Time Machine does not automatically delete old backups when drive is full

I back up to a 1TB external drive with TM.  It will not delete old back-ups and instead tells me that the drive is full.  I thought TM was supposed to manage all of this on its own.

It will, if it can.  But it will never delete your last remaining backup.
See #C4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting, probably the pink box there.
Basically, if Time Machine has to do a full or very large backup, and your Time Machine drive isn't well over twice the size of the data it's backing up, there won't be room for the last backup, plus the new one, plus some workspace.

Similar Messages

  • Time Machine does not completely remove old Backups

    Hi all,
    since the upgrade to SL it seem that Time Machine has problems to completely remove old backups completely. The "removed" backups do not show up in Time Machine anymore, but the backup folders and part of their contents can still be seen in Finder.
    The number of expired backups not removed is growing. I know one should not fiddle around with backups in Finder or Terminal - but the system does not allow me to remove any of the files/folders anyway.
    Here is part of the log:
    Found partially deleted backup - trying again to delete: 2009-08-06-211832
    Error -47 deleting backup: /Volumes/Drobo/Backups.backupdb/MacBook Pro HGA/2009-08-06-211832
    Deleted backup /Volumes/Drobo/Backups.backupdb/MacBook Pro HGA/2009-08-06-211832: 1.75 TB now available
    Post-back up thinning complete: 5 expired backups removed
    Backup completed successfully.
    Any suggestions?
    Thank you for helping
    Heinz
    Message was edited by: Heinz-G?uenter Arnold

    Heinz-G?uenter Arnold wrote:
    since the upgrade to SL it seem that Time Machine has problems to completely remove old backups completely. The "removed" backups do not show up in Time Machine anymore, but the backup folders and part of their contents can still be seen in Finder.
    Hi, and welcome to the forums.
    That happens occasionally, in both Leopard and Snow Leopard, sometimes after something was deleted from the Finder, but also after an abnormal shutdown or improper disconnection of the TM disk.
    Run a +*Repair Disk+* on it via Disk Utility, in your Applications/Utilities folder. If it finds errors, but can't fix them all, run it again (and again) until it either fixes them all, or can't fix any more.

  • 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.

  • Time Machine does not recognize my iMac backup. Reports: not enough space; can't back up. How do I get it to recognize the backup?

    Time Machine does not recognize my 430 GB iMac backup on 1 terabyte Time Capsule. Reports: not enough space; can’t back up. How do I get it to recognize the old backup and continue backups?

    Thanks for the Time Machine Troubleshooting link. Apparently things have changed since 10.7.0. Backups.backupdb doesn’t exist. Path now is: Time Capsule/Data/Daru’s iMac.sparsebundle. So I did Terminal (I usually avoid Terminal) using the instruction in B6. It does not appear to be working. It went through looking for backup, preparing backup, and is now stopping backup, and the TMBackup has disappeared from the sidebar.
    Well, just now Time Machine progressed to preparing backup again; the Tiime Machine Backups appeared in sidebar, and with it Backups.backupdb/Daru’s iMac/2012-04-21-112939.inProgress. So it does exist... I’ll let it run, see what happens... But that is a strange date. Today is 28.
    I’ll let you know the outcome.
    Oops. Just ended! Real time report: “Backup too large for disk...“ So it is not recognizing the old backup. I’ll look at those instructions again, see if I can do the Terminal thing with the backup running. I doubt I can damage anything except the existing baackup which I'll lose anywy if I can’t achieve recognition.
    Daru

