Time Machine Doesn't Show Previous Back-Ups

Hi,
Just reconnected a TC after a 2 year hiatus. I can connect as a shared disk and see the the contents of the TC which includes a sparsebundle - so I know content is there. But when I launch Time Machine I dont see any previous content. I haven't performed a Time Machine back-up yet.
What would be the best way to proceed? I dont want previous back ups to get wiped. Also, I take it connecting via wired Ethernet would speed up what initial back-up I might perform as much on my computer has changed in two years.

mrhifi wrote:
Hi,
Just reconnected a TC after a 2 year hiatus. I can connect as a shared disk and see the the contents of the TC which includes a sparsebundle - so I know content is there. But when I launch Time Machine I dont see any previous content. I haven't performed a Time Machine back-up yet.
What would be the best way to proceed?
What's changed in those 2 years? Any hardware repairs, especially a new logic board?
If not, try Repairing the backups, per #A5 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of the +Time Machine+ forum).
If that doesn't help, try the Browse... option, per #E2 there.
I dont want previous back ups to get wiped.
2 year old backups? That makes me wonder if you deleted things from your Mac, counting on Time Machine to keep the backups indefinitely. If so, see #20 in [Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/FAQ.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of the +Time Machine+ forum).
After that long, Time Machine will almost certainly do a new, full backup. That, of course, will take a lot of space, so if there isn't enough room on your TC, it will have to delete old backups, perhaps a LOT of them, to make room. Depending on the sizes, it may delete all but the most recent one, then fail because there still isn't enough room.
See how much space is available on the TC. If that's less than 120% of the amount of data on your Mac (or the estimated size of a full backup under the exclusions box in +Time Machine Preferences > Options,+ backups will have to be deleted. How many is impossible to predict.
Also, I take it connecting via wired Ethernet would speed up what initial back-up I might perform as much on my computer has changed in two years.
Yes, absolutely!
If old backups have to be deleted, that can be an excruciatingly slow process, even via Ethernet. Because of the way sparse bundles work, TM must mount it, delete the oldest backup, dismount it, compact it, then mount it again to see if that made enough space. If not, repeat, repeat, repeat . . .
So, if it looks like a lot of old backups will have to go, and you really don't want that to happen, your best bet is to connect a USB or FireWire disk directly to your iMac and start backing-up to it. That's much faster and more reliable anyway. You should still be able to see and restore from the old backups via the Browse... option.
By the way, please click +My Settings+ at the right of this page, and update your Mac and OSX specs. I'm assuming you're still on the iMac, but clearly not 10.4.5 )

Similar Messages

Time Machine doesn't delete previous back-ups. Why?

I'm using a 500gb external drive for backing up.
Every time TM tries to do a backup, it says it failed because there isn't enough disk space. Before, TM used to delete old backups to make space for the new one but now it doesn't seem to do it automatically.
I've checked everything I can think of and the preferences window does state that "the oldest back-ups are deleted when your disc becomes full".
It seems to be working if I reduce the size of my backups by excluding more.
Is there a built-in "preference" that Time Machine has to store at least two back-ups?
I'm happy to simply store one backup if I can adjust the setting to do so?
Any suggestions/advice please?

It will never delete the only backup if only one complete backup remains, no. If it needs to make a new full backup for any reason, it will only remove the exisiting backup once the new one is complete and in place, so for at least a short period, it would need double the normal backup space.
Without knowing the full history and details of backups on that drive, I would say you are pushing things quite a bit with so little available space. Depending on just how much changes in any one backup cycle, or if anything needs to be replaced because something gets corrupted, you could get warnings or outright errors. Basically anything that causes TM to need to make a larger than usual backup could cause you problems.
As Pondini mentions elsewhere in his FAQ, a good rule of thumb is to have a backup drive at least 2x-4x the size of the drive being backed up. External 1TB drives are pretty cheap these days - you could avoid a lot of headaches if you got and used a larger drive.
An alternative for that drive you have now is to use something like Carbon Copy Cloner (Bombich software) or SuperDuper (Shirt Pocket software) and make a full bootable system clone, then use the incremental option in those tools to keep it up to date. If you setup the incremental to basically always keep the clone to just a true single snapshot in time of what your boot drive has on it, then the clone will never take up more space than your boot drive. A cloned drive is itself a bootable complete copy of your entire current internal boot drive and system. The downside of such a clone is that it only includes copies of everything from the most recent incremental cloning operation, so you cannot go back in time to multiple previous versions of a file as you can in TM.
In an ideal world, you could get a bigger drive and start using it for TM, and also use your existing drive for a clone. Redundant backups are an asset (I keep 3 on hand at all times - a TM, and two clones).

