is expected to be on it in the next year or so). It varies widely, of course, depending on how you use your Mac, but Time Machine usually needs 2-3 times the space of the data it's backing-up.
. . . it only lasts a split second as though there is nothing to backup and when I enter the time machine, the files are really missing.
That sounds like the year-old unfixed bug detailed in red in #D5 of [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

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 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 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.

Can a time machine usb drive backup the data from an external usb drive connected to and airport extreme*

can a time machine usb drive conected to my mac book backup the data from an external usb drive connected to and airport extreme ?

Hi Adam, if you think yoiur HD may be failing you could do a TM restore onto the new disk. I would rather see you do a clone either SuperDuper or CarbonCopy Cloner.Of your internal drive. That way you have a bootable backup in case it does fail.
btw - what are the symptoms of your failing drive?
-mj
Message was edited by: macjack

Time Machine doing full backup of external drive again

I have a Time Capsule, as well as an external data drive connected to my Mac. The external drive (named Yoda) is NOT excluded from backups. Yoda has about 703 GB of data on it.
I recently replaced the hard drive inside my time capsule. Consequently, a full backup was made, which was to be expected.
When the new full first backup was done, I disconnected the Yoda drive. A day later, I reconnected it, and now Time Machine is saying it's doing a 703 GB backup. Since the size TM indicates its backing up is ever so slightly larger than the total amount of data on Yoda, I'm assuming it's doing a full backup of the Yoda drive for some reason (the only other drive, the system drive, only has about 200 GB on it).
The files on Yoda weren't changed, certainly not all 703 GB of them. No hardware changes were made, no updates, tinkering, modifications, or anything. The Mac itself has not even been shut down or logged out. The ONLY thing that's happened was the Yoda drive was unmounted and disconnected, then several hours later it was reconnected.
Why is Time Machine repeating a full backup of this external drive? Is this going to happen every time I disconnect and reconnect the drive? Is there any way to make this not happen, short of excluding the drive (which I don't want to do)?

After posting this thread, I did find a similar thread (in the "More Like This" section) and saw your responses in it. You had suggested the same thing, as well as doing #A5 if that didn't work.
I tried #A4 and although that seemed to work in the other thread, unfortunately it didn't work for me. So I moved on to #A5, but I could not get my Time Capsule drive to show up in the Disk Utility. I didn't see a "data folder", but I did try directly dragging the sparsebundle to the left pane of the Disk Utility, but that seemed to hang Disk Utility.
At this point I'm probably going to try deleting the plist file as per #A4, erasing (reformatting) the drive, rebooting, and starting a whole new backup from scratch. It's not going to take much longer than backing up the entire external drive by itself would have, and I still have older backups (up to a few days ago) on the original Time Capsule drive in case of massive disaster.
So we'll see how that goes...

Time Machin does not backup automatically

First backup worked fine, and also the subsequent hourly automatic backups. But then the automatic backup stopped, and it does no longer show the next backup time. I can again manually backup but the automatic backup does not work any longer.
Who has similar problems?

I am also having problems with TimeMachine failing to continue to backup.
I have reformatted (even though disk already had correct GUID format) a couple of times.
Here are my symptoms after about a dozen hourly backups:
TM gets itself in an endless loop.
It acts like it is performing a backup
the disk indicates it is busy
a *.inProgress file is created on the backup drive
my machine slows to a crawl, and
no new backups are created.
I really like the features of Time Machine, but can't seem to find a way to make it work for more than a day.

Time Machine does not backup after using second Mac on different volume.

Hi.
I use an airport extrem with an external usb hdd. It has 3 partitions. On the first one I made an TM-backup (MBP 2.2 Leo), all worked fine. Then I made a second TM-backup (MacBook) on the second partition. Worked fine too. But now TM on my MBP is not able to backup any more. When TM starts, it just "prepares" but never actually backs up.
What is the Problem and how do i fix it?
08.05.08 19:43:48 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[192] Backing up to: /Volumes/Backup of Thomas MBP/Backups.backupdb
08.05.08 19:43:51 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[192] Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Mac HD
08.05.08 19:43:51 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[192] Node requires deep traversal:/ reason:kFSEDBEventFlagMustScanSubDirs|kFSEDBEventFlagReasonEventDBUntrustable|
Message was edited by: Thomas_xp

Time Machine will only back up HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) formatted drives. Reformatting will erase the drive so make sure everything on it is safely copied elsewhere and verify a few test files before erasing the drive. Getting rid of the FAT32 formatting has been problematic for quite a few people. The directions in this article are for good for getting rid of the FAT32 formatting. They are for formatting a Time Machine disk but the directions will work just as well for your purposes.

Time Machine does manual backups but not automatic.