  • Time Machine - strange behavior while deleting old backups

    Not sure if this is the right place, because this is actually not on Time Capsule, but on a Time Machine on an external USB drive.
    In any case, I searched the web for "time machine delete old backups" and found many discussions of various aspects of this task. My objective is to clean up a partition on a the external drive that I no longer use for active TM backups, but to retain a small set of backups in case I need to go back to them. The partition now has other uses and I need the space. My main TM backup is now on a separate Time Capsule.
    So again my objective is not to remove all backups, but just most of them.
    It appears that the well-discussed procedure is the following:
    Go into Time Machine.
    Select the Macintosh HD.
    Go back to one of the oldest backups.
    Click on the Gear > click Delete Backup.
    This procedure will remove one Backup at a time, and it seems to take 5 - 10 minutes for each backup.
    Here is what I noticed that was "strange":
    You could delete a selected backup using the above procedure.
    For the first selected backup so deleted, there is a confirmation dialog with a warning message that it is not undoable.
    After clicking OK on the warning message, the display backs up to the "Present" backup, and the administrative password is requested.
    After the administrative password is entered, the backup starts but control is passed back to the user interface, and another backup can be selected to be deleted.
    However, after the second backup is selected and deleted, there is no warning dialog, and no request for the administrative password. At this point the user interface is busy and nothing more can be done until the backup delete is completed. Except that the Time Machine can be exited by first pressing Escape, then Cancel on the lower left of the screen.
    If the time machine is exited, there is a Delete Backups progress dialog with a progress bar for each backup  so far requested. If the second backup was requested, as in the steps above, there would be two backups.
    I discovered by playing around that either you had to wait within Time Machine for the deletion to complete, or alternatively exit Time Machine. While I was not sure what was going on, I kept starting one backup, then exiting Time Machine and re-entering Time Machine and requesting another delete operation. Each time after entering Time Machine, the warning/admin password sequence occurred and I was able to exit. And then immediately re-enter Time Machine and request another backup. Only by exiting and re-entering could another delete request be made.
    When out of Time Machine, I thus saw the Delete Backups dialog with any number of concurrent "Delete One Backup" progress bars.
    Because of the nature of the hard links used to indicate backups, I was wondering if these multiple delete operations could possibly be hung in a deadly embrace, so I decided to only do one at a time. Some further study to see if the multiple delete operations were all able to complete would be needed to know if this would be a good way to "queue up" multiple delete requests.
    Bottom line: seems like kind of an odd implementation. Would be really nice if you could select many (say 30) individual backups and delete them all at once, rather than taking 5 - 10 minutes each. Again, this is because I am trying to reclaim disk space, but not delete all the backups from a Time Machine backup set that is not in active use.
    Also, the method of "queuing up" backup delete requests is kind of odd, but seems to work, with the proviso that I have not yet confirmed that doing more than one at a time actually works.

    Heinz-G?uenter Arnold wrote:
    since the upgrade to SL it seem that Time Machine has problems to completely remove old backups completely. The "removed" backups do not show up in Time Machine anymore, but the backup folders and part of their contents can still be seen in Finder.
    Hi, and welcome to the forums.
    That happens occasionally, in both Leopard and Snow Leopard, sometimes after something was deleted from the Finder, but also after an abnormal shutdown or improper disconnection of the TM disk.
    Run a +*Repair Disk+* on it via Disk Utility, in your Applications/Utilities folder. If it finds errors, but can't fix them all, run it again (and again) until it either fixes them all, or can't fix any more.

  • Time machine doesn't delete old backups when disk is full

    TM disk is 750GB. It tells me there is not enough room for backup…then I look into TM and find there ARE NO BACKUPS anymore. (There were a few days ago.) All backups are gone, except for one two days ago, which was when I began getting the "no room" error.
    I assume I've lost everything, as the TM disk shows only the backup from 2 days ago. True?
    Do I just format and start again?
    Is there a fix for this "no room" message? (It says oldest backups are deleted when disk becomes full. But it doesn't do it.)
    Do people rely on this?

    How much data is TM backing-up? (What's shown for +Estimated size of full backup+ under the exclusions box in TM Preferences > Options?)
    Note that your Time Machine disk should, in most cases, be at least twice the size of the data it's backing-up. See #1 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
    It appears that Time Machine needed to do a large backup, perhaps a full one, for some reason, and deleted as many old backups as it could (but it won't ever delete the last remaining one, as that would leave you with no backup at all), trying to make room.
    If in doubt, 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 all the messages for that run here, along with the amount of data that TM is backing-up.