I recovered my back up via a wired connection. now Time Machine does not recognise older back ups wirelessly and wants to do a first back up

I recovered a back up from my time machine via a wired connection after getting the 'white screen of death'. Now Time Machine does not recognise any back ups on the time machine when connected wirelessly and wants to do a first back up of the whole machine. How do I get my mac to recognise these older back ups? It connects to the wifi network the time machine creates fine, with the same name and password.

I recommend the following.
1. Reset the TC to factory.
Universal Factory Reset.. any model TC or AE.
Unplug your TC/AE from power or turn off at the power point.
Hold in reset. and power the TC/AE back on.. all without releasing reset and keep holding in for about 10sec. (this is often difficult without a 2nd person or a 3rd arm).
Release it when the status light flashes rapidly. If it doesn’t flash rapidly you have missed it and try again.
Note..
Be Gentle! Feel the switch click on. It has a positive feel.. add no more pressure after that.
TC/AE will reboot after a couple of minutes with default factory settings and will wipe out previous configurations of the router.
No files are deleted on the hard disk in a TC.. No reset of the TC deletes files.. to do that you use erase from the airport utility.
2. Rename the TC to SMB standard.
That means short names.. 2-20 characters but less than 10 is excellent. eg TCGenx (use number for x that is actual generation of the TC)
No spaces.
Pure alphanumeric. No apostrophe.
3. Ensure IPv6 is set to link-local..
Do the same thing for ethernet if that is used.
4. Manually mount the TC disk in Finder.
Use Go in the top menu.. connect to server.
Type in
AFP://TCname.local (where TCname is your new short name for the TC and local is default domain .. it helps using the domain I found).
You will then find the computer either can or cannot find the network resource.. if it fails something else is wrong with the actual network and you will need to fix that.
It will request the password if it is found.. password is public by default unless you changed it.. type in the password and check to keep it in your keychain.
5. Delete current TM setup and redo it with the newly named TC.
See A4 here. http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
If your backups cannot be found, try B6 again, now that you actually know that the disk has been properly discovered.

Time Machine appears to be doing back-ups, but they do not appear on the external hard drive. The last one I can find is June 30. I did a utility scan of the hard drive disk and it is fine.

Time Machine appears to be doing back-ups, but they do not appear on the external hard drive. The last one I can find is June 30. I did a utility scan of the hard drive disk and it is fine. What do I do?

Click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar. The time of the last backup is shown in the drop down.

HT3275 Time Machine doesn't see the back-up disk

Time Machine doesn't see the back-up disk after I've logged off and then back on, even though the disk is available to the iMac 24/7. Turning the disk off and then on in the current session works, but this seems to defeat the purpose of an unattended back-up disk. I can't find a setting that ensures the back-up disk is recognized after log-in or restart. Is there a solution?

Is this Mountain Lion??
It seems to have made some changes that make the disk drop out.. it does this even if you are continually connected to the TC and we don't have a solution yet.
For your login issue, is the TC using a disk password.. or are you setting it to default? Could you try just turning on the guest account in the TC to read and write access and see if this helps. Tell us how it goes.
There is another fix.. but it involves using disconnect all users from v5 airport utility.. Apple removed the function in v6.
If you are on Lion or Mountain Lion even you can install the v5 utility.
How to load 5.6 into ML.
1. Download 5.6 for Lion.
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1482
Click to open the dmg but do not attempt to install the pkg.. it won't work anyway.
2. Download and install unpkg.
http://www.timdoug.com/unpkg/
Run unpkg on the desktop.. it is very simple.. drag the AirPortUtility56.pkg file over to unpkg.. and it will create a new directory of the same name on the desktop.. drill down.. applications utilities .. there lo and behold is Airport utility 5.6 .. drag it to your main utilities directory or just run it from current location.
You cannot uninstall 6.1 so don't try.. and you cannot or should not run them both at the same time.. so just ignore the toyland version.. the plastic hammer.. and start using 5.6.. a real tool.

