Time machine doesn't recognize old time machine backups after new drive

After getting my original hard drive replaced on apple care. Time machine refuses to recognize time machine backups dating back to October when I first installed Leopard. The Records are there on an "off-board" Lacie drive. Any fixes for this? I have had so many problems with Time Machine I am afraid to turn it back on. Last time it took over 40 hours to do an initial back-up.

Yes I had been having multiple problems and once saved the entire system in archive and install and also time machine had been active since October when I first installed it. all of this was saved to an off-board Lacie drive I can find the old time machine files easily enough but time machine since the new drive, does not recognize them. Since I got the drive back with tiger installed, I first had to re-install Leopard so I don't know if that caused Time machine to start over . I did do an archive and install at that time but there was nothing really to archive since they had not recovered my old files. If this wasn't bad enough The Technician replaced my administrator password with his own and the was off for a few days and I couldn't do anything for awhile. You have been very helpful thank you for your time on my behalf.
Respectfully,
Thomas Carlisle

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Migrated old back-up to new MacBook Pro, but now new machine doesn't recognize old back-up

So last night I migrated my old back-up to my new MacBook Pro, but this morning my new machine doesn't recognize my old back-up. I'd rather not erase and back-up from scratch for numerous reasons (losing the old data, time, etc).
Any suggestions? I'll bet this is a realatively common issue?
Thanks in advance for any help!
-Ron

Looking back, at your original posts....it said it needed 774 GB?? is that at all reasonable for a full backup of your system??
Maybe there's something more than meets the eye?
Also maybe we can figure out what went wrong with the tmutil command. It is possible that you may have to use additional options.
But first le's see who owns the old backup....
From the terminal command line try this:
sudo xattr -l "path to your backup"
Where "path to your backup" is tha same path exactly as used in the tmutil command, that is:
/Volumes/"Backups Device Name"/Backups.backupdb/"Backup Name"
You should get something like this for output:
com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress:
00000000 30 30 3A 31 64 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. |00:1d:..:..:..:.|
00000010 34 00 |4.|
00000012
com.apple.backupd.HostUUID:
00000000 41 34 32 30 43 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. |A420Cxxxxxxxxxxx|
00000010 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. |xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx|
00000020 32 37 37 42 00 |277B.|
00000025
com.apple.backupd.ModelID: MacPro3,1
The "BackupMachineAddress" is the MAC address of the Ethernet port your mother board.
You can find the MAc address in About this Mac-> More Info. -> System report -> Network -> Ethernet 1
The "HostUUID" is the identifier of your mother board.
You can find it in About this Mac-> More Info. -> System report ->Hardware Overview [that's the first thing that shows when you select System report]
These are the way the connection of the backup to a machine is made.
Now the tmutil inheritbackup comand should have set them to the correct values for your new machine.
But let's' see if any of them match the new machine and then see of we haveany more options.
Steve

Time Machine doesn't recognize old backup after logic board replacement

I recently had my logic board on my MacBook Pro replaced and when I tried to backup, Time Machine did not recognize the old backup on the drive and tries to create a new one. The drive is mounted fine.
Is there a way to continue using my old backup, or do I need to delete it and create a new one?

lissy-loo wrote:
Hi there I've just had this problem on my computer too but is there a possibly easier way to explain what is on this site...
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080128003716101
I read through but got lost about half way down when it says:
"The last bit of information needed is the old MAC address. Open Terminal and change directory to the root of the Time Machine backup database, then get the old MAC address:...."
I was in terminal but couldn't work it out. Is this not a good idea to stumble around in if i have no idea what I'm doing? Seems difficult but I really wanna work it out because my Time Machine hard drive is full so I can't just get to back up everything from scratch and don't wanna delete what is already on there. Any help would be much appreciated!!
Hi, and welcome to the forums.
If you're not comfortable with the procedure, I'd advise against it. Mucking about with Terminal can cause all manner of problems.
But you can find your Mac's Ethernet Address via the *System Profiler* app. Click the Apple logo in your menubar, then +About This Mac,+ then +More Info+ to start it.
Select Network in the sidebar, then Ethernet in the upper panel. Near the bottom of the lower panel, under Ethernet, you should see *Mac Address.* It's 6 hex numbers (12 characters), separated by colons. Omit the colons when you type it into Terminal.
As noted in the Troubleshooting Tip, it's easy to do this wrong, get no error message, and have it not work (been there, done that!).
If it doesn't work, your only choices are to erase the drive and start over, or get a larger one and transfer your backups to it (see item #18 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip* at the top of this forum).
How big is your TM drive, vs. how much it's backing up? TM usually needs 2-3 times the space of what it's backing-up (see item #1 of the FAQ Tip).
Are you so concerned about not losing your backups because you've been deleting things from your internal HD, relying on TM to keep it's copies? If so, post back -- that's a terrible idea.