  • Time Machine does not cope well with nearly-full disk

    Although Time Machine is supposed to delete old backups when the disk fills up, under some circumstances it does not cope well with a disk-full condition.
    Hardware: iMac (mid 2007)
    OS: Mac OS X version 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard)
    Processor: 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
    Memory: 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
    The other day I noticed that I had not had a successful Time Machine backup in over a day. Backups were taking a long time to run (4 hours or more), during which time the backup disk was chattering constantly and the disk showed "Estimating index time" in the Spotlight menu (even though I had excluded the disk from Spotlight indexing). When the disk finally stopped chattering, the backup finished with no visible errors but Time Machine continued to state that the last successful backup was yesterday. The backup disk was nearly full, but I had assumed that Time Machine was designed to cope with this situation by deleting old backups.
    A complete annotated log file of the incident and my observations can be found here: http://bentopress.com/backup.log.zip
    Here are some of the interesting entries from the system.log file:
    Sep  7 16:22:14 Bento-iMac com.apple.backupd[56515]: Starting standard backup
    Sep  7 16:22:14 Bento-iMac com.apple.backupd[56515]: Backing up to: /Volumes/My Backup Disk/Backups.backupdb
    Sep  7 16:23:07 Bento-iMac com.apple.backupd[56515]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 100.0 MB requested (including padding), 137.2 MB available
    Sep  7 16:25:49 Bento-iMac com.apple.backupd[56515]: Copied 32984 files (23.7 MB) from volume iMac HD.
    Sep  7 16:25:53 Bento-iMac com.apple.backupd[56515]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 100.0 MB requested (including padding), 108.4 MB available
    Sep  7 16:25:57 Bento-iMac KernelEventAgent[47]: tid 00000000 type 'hfs', mounted on '/Volumes/My Backup Disk', from '/dev/disk1s3', low disk, very low disk
    Sep  7 16:25:58 Bento-iMac mds[45]: (Normal) DiskStore: Rebuilding index for /Volumes/My Backup Disk/Backups.backupdb
    Sep  7 16:25:58 Bento-iMac KernelEventAgent[47]: tid 00000000 type 'hfs', mounted on '/Volumes/My Backup Disk', from '/dev/disk1s3', low disk
    Sep  7 16:25:59 Bento-iMac mds[45]: (Normal) DiskStore: Creating index for /Volumes/My Backup Disk/Backups.backupdb
    Sep  7 16:26:00 Bento-iMac KernelEventAgent[47]: tid 00000000 type 'hfs', mounted on '/Volumes/My Backup Disk', from '/dev/disk1s3', low disk, very low disk
    Sep  7 16:26:00 Bento-iMac mds[45]: (Warning) Volume: Indexing reset and suspended on backup volume "/Volumes/My Backup Disk" because it is low on disk space.
    Sep  7 16:26:02 Bento-iMac mds[45]: (Normal) DiskStore: Reindexing /Volumes/My Backup Disk/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/35367D91-8096-4D43-802B-A8658DBAB581 because no basetime was found.
    Sep  7 16:26:02 Bento-iMac mds[45]: (Normal) DiskStore: Rebuilding index for /Volumes/My Backup Disk/Backups.backupdb
    Sep  7 16:26:04 Bento-iMac mds[45]: (Normal) DiskStore: Creating index for /Volumes/My Backup Disk/Backups.backupdb
    Sep  7 16:26:14 Bento-iMac com.apple.backupd[56515]: Error: Flushing index to disk returned an error: 0
    Sep  7 16:26:14 Bento-iMac com.apple.backupd[56515]: Copied 776 files (17.3 MB) from volume iMac HD.
    Sep  7 16:26:15 Bento-iMac com.apple.backupd[56515]: Backup canceled.
    Note the "error: 0". Error code zero normally indicates success.
    There were also many, many, many copies of the following message, which occurred while Spotlight was trying to index the backup disk:
    Sep  7 17:28:40 Bento-iMac com.apple.backupd[58064]: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
    Here's what I think is happening: at the very end of the backup, after the files have been copied to the backup disk, mds resets indexing because the disk is now full. backupd's attempt to flush the index to disk then fails because indexing is suspended (error zero), so the backup is canceled. I suspect that this may occur when the new backup and the old one(s) being deleted are both small enough that the disk "packs" tightly, leaving no room for the index. If a large (>500MB) old backup had been deleted to make room for a small (<100MB) new one, the problem would not have occurred.
    I worked around the problem by switching Time Machine from the full disk to my Time Capsule. (I did not have this system backing up to the Time Capsule originally because I purchased the Time Capsule later for a different system.) The downside of this is that I lost access to older backups (though they are still accessible by right-clicking on Time Machine in the dock and selecting "Browse other Time Machine disks..."—however, I have not actually tried this). I'm also not completely happy having both my main systems backing up to the same hardware, but everything seems to be working well at this point and I do have a secondary backup system, using SuperDuper to clone the systems' disks to an external HD, which I do about once a month.
    Although I have worked around the problem, I am posting this in the hope that it will be useful to someone else, in the hope that someone at Apple will notice and perhaps improve the performance of Time Machine in this situation, and also in the hope that someone can suggest a solution that does not involve throwing a bigger disk at the problem. Is there any way to free up space on Time Machine's backup disk, for example by manually pruning older backups, either through Time Machine itself or via the Finder or command line?

