Time Machine dumping backups when it shouldn't!

I've had this problem from the outset of getting my new machine about a week ago. TM starts dumping back ups at about the 15th or so hourly backup. There is plenty of space on my external 1TB LaCie D2 Ext. hard drive...I've tried everything as far as troubleshooting, including doing an archive and install on my interior 640 gig hard drive. But TM just won't get past the hourly back-up. It keeps deleting back-ups sometime 2 or 3 at a time. I'd like to be able to use Time Machine, but right now I'm just going to be happy with a Super Duper back up unless any of you genius'....grin...can help...Otherwise my machine is working great and I truly love it! I'm new to Leopard, but have been a Mac guy for 25+ years....Thanks for any ideas or help guys!
Z

zutty wrote:
Hmm...OK let me see if I've got this right....My initial TM backup was on May 17 at 2AM...So seeing as it's been more than 24 hours...It will begin to delete some..or all..of the preceeding hourly backups?
Yes. Only one will be kept. The rest will be deleted.
Also, it is still scheduling backups every hour...When does it start to schedule daily?
TM will continue to schedule backups every hour as long as TM is turned on. TM doesn't "schedule" daily backups. After one day has passed, TM deletes all of the hourly backups except one. That one becomes the daily. Daily backups are kept for 30 days. After then, only one out of the oldest 7 dailies is kept. The others are deleted. The one that is kept becomes your "weekly" backup. Weekly backups don't get deleted until your TM drive fills up. Then they are purged to make room for your new hourly backups.
The last couple of backups had no deletions, but the one before that after it was asleep, it deleted 3 of them.Making it 15 kept I guess I just don't really understad how TM is supposed to work.
The three that were deleted were deleted because they were more than 24 hours old. The remaining 15 were kept because they were less than 24 hours old. If you had kept your Mac on overnight, you'd have 24 hourly backups. But since your Mac was asleep for nine hours, only 15 were made.
I'm dealing with an Apple rep and he's had me send over some data to give to the tech support guys. Thanks for your patience guys. I'm not a newbie, but am also far from a tech genius either...I am new to Leopard, but am really loving this new machine and OS. Much different than my old G4 MDD and Tiger..

Similar Messages

Time machine only backup when i am using mac

i have a time capsule and a wd external drive connected to IMac for backups. time capsule only backs up when i am using computer or if i click the time machine icon. is this correct? i thought it would backup automatically every hour.

Time Machine will back up every hour as long as your Mac is active and you have made any changes in the last hour.
If a change has not occurred on your Mac, there is really no reason for Time Machine to back that up.

Time Machine--"Next backup: When Mac is plugged in"

My wife and I have identical MacBook Airs (2011) with Mavericks. For whatever reason my wife's Time Machine will not back up until it is plugged in to an electrical outlet. When I open Time Machine Preferences, it will say, "Next backup: <future time>". When I unplug her Mac Air from the electrical outlet, it changes to, "Next backup: When your Mac is plugged in". The concern is that the Mac Air is used unplugged all the time, and when it is plugged in she closes the lid. All I need is for her to restore some work that is from two days ago.
I can not find anything in Preferences that controls that function. I reset SMC and did a reset of Time Machine using Pondini's instructions, http://pondini.org/TM/A4.html
So why is it doing this?
My MacBook Air does not act this way. It backs up on the hour plugged or unplugged.
A search on the forum turned up a handful of posts from 2008 with this question.
Everyone have a nice day.

There is a setting in Time Machine in System Preferences. It is under the options button to "Backup while on battery power". Check that.

I bought an external hard drive for backups to use with Time Machine, but however when I try to connect it with the other windows laptop it doesn't work ? intact it doesn't work on any other device except my MAC ?

I bought an external hard drive for backups to use with Time Machine, but however when I try to connect it with the other windows laptop it doesn't work ? intact it doesn't work on any other device except my MAC ?

Do not worry about it.
Time Machine needs that your external drive is formatted in HFS+, or better known as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)". This filesystem is used by Apple on Macs and Windows cannot read or write drives formatted with this filesystem, being this the reason why all your devices do not read the external drive except your Mac.
You can only use your external drive to make Time Machine drives. If you store anything different, you may damage the Time Machine structure, so it is better not to use it as a drive to store other data. Instead, get another external drive to do it or create a second partition on the external drive formatted in FAT32 by using Disk Utility > http://pondini.org/OSX/DU3.html FAT32 can be read by Windows PCs

Does Time Machine bundle backup sets when it deletes a month's daily sets?