Time Machine doesn't recognize old sparsebundle after new logic board

Installed new logic board in pre-Isight 20" iMac due to capacitor swelling and kernel panic. I had also erased the internal HD. I was able to restore all my files to internal HD from Time Machine backup on the 1TB Time Capsule. Now I'm trying to back up my restored iMac to Time Capsule, but there is insufficient space. Time Capsule has three sparsebundle files: one for the 20"iMac prior to new logic board, one for a Powerbook, and one for a newer 24"iMac. Time Machine wants to create a new sparsebundle for the restored iMac, but there is not enough room and I would like it use the residing sparsebundle so that I will have backups prior to the point the new logic board was installed. I tried just changing the name of the old IMac Time Capsule sparsebundle file to the new sparsebundle filename that Time Machine creates when attempting backup, but that did not work. Any suggestions?

1. I thought of just deleting the old sparsebundle in order to make room, but it was a less elegant solution because: a) I'd have to do a complete (i.e. lengthy) backup when really only a few things have changed (mostly software updates) since the restore. b)if something should go wrong with that process, then I've lost my backup file to restore the computer. True, I could archive the old sparsebundle to another drive, and then delete it from the time capsule, but somehow I think there should be a quicker, less labor intensive way that doesn't involve bringing in another hard drive.
2. I believe you can restore any Mac with any time machine backup. If you boot from the system disk, go to utilities, and select restore from time machine backup, it then allows you to pick any of the files on the disk that time machine has backed up to. After all, even though Time Machine thinks this is a new computer, the restore that I just did makes it essentially the same computer that I had before the failure of the logic board--the desktop looks exactly the same. BTW, the Apple authorized service center that did the logic board replacement had put a clean version of 10.6 on the internal hard drive, and I was unable to use that system to do the restore--it just hung up. I had to do the restore using my system disk CD (and basically downgrading to system 10.5.8)

Time Machine Doesn't Recognize Old Backups

1) Had a mid-2010 27" iMac with Snow Leopard on it.
2) Upgraded Snow Leopard to Lion. Lion recognized time machine disk like it should and backed up like it should. I was able to retain my backups I've had since 2008.
3) This iMac had a hardware issue that prompted the purchase of a new iMac. Plugged time machine into this new iMac today and recovered system like I expected it to.
4) Problem: I can't access my old backup sets. Time machine wants to start from scratch.
Is there a work-around? Do I WANT a work around. In other words, if I can fix this so that Time machine "picks up" where I left off, will it cause problems later?

I'll refer you to Pondini's site. See section B 5 & 6.
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html

HT203177 Time machine doesn't recognize my hard drive archive

I have time machine archive on a hard drive (not time capsule). It recently stopped backing up. On checking, time machine recognizes the hard drive (in preferences it is listed as the back up drive.) The files appear to be present on looking into the drive, but Time Machine doesn't recognize that there are backup files there, it wants to complete another full backup. Meaning - it says for latest backup: "none".
I am afraid if I do another full backup, I will lose the ability to access the older backups.
When I try to access older files through time machine, it predictably cannot find them.
How do I tell Time Machine that the files on that hard drive are the backup files?

Update:
1) Right click on TM icon - Menu choice "Browse other TM disks" allows me to see the data - i.e. it is a valid TM archive, not corrupted.
2) Looking at TM preferences immediately after showed the proper disk was targeted, but still Latest backup: None.
3) Shut down, anomalous shut down -required power button hit. (AHH - the problem??)
4) restart using command - R works - i.e recognizes the disk and emergency recovery system software
5) Restart - Still shows latest backup: None
6) trying to access data through standard TM startup shows data now.
7) go back to preferences - still no backup shown.
Aside - I can't recall what the purple vs white dates on right side of the screen signify, and can't find it in the documentation right now. Anybody know?