    If you suspect that the disk being full is the problem, have you tried deleting some of the old backup data on the TM disk?
    When in TM, go back to the past a long way, right click on a file/directory and select "delete backup". Do this on some big files you have (so that you get more space per removal) that you change all the time (so you'll still have recent backups).

  • Doesn't Time Machine delete old backups when it needs more space?

    I've had time machine running for a long time now. It worked flawlessly for quite some time.
    Today it gave me the error that there was not enough free space on the disk to complete the backup (the error message says something like there is 360 GB of data on the Time Machine drive already, 140 GB of free space and it would require more than that to complete my backup). I have a 500 GB Time Machine disk and my Mac has a 500 GB hard drive, so I should technically never run out of space.
    The Time Machine almost acts like this is the first time I've ever backed up, which is not true. Shouldn't Time Machine delete old backups to make space for the new? What's even weirder is that if I open the "Star Wars" window of Time Machine I only see one backup from March 31, 2011, but I have been running Time Machine for well over a year now. I'm totally confused as to what happened. Any advice on how to get my Time Machine back up and running (without buying a new drive) would help!

    You see only one backup in the Time Machine window because Time Machine has deleted the older backups to make space to do the current backup.
    Time machine needs some working space to do its backups, and so backing up a 500GB drive onto a 500GB time machine volume is not ideal.
    However, I do essentially the same thing, and what I do, when I have this problem, is exclude things from the backup.
    First off, figure out what you changed. If you moved things from one partition to another, then that will cause a backup of the size of the thing that was moved. This may be why you have a large backup.
    When I have this problem, I exclude large things that have changed recently from the backup. This makes the backup smaller, and means that there is less working space needed. I do this until I get a successful backup. Then I remove things, one by one, from the exclusion list, and back up after each one.
    So, for instance if you just put 4 new folders on your drive, each of which s 20GB of data and they are named A, B, C and D, add all four to the exclusion list, do a backup, then remove A from the exclusion list (leaving B, C & D on it) and do a backup, and continue like this, adding 20GB of backup data each time until none of the new data is on the exclusion list and you get a completed backup.
    Another possible issue, if you use multiple partitions, is that Time Machine may be keeping an obsolete backup of a partition that you previously reformatted. To see if this is the case, go into time machine (The universe interface) and go back to the most recent backup it shows. Click on your computer and see what partitions show up-- are any of them old ones that have been reformatted and renamed? You may be storing a duplicate backup because Time Machine does not realize that the disk that went away isn't coming back (because it has been reformatted as a different partition)
    You can right-click on these items and remove them from your backup by sleecting "Delete all backups of...." This will free up space as well.

  • I have a 2013 macpro I upgraded to yosemite.  Now I find time machine does not work, nor my old back up using a click free wireless back up.  What is the status of time machine and yosemite?

    What is the status of time machine not working with yosemite?
    I upgraded mu mac pro to yosemite and since have found time machine does not work.
    Also, my old backup via a clikfree wireless backup does not work any longer.
    Is anyone working on this issue?
    Is there anyway I can backup my information today and until time machine &
    yosemite get fixed?