Time Machine skips automatic hourly backups but will do a backup if I click "Backup Now". Any idea why automatic backups are not working and how to enable them? Thanks.

Jan 14 04:10:17 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[18614]: Copied 16.0 GB of 17.4 GB, 462725 of 509959 items
Jan 14 04:16:21 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[18614]: Copied 504166 files (16.4 GB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Jan 14 04:16:26 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[18614]: 839.3 MB required (including padding), 253.24 GB available
Jan 14 04:16:46 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[18614]: Copied 1570 files (310 KB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Jan 14 04:16:50 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[18614]: Starting post-backup thinning
Jan 14 04:16:50 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[18614]: No post-back up thinning needed: no expired backups exist
Jan 14 04:16:50 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[18614]: Backup completed successfully.
Jan 14 04:16:54 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[18614]: Ejected Time Machine disk image.
Jan 14 04:16:54 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[18614]: Ejected Time Machine network volume.
Jan 14 05:11:18 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19152]: Attempting to mount network destination URL: afp://[email protected]/Client%20Backups
Jan 14 05:11:20 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19152]: Mounted network destination at mountpoint: /Volumes/Client Backups-1 using URL: afp://[email protected]/Client%20Backups
Jan 14 05:11:39 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19152]: QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN
Jan 14 05:11:42 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19152]: Disk image /Volumes/Client Backups-1/My MacBook Pro.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
Jan 14 05:12:58 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19152]: Network destination already mounted at: /Volumes/Client Backups-1
Jan 14 05:13:14 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19152]: Disk image already attached: /Volumes/Client Backups-1/My MacBook Pro.sparsebundle, DIHLDiskImageAttach returned: 35
Jan 14 05:13:16 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19152]: Disk image /Volumes/Client Backups-1/My MacBook Pro.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
Jan 14 05:48:50 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19287]: Starting standard backup
Jan 14 05:48:50 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19287]: Network destination already mounted at: /Volumes/Client Backups-1
Jan 14 05:49:07 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19287]: Disk image already attached: /Volumes/Client Backups-1/My MacBook Pro.sparsebundle, DIHLDiskImageAttach returned: 35
Jan 14 05:49:09 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19287]: Disk image /Volumes/Client Backups-1/My MacBook Pro.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
Jan 14 05:49:09 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19287]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
Jan 14 05:49:13 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19287]: 536.7 MB required (including padding), 251.29 GB available
Jan 14 05:49:38 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19287]: Copied 1913 files (30.5 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Jan 14 05:49:39 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19287]: 500.4 MB required (including padding), 251.29 GB available
Jan 14 05:49:43 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19287]: Copied 185 files (128 KB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Jan 14 05:49:44 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19287]: Starting post-backup thinning
Jan 14 05:49:44 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19287]: No post-back up thinning needed: no expired backups exist
Jan 14 05:49:44 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19287]: Backup completed successfully.
Jan 14 05:49:47 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19287]: Ejected Time Machine disk image.
Jan 14 05:49:47 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19287]: Ejected Time Machine network volume.
Jan 14 05:49:55 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19287]: Attempting to mount network destination URL: afp://[email protected]/Client%20Backups
Jan 14 05:49:57 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19287]: Mounted network destination at mountpoint: /Volumes/Client Backups-1 using URL: afp://[email protected]/Client%20Backups
Jan 14 05:50:17 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19287]: QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN
Jan 14 05:50:19 myclienthost com.apple.backupd[19287]: Disk image /Volumes/Client Backups-1/My MacBook Pro.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
Note, there are no backup log messages for the last few hours even if I put new files or change files on the client.

Time Machine does not backup home folder

I upgraded to Lion recently and time machine was working properly, my hard disk failed and apple replaced it, but put in a HD with 10.6.8 on it. I then restored from time capsule (1 TB- first gen) and eventually it worked and everything seemed to be working. However it also changed the name of my home folder (reversing the name) and now my home folder is not backed up on to time capsule, local snapshots include it but not on the tc. I have reset (using pondini guide) the preferences and also eventually deleted the previous time machine and completely set up a new one but still no luck. Can anyone help as i am uncomfortable without a backup of my home folder. Nothing is encrypted and file vault turned off. Please help.

No one with a clue?

Help! Time machine says my backup disk is too small

I have a 500 gig back up disk for time machine back up and my hard drive on my imac is 500gigs but for some reason it is saying I don't have enough space on my back up disk for time machine to back up. how can that be if they are the same size.

Bucknut wrote:
I have a 500 gig back up disk for time machine back up and my hard drive on my imac is 500gigs but for some reason it is saying I don't have enough space on my back up disk for time machine to back up. how can that be if they are the same size.
How big is your Leopard filesystem?

Time Machine, does it backup the MacOS too?

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