Time machine doesn't recognize my old backups after clean install

Time machine doesn't recognize my old backups after clean install of OSX Lion
I also tried using migration assistant with no success.
I just want to use TM to restore files and folders SELECTIVELY.
Does anyone also know how to fully restore my iTunes data? (purchaces, music, iphone backups, etc)
Thank you in advance

Oh yeah, and the other thing is, now I CAN'T go back in time using my Time Machine back-up . . . It says I've never backed up now (I guess because this is a fresh install that's TECHNICALLY correct), but I restored from this Time Machine file . . . Surely I've done something wrong that can be fixed. Help, please?

Replaced internal hard drive, time machine doesn't recognize as same volume

Howdy,
The hard drive (call it drive "X") on my iMac (one of the 2005 models) was dying so I had it replaced. I rebuilt the new drive (drive "Y") from my most recent time machine backup (from external drive "A"). I am now having problems with one of my backup devices, in that time machine doesn't recognize that the new disk is conceptually the same thing that had been backed up before (same volume name).
More details... I rotate my backups monthly through three external drives (I store the most recent offsite). After the disk replacement and restore process, I continued to use that backup drive (drive "A") without noticing any problem. Then it came time to rotate my external drives, and time machine doesn't find enough space on the next backup drive (drive "B"). Presumably this is because it doesn't realize that the drive I am backing up ("Y") is a copy of the drive that had previously been backed up on "B" ("X").
Is there any way to convince it they are the same? Or am I in the same boat as this poster:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2770362&tstart=0
Basically I just want to verify that I am in that same boat before I remove old backup files on "B". If I do decide I need to remove those, are the instructions linked in thread 2770362 correct, or are there better ones?
Thanks for any help,
Bob H

Actually, the backup I deleted above was the backup for the new internal drive. Apparently TM had created the (incomplete) backup during the failed attempt that ran out of space on the backup device. Since the new internal drive had the same name as the old internal drive, I didn't initially realize that's what I was deleting. Not that deleting it causes any harm, but it didn't address the original problem of freeing up space on the backup device.
Not to worry though. I've figured out how to get at the backups for the old internal drive, and am in the process of deleting those. I was about to follow the instructions in your troubleshooting items E3 and E2, but upon attempting to enter time machine I stumbled into the right place. Since I had previously told TM to do no backups (because there was still not enough disk space), and since I'd left the backup device connected, when I pulled up the TM menu from the menu bar, the usual "Enter Time Machine" menu was replaced by "Browse Other Time Machine Disks" (or perhaps "Disks" was "Backups"). This then gave me a list of the machines that I'd backed up on this backup device (in my case machine names and internal drive names are the same). Of course one of those was for the old internal drive, and after choosing it I roughly followed the same course of action as I did a few days ago, to initiate deletion.
I also saw how I could delete each of those old backups individually, but decided against that as I did not expect it would free up enough space. My expectation is that nearly all the space is shared among all the backups for the same source drive, since relatively very little changes between backups.
Bob H

Time Machine Doesn't Recognize Drive

My Macbook Pro died the other night -- it wouldn't wake from sleep and couldn't be restarted -- and it now has a new logic board. Everything seems okay, but Time Machine no longer recognizes my time machine backups. The files are all there, on the same drive they were always on. But TM doesn't see them and won't back up, giving me an error that the time machine drive can't be found.
So I re-specified the drive in Time Machine preferences. And now TM now says that it doesn't have enough room for the backup on that drive -- presumably because it wants to start over and back up the whole drive again.
I've checked both the internal drive and the TM drive with Disk Utility. No problems found.
Does anybody have any ideas?
Thanks very much,
Steve

Thanks for responding. Yes, I see. New logic board, new computer.
If I have to start over, I'd like to hold on to those old backups -- and put the new backup on the partition where the old one was. So I tried copying the whole TM backup to another partition, where I could keep it for protection.
But apparently you're not supposed to do this. The finder asks for your password twice in order to do it and it took about a half hour just to prepare to copy -- and it counted about 2 million files. Is there any way to back up the back up, or do I just blow it away?
In that FAQ they refer you to an article that allows you to use the terminal to point the Mac back at the original backup. But it seems pretty fragile and easy to make a mistake. (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080128003716101)
I also called Apple support and after escalating the call I got a guy who was willing to do much the same console thing. We started and immediately got an error from the console. If the Apple guy can screw this up, maybe I should stay away.
Suggestions? Do I just give up and start over?
Thanks again,
Steve

Time machine doesn't recognize external hard drive

Recently I went to the apple store to get help to switch from Mavericks to Mountain Lion (I had some problems with Mavericks). They used time machine to bring back my applications (from my external hard drive, LaCie) on the Mountain Liion software. They said my time machine/external hard drive should work the same when I got home. Now, when I go to back up my computer, time machine doesn't recognize that I've backed up my files before. In the past, when time machine was working, every time I plugged in my hard drive the icon for it would turn blue, time machine recognized it, and it would back up my files. Now, the icon for the hard drive shows up, but time machine doesn't recognize it.
Some other things:
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- I used disk utility to check my hard drive and macintosh HD - both are OK
How can I use time machine to continue backing up files? Or am I going to have to partition or erase the hard drive and start a new back up?
Thank you in advance

nevermind! time machine suddenly recognized the disk after half an hour. sorry, I don't know how to delete this post!