    These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
    Launch the Console 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 and start typing the name.
    The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
              SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
    from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
              View ▹ Show Log List
    from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
    In the top right corner of the Console window, there's a search box labeled Filter. Initially the words "String Matching" are shown in that box. Enter the word "Starting" (without the quotes.) You should now see log messages with the words "Starting * backup," where * represents any of the words "automatic," "manual," or "standard."
    Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Note the timestamp of the last "Starting" message that corresponds to the beginning of an an abnormal backup. Now
    CLEAR THE WORD "Starting" FROM THE TEXT FIELD
    so that all messages are showing, and scroll back in the log to the time you noted. Select the messages timestamped from then until the end of the backup, or the end of the log if that's not clear. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
    ☞ If all you see are messages that contain the word "Starting," you didn't clear the text field.
    ☞ The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
    Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
    Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
    ☞ Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

  • 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 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).

  • HT3275 My time machine does not back up and giving me this error message: The backup disk image "/Volumes/Data-1/Amiel's MacBook Pro.sparsebundle" is already in use. Pls help.

    My time machine does not back up and giving me this error message: The backup disk image “/Volumes/Data-1/Amiel’s MacBook Pro.sparsebundle” is already in use. Pls help.

    Make sure that there are no other Macs backing up at the present time.
    Pull the power cord from the back of the Time Capsule
    Count to ten
    Plug the power cord back in
    This will "fix" things about 98% of the time. Post back if you are in the unlucky 2% category.

  • Time Machine does not see original backup file on Time Capsuel after reset.

    I recently moved. I have a Time Capsule which is also my airport base station. I have about 7 months worth of back-ups on the drive for an iMac and a MacBook. The local cable company would only hook up the modem directly to my iMac and would not set up through the Time Capsule as it is not one of their routers. No problem. I did it once -- I could do it again. After discovering that it was not as simple as plugging the ethernet cable into the Time Capsule (after doing so, the Time Capsule recognized it had internet feed -- the iMac recognized the Time Capsule/Airport network -- but I could not get onto the net.) I discovered that I needed to do a hard reset. The instructions said the files would not be erased. They were not. I can still see the original back-ups for both computers in finder. But Time Machine does not recognize that either computer was ever backed up. There is no history and when I try a back-up it begins from scratch and creates a brand new back-up file.
    How do I get Time Machine to recognize the original back-up files? I tried "choosing disk" in Time Machine preferences but it only lets me choose the actual disk (the Time Capsule) and not an individual back-up file
    Thanks in advance to the collective brain trust.
    Robert

    I saw a post on another discussion about this subject, and one user found this workaround:
    2) Start the backup via wireless connection. Stop the backup. Unplug external HD and plug in via USB or FW (you want FW800). Time Machine appears smart enough to continue your backup in a manner that is useable by the AEBS.
    This only makes sense for the first backup (or if you have a lot of data for one particular incremental backup), as it removes the whole convenience factor of wireless.
    The post got this reply:
    Thx for your #2 tip on using Time Machine with an Airport Extreme Base Station, then switching to a wired connection. Worked perfectly.
    Started the TimeMachine b/up wirelessly, allowed it to run for a couple minutes, then stopped it, unplugged the USB drive from the AEBS, plugged it into the computer directly via FW400, opened TimeMachine and it recognized the Disk. Ran TimeMachine via the wired connection, after it finished I ejected it, plugged it back into the AEBS, initiated the AirDisk in the finder, then opened TimeMachine and presto!!
    Awesome tip. Note: this works for first-time TimeMachine wireless backups only. Saved me over 40 hours of wireless waiting!!
    http://gizmodo.com/370017/how+to-use-time-machine-with-an-airport-extreme
    Can anyone confirm that this will work?

  • Time machine does not appear to backup an external HD.  how do I get that included in the backup?

    time machine does not appear to backup an external HD.  how do I get that included in the backup?

    In the Finder, press the key combination shift-command-C, or select
    Go ▹ Computer
    from the menu bar. A window will open showing all mounted volumes. Select the one in question and open the Info window. What is shown as the Format in the General section? If it's not "Mac OS Extended," Time Machine can't back up the volume.

  • 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

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