Time machine doesn't show non-current drive.

I had an external hard drive die. I need to restore the files, but since the drive's not there anymore Time machine doesn't list it. How do I access the files without manually finding them on the backup drive?

See > http://pondini.org/TM/E3.html

Time Machine doesn't show any backups even though the data is being backed up

Time Machine is set to backup my Mac regularly and it seems to be doing so since the backups are being written to my backup disk.
However, when I enter Time Machine, none of the backups in the past show up on the Time Machine screen.
Is there a way to have Time Machine recognize the data it has backed up?

I restarted my Mac and all's well. Odd.

Logic Board was replaced - Now Time Machine does not show previous backups

Hi
Bit desperate here.
My Apple store changed my hard disk and the logic board along with it.
I'm now aware that this means my MAC address has changed - which is what your Time Machine looks for when it tries to back up.
So now the backups are failing, and I KNOW there's a HINT offered on macosxhints.com
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080128003716101&query=Time%2Bmach ine%2Blogic
- but I have absolutely NO previous experience with TERMINAL and minute I try to re direct terminal to my Time Machine Volume : it tells me there is no such file or directory. It's all gobbledygook to me. I think the person that wrote it ASSUMED some previous knowledge of using terminal.
The things I DO know are: My MAC address number, and my TM Volume is called The BIG BACKUP (not Time Machine). It doesn't
Can anyone make this clearer for me, or indeed is there an easier way.
I know I could just tell TM to change disk and just star afresh - but I'm under the impression that it's very uneccessary for me to lose all my previous backups.
Hey, many, many thanks if you can help
Simon

Hello K.V.
(I'm having to come back to this when I get a minute at the moment)
Many thanks for your suggestions so far. Several things have occured:
Firstly I did what you instructed in your last post, that seem to let me go on without any further errors - so I then when back to my desktop - dismounted The BIG BACKUP and restarted the whole mac, remounting the The BIG BACKUP. I went to the 'Back Up Now' commend to test it and it failed, sayind it could not find the file or directory.
So this evening I started in terminal from scratch - when I got to the ls -al command I noticed that my old address was no longer in the list, it was on the line before the new address before (I also punched in the wrong mac address intially but spotted it and rectified my mistake .001f5beb34e5 being the correct one) as you can see from below it now says my old address is No such file or directory.
Here is a copy of what happened
Last login: Mon Jul 21 19:27:07 on ttys000
simon-evanss-imac:~ simonevans$ cd /Volumes/"The BIG BACKUP"/Backups.backupdb
simon-evanss-imac:Backups.backupdb simonevans$ xattr -p com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress "simon-evanss-imac"
No such file: simon-evanss-imac
simon-evanss-imac:Backups.backupdb simonevans$ xattr -p com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress"simon-evanss-imac"
simon-evanss-imac:Backups.backupdb simonevans$ cd ..
simon-evanss-imac:The BIG BACKUP simonevans$ ls -al
total 104
drwxr-xr-x@ 16 simonevans staff 612 20 Jul 22:44 .
drwxrwxrwt@ 6 root admin 204 21 Jul 21:13 ..
-r-------- 1 simonevans staff 16 24 Apr 23:56 .001f5beb34e5
-rw-r--r--@ 1 simonevans staff 6148 21 Jul 19:08 .DS_Store
drwx------ 3 simonevans staff 102 24 Apr 23:55 .Spotlight-V100
d-wx-wx-wt 3 simonevans staff 102 19 Jul 09:25 .Trashes
-rw-r--r-- 1 root staff 0 25 Apr 09:23 .com.apple.timemachine.supported
drwx------ 8 simonevans staff 272 21 Jul 19:32 .fseventsd
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 root staff 102 20 Jul 22:56 Backups.backupdb
-rw-r--r--@ 1 simonevans staff 1024 1 Jan 1970 Desktop DB
-rw-r--r--@ 1 simonevans staff 2 1 Jan 1970 Desktop DF
-rw-r--r--@ 1 simonevans staff 0 1 Jan 1970 Icon?
drwxr-xr-x 5 simonevans staff 170 24 Apr 23:55 MANUALS
drwxr-xr-x 5 simonevans staff 170 24 Apr 23:55 SOFTWARE
simon-evanss-imac:The BIG BACKUP simonevans$ sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes/"The BIG BACKUP"
Password:
Access control lists are supported on /Volumes/The BIG BACKUP.
simon-evanss-imac:The BIG BACKUP simonevans$ sudo mv .001b639a9935 .001f5beb34e5mv: .001b639a9935: No such file or directory
simon-evanss-imac:The BIG BACKUP simonevans$ sudo mv .001b639a9935 .001cb37264bc
Password:
mv: rename .001b639a9935 to .001cb37264bc: No such file or directory
simon-evanss-imac:The BIG BACKUP simonevans$ sudo mv .001b639a9935 .001f5beb34e5
Password:
mv: .001b639a9935: No such file or directory
simon-evanss-imac:The BIG BACKUP simonevans$
Very confusing huh.
To be honest now, I guess my prime concern is if I've made any damaging changes to things I don't understand or not - and I think it may be best if I accept the Time Machine starting afresh from square one by clearing the external drive and re-directing TM to it. I could live with this I guess, so long as it worked.
What do you think?
Many thanks
Simon