I'm asking this question to find out if I can delete the all but the last week in a month, each month, in order to extend the useful capacity of my backup drive.
In some backup systems, a periodic "bundle" is made when previous sets are deleted, so for instance, the last backup of the month has the cumulative hourly changes of that month. In this way, transient files which appear and disappear within the month are retained in the monthly backup.
Is this true of Time Machine? Exactly what does Time Machine do? Does it simply wipe out the daily sets and chose the last one to be the "weekly backup?" Or something more sophisticated and useful?
Thanks for any insight!

I've devised a little experiment to discover Time Machine's behavior in this regard:
On my Time Machine's backup schedule, August 27 corresponds with the end of a week. So, on August 26 at 9:15AM, I created the following [folder]/file structure:
[Time Machine Test -Transient Roll-up]
   [Time Machine Test - 1. Hourly Transience
      A one hour lifetime file.rtf
   [Time Machine Test - 2. Daily Transience
      A one day lifetime file.rtf
   [Time Machine Test - 3. Weekly Transience
      A one week lifetime file.rtf
At 10:10AM of that day I removed
[Time Machine Test - 1. Hourly Transience
      A one hour lifetime file.rtf
At 10:10 the next day, August 27, I removed
   [Time Machine Test - 2. Daily Transience
      A one day lifetime file.rtf
On August 28 at 10:30AM, acheck today of the earliest backup of this structure reveals only the following:
[Time Machine Test -Transient Roll-up]
   [Time Machine Test - 3. Weekly Transience
      A one week lifetime file.rtf
I draw the conclusion that transient files within a time period are not subject to a "roll-up" mechanism that displays all changes after out-of-date files are deleted by Time Machine. Thus, for instance, any file that appeared and disappears during an hour will be lost in Time Machine's daily history. Similarly, files that only persist for a day will be lost in the weekly history. And, presumably, if one wanted to choose a week which represented an accumulation of transient changes during the month it would be impossible to do so.
Even so, if one wants to manage only one backup volume, rather than accumulating a stack of them over the years, one might well think about selectively deleting all but one week per month in the earliest backups available, as the projected remaining time approaches less than a few weeks. BackupLoupe's Statistics gives an estimate of remaining time left for backups on a volume, and I would suggest using that as a forecast, unless others have experience to the contrary.
Hope this is useful. It certainly is to me.

When installing maverick mailboxes disappeared, only have current emails. All the folders and content missing. Could anyone be of help. I do have Time Machine for backup.

When installing maverick mailboxes disappeared, only have current emails. All the folders and content missing. Could anyone be of help. I do have Time Machine for backup.

Solved the problem by clicking the gray triangle next to "On My Mac" and drilled down!

Time Machine Slow Backup

I use Time Machine to backup to a G-Technologies 4TB external HD. The backup is extremely slow, many times saying it will take 69,000 days to back up. I have almost a TB to backup. The G-Technology HD will go off line. I'm not sure if this is a HD problem or Time Machine problem. My iMac is a IntelMac with 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB of Ram, OSX 10.8.2. Any thoughts?

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an 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. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Enter the word "Starting" (without the quotes) in the String Matching text field. You should now see log messages with the words "Starting * backup," where * represents any of the words "automatic," "manual," or "standard." Note the timestamp of the last such message. Clear the text field and scroll back in the log to that time. 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 (command-C) to the Clipboard. Paste (command-V) into a reply to this message.
If there are runs of repeated messages, post only one example of each. Don't post many repetitions of the same message.
When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Some personal information, such as the names of your files, may be included — anonymize before posting.

Time machine multiple backup drives question

Time machine to backup to my 2TB MyBook drive. I wanted a second backup on a portable 1TB, so in time machine settings, I selected the 1TB drive, and then clicked the "Replace" button, instead of the "Use both" button. Currently the 1TB drive is backing up from scratch.
So will I be able to select my 2TB MyBook drive after the 1TB is backed up and disconnected? I mean, can I resume time machine backups where I left off?
Most of what I've read (after the fact) seems to suggest that I should have clicked the "Use both" button, then just removed the 1TB drive.
-Thanks

I find tm doesn't remember the drives anyway. I have a dedicated drive for lion and mountain lion as I have both lion and mountain lion installed on my mac. When I'm in either os and connect the appropriate drive and start tm I still have to go in and select the drive. Tm says there are no older backups, but there are, until the new partial backup completes. Then it lists al the backups on that drive.
Now maybe if you leave tm on all the time it might work differently but I don't care for it creating local snapshots and I only connect the externals when I want to do a backup.
So bottom line is you shouldn't have any problem when you connect the other drive. At that time, when you have to select that original tm backup drive, you can click the option to use both.