This Question is at least 2.5 years old. But still an issue. I have an early 2008 and mid 2010 13 inch macbook pro running iTunes 10.7. Itunes on both machines doesn't recognize blank cds or allow me to import from a music cd when I insert it.

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Time Machine will not let me restore from backups after June, 2013. I can see the files on the external hard drive but Time Machine skips all of them and goes back to June, 2013. Does anyone have any idea what the problem is?

Time Machine will not let me restore from backups after June, 2013. I can see the files on the external hard drive but Time Machine skips all of them and goes back to June, 2013. Does anyone have any idea what the problem is?

rtilghman wrote:
telling me to buy a new router is NOT a solution.
And why not? Apple is selling these things like BigMacs. They can't make enough of them. You've been suffering since May because you refuse to get a decent router.
Can you imagine if a company that makes a refrigerator told me that I needed to upgrade my electrical system to rectify a problem with their device? What kind of response IS that?!?!
What if the problem with their device is that it requires a new-fangled "grounded" outlet and your circa 1890 house doesn't have grounded outlets. Would you refuse to purchase a $ 25 adapter on principle?

Time Machine doesn't recognize past backups anymore

My Macbook pro just came back from being repaired (issue with the video display).
I think they had to replace the logic board or graphics card or both - but I'm not sure.
Everything works fine now... except for Time Machine.
Before the Macbook Pro was shipped off I would backup regularly to an external hard drive.
While my Macbook was gone I had to use some of the backup files from within the Backups.backupdb file system. So on my Powerbook G4 with Tiger I had to go in manually and copy files over. No big deal... or so I thought.
Now Time Machine does not recognize the past backups from before I shipped the MacbookPro.
It just wants to start an entirely new backup again.
Is there a way I can get Time Machine to recognize my old backup again?
I'd hate to have to go in manually from now on. It's not exactly convenient.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

OK, I didn't explain that well...
So here is what I'm typing in and what I'm getting back (the name of my computer being "Jason Argo's Computer":
Last login: Thu Jul 17 22:22:16 on ttys000
Macintosh:~ Jason$ cd /Volumes/Chubs/Backups.backupdb
Macintosh:Backups.backupdb Jason$ xattr -p com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress Jason Taylor's Computer
I don't know why but I'm getting nothing back now. Before I was getting errors saying no such directory exists. I've typed in ls as well and get nothing.
Any ideas?

New Computer doesn't read old time machine backups

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Mac 101- Using Time Machine in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
Is Time Machine all you need?
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TidBITS Macs & Mac OS X- Time Machine- The Good, the Bad, and the Missing Features
Mac OS X 10.5- Time Machine backups are not visible
OS X 10.5- Time Machine stops backing up to external disk
10.5- Disable the 'use this disk?' Time Machine dialog
Time Machine tips and troubleshooting
Mac OS X 10.5 Help- Restoring files backed up with Time Machine
OS X 10.5- Using Time Machine and troubleshooting Time Machine issues

Time Machine doesn't see/find my last backup

I made a fresh, new backup on my Time Capsule 1 week ago, because I had to get my MacBook Pro repaired. I got a new logic board. Now Time Machine doesn't find or see my last backup. But it's definitely on my Time Capsule. I can see the sparsebundle file on the disk. And if I try to do a backup (I had to select my Time Capsule as volume in the settings first...?), it isn't possible because there is not enough space on the Time Capsule. Of course there is not, because my last backup is on it. Time Machine seems to ignore that there is already a backup of my system on the Time Capsule.
What can I do?
Thank you very much

DId you get an answer to this? I too have the same problem except that all I did was move, change dsl companies and rehook up the time capsule...and nothing. The sparse bundle is there but whenever I back up it wants to do a whole new backup
Thank
Robert

Time machine doesn't recognize old time machine backups after new drive

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