Time Machine deleting too many old back-ups

I connect Time Machine (external drive) and start the back-up. TM takes a while to clean old back-ups to create space. Fair enough, as I have not been backing up since a month ago. This takes too long though, I get suspicious and I check Console and see that TM has deleted 5 old back-ups. It does not make any sense, I know that deleting one, at most two, would have been enough. I check the Console log and see the text below:
1/10/15 10:19:33.109 PM com.apple.backupd[415] Deleted backup /Volumes/LaCie/Backups.backupdb/John Doe’s MacBook Pro/2013-09-29-211629 containing 1.76 GB; 140.71 GB now available, 194.75 GB required
This is curious as I am sure a single TM back-up is much larger than that, at least 130GB. I get into TM via Finder and notice that each back-up for a given date has the expected size there, with all the many files from my laptop correctly saved in the back-up. And yet, when TM deletes a given back-up, it frees up only much less in terms of space and so it keeps deleting back-ups.
I have had some issues in the past with this external drive and I recently had it fixed. I have another one and I plan to switch to it as TM. Yet, I do not understand why this happens.
Macbook Pro OS X 10.9.5, 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Time Machine External Drive: La Cie Porsche 500GB

140.71 GB now available, 194.75 GB required
It appears Time Machine needs 194.75 GB to do the latest backup, but only 140.71 is available. So it keeps deleting more in an attempt to make enough space available.

Time Machine won't create diff. back-ups despite sufficient disk space

Hi,
I have one full back up on my external HDD, and several differential back ups. However, despite there being over 80GB left on my external HDD, Time Machine will fail to complete further differential back ups when I disconnect my external HDD and then reconnect (say a week later or so). Time Machine seems to want to create another full backup when I reconnect my external HDD (or it seems this way). My questions are: why won't Time Machine create further differential backups based on my original full backup when I reconnect my external HDD and/or can I change a setting so that TM will create ONLY differential backups (given that one full back up already exists)?
Advice appreciated,
SM

I should add that when TM attempts to create another backup after I reconnect my external HDD, it fails, stating 'not enough disk space' - which is why I assume it's attempting another full backup. Cheers, SM.

Time machine doesn't show backups

So I my logic board died and I decided to reformat my computer after it was repaired just for a fresh start. My time machine has all the backups, however, when I tried to restore from it, i opened up time machine to see that NOTHING was there. I set the drive to be the same drive used before and the drive DOES actually contain all the backups. It's just when i open up time machine to restore nothing is there. Does anyone know how I can fix this?

Yes, sorry, I didn't read the initial post carefully enough.
If babolat is still at the restore stage, the best answer is to boot up from the Leopard install disk and choose Restore from a Time Machine Backup from the Utilities menu. This will get the system back where it was and may also associate the backup directory with the new hardware (not totally sure of the latter though).
The backed up data itself can be accessed using the Browse Other Time Machine Disks option in Time Machine. I believe the Migration Assistant approach will work to get the full user across, but will not associate the existing backup directory with the new hardware.

Time Machine doesn't show my second hard disk

I recently updated my G4 from Tiger to OSX 10.5 Leopard. My G4 has two internal hard disks, one (Mac HD) containing the system & most documents, the other (Music & Pics) containing my iPhoto & iTunes libraries. I thought I had set TM to backup both disks as after I got it running I checked the backups and am sure I saw the icons of both Mac HD and Music & Pics in the TM "Star Wars" window.
Now I have just had a failure of the Music & Pics disk and am trying to recover the iPhoto & iTunes libraries to Mac HD. However when I look at all the TM backups, there is no sign of Music & Pics!
Is this because TM can't see the Music & Pics drive any more, so assumes I only want to see the files backed up from Mac HD? Do I need to install a new drive and name it Music & Pics to see the backups, or is there another way?

brianbron wrote:
I recently updated my G4 from Tiger to OSX 10.5 Leopard. My G4 has two internal hard disks, one (Mac HD) containing the system & most documents, the other (Music & Pics) containing my iPhoto & iTunes libraries. I thought I had set TM to backup both disks as after I got it running I checked the backups and am sure I saw the icons of both Mac HD and Music & Pics in the TM "Star Wars" window.
Now I have just had a failure of the Music & Pics disk and am trying to recover the iPhoto & iTunes libraries to Mac HD. However when I look at all the TM backups, there is no sign of Music & Pics!
Is this because TM can't see the Music & Pics drive any more, so assumes I only want to see the files backed up from Mac HD? Do I need to install a new drive and name it Music & Pics to see the backups, or is there another way?
Are you trying to do this by booting from your Leopard Install disk and doing a full system restore? If so, that procedure only restores OSX drives. Use the normal "Star Wars" display to restore a data-only drive.
Since the failed drive is no longer connected, see #E3 in the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.

Time machine doesn't show older backups anymore after restoring one

After restoring a backup, my older backups are not shown anymore in my Time Machine. Although it's said that the oldest one is from 2010.
how ca i get them back?
thank you for helping!

Try right-click on the Time Machine "clock" icon on the dock
Click Browse Other Time Machine Disks
See if your old backups are there

Time machine makes too many full back-ups

Yes, this has been written about ad nauseam almost since Time Machine's been around. But I am really tired of going through 3 and 4 TB hard drives because of a Time Machine bug/error/glitch/what-have-you. The latest message (from the Time Machine Buddy widget) is this:
Deep event scan at path:/Volumes/LaCie reason:must scan subdirs|new event db|
Why? Nothing's changed with this drive. Nothing's changed with the Time Machine Drive.
Thanks in advance for intelligent help.
James

Thanks for the quick reply Eric.
Yeah, I'm certainly aware of these pages. I'm running Mavericks, and there is nothing after 10.8 listed in the otherwise comprehensive resource. But more to my issue, there was only a small bit (D3) that I could find about doing full backups, none of which applied to my situation. Basically I'm wondering why there is a "new" event data base.
Same drive
not many, if any new files (it's an external sound library storage drive),
Weeks went by with none of these issues
but I have noticed issues when waking from sleep
I'm not aware of any potential issues with the Mac's routine maintenance operations. But again, it's an external drive (via FW)
The 2nd link did not work.

Time Machine doesn't see previously used partition

I made the mistake of starting my TM backup with the drive connected directly to my Mac and then switching it to my AEBS. Of course, TM decided that it would like to start the entire backup process all over again. I cancelled that and killed the backup files that were on the drive and attempted to start the whole process via wireless. For some reason, TM now refuses to recognize that drive partition anymore.
I have two partitions on the drive, both are formatted as journaled. I also have a second drive attached to the AEBS. TM sees both the little drive and the one partition of the big drive, but it will not see the partition I originally started the process on. I've even removed the partition and recreated it with a completely different name. No dice.
Is there somewhere - a plist or something - that I can flush TM's memory of that original partition so I can begin again?

Try Sections B and C from Pondini's excellent information here...
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html

Time Machine Doesn't Show Previous Back-Ups

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