Time Machine does backups, but cannot find those backups

I have a 27-inch iMac (mid 2011) what is wirelessly connected to a 3T Airport Time Capsule.
I am running Yosemite 10.10.1
In the Time machine preferences, the latest backup was made at 5:54p (C) today. The earliest was made in July 2014.
My problem is that I cannot access the backups. When I enter time machine I get the "waiting" window title and then a message that says the backups cannot be found and a referral to the time machine preferences. When I go the the preferences, everything looks OK. The proper disk is selected.
I read another post that seemed related to this, but there were so many abbreviations, that I could not understand anything. If anyone does understand this issue, could you explain it in plain terms? Thank you.

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.
Click the Clear Display icon in the toolbar. Then try to enter Time Machine. Select any messages that appear in the Console window. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
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. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
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 or email address, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

How do I use time machine to backup to an external hard drive plugged into my airport extreme

How do I use time machine to backup to an external hard drive plugged into my airport extreme? I used to be able to but now time machine will not recognize my hard drive to select as a backup when plugged into my airport extreme. I'm not sure what happened or changed. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks

First thing to do is go to the Pondini tips page, then follow the link to his full TM site for all the details.

Using time machine to backup Logic Projects

Hi
I was wondering if it is possible to use time machine to backup my Logic Projects. I have a seperate internal drive that I use to keep all my user data on, like my Logic projects. I want to use time machine to back up these projects onto a external firewire drive.
Can timemachine only backup your systems drive and therefore I would need to have my Logic projects based stored on it?

Yes - time machine can back up any drive. I am using 3 drives: system drive, a USB2 drive for Time machine backups and a firewire 800 drive for Logic Studio projects, instruments, samples, audio, etc. TM backs up my system and FW drives to the USB drive.
Time machine options (in system preferences) allow you to exclude/include drives so you just need to set it to include your second internal drive.
The only thing I'm not sure of is whether this effects the loop browser. Oddly, when I was experimenting with using aliases for Apple loops, Logic actually found the TM backup files when it couldn't locate the original GB loops! After some file moving and index deleting I cleared all loops but now I have duplicate entries again in Logic - possibly due to TM, but I have not verified this.
-Scott

Time Machine: Repeated errors when backing up for the first time using a new external firewire drive

My Iomega 500GB firewire external drive failed on me last week and I have just replaced it with an identical model. I used to use the old drive with Time Machine on my MacBook Pro running 10.5.8 with no issues, until the drive had a hardware failure and stopped spinning up, hence the replacement.
Two days ago I tried using Time Machine for the first time with the replacement external drive. The backup failed and each subsequent backup attempt has failed since then with a different error each time. The drive cannot be ejected using Finder (Finder says disk is in use and cannot be ejected even when no processes are running except for Finder and Time Machine has been disabled), by dragging it to the dock (hangs computer which can only be fixed by a hard reboot), in Disk Utilities (drive cannot be unmounted) or in Terminal ("no such file or directory").
The first backup attempt failed after 3 hours of "preparing" with the message "The backup was not performed because an error occured while creating backup directory".
I tried repairing the disk in Disk Utilities and Disk Utilities said the drive was OK ("the volume Time Machine Backups appears to be OK"). I tried ejecting the drive (hard reboot of computer and disconnecting the drive), plugging it back in again and trying again.
This time it started backing up, then failed after a few minutes with the message "an error occured while copying files to the backup volume". I had a look at the troubleshooting suggested on http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/C3.html and followed instructions. It failed again, so I did a full reset as per http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/A4.html.
It failed again, so I tried reparing the drive again in Disk Utilities and again it said it was OK. I tried using different cables and ports (Firewire 400 instead of Firewire 800), and backups still fail.
I have turned off anti-virus scanning (Sophos). I have tried excluding it from Spotlight but this causes an error message from Spotlight. I have tried trashing the com.apple.TimeMachine.plist file and rebooting. I have tried selecting deselecting the drive as the back up in Time Machine preferences, selecting "None", then "Stop Backing Up" then quitting preferences, rebooting, disconnecting the drive, reconnecting the drive and selecting the drive again as the backup disk in Time Machine preferences. I have tried erasing the drive completely, rebooting, and trying to back up again.
None of these have worked. This is a brand new drive and I do not want to have to replace it again if I do not have to.
Does anyone have any suggestions? Thank you.

Hello, some possible clues...
Should you click “Start New Backup”? Not yet! If you see the dialog above, your existing Time Machine backup is corrupt, and you might not be able to recover data from it. But you can save a copy of the corrupt bundle and, perhaps, extract some data from it if needed.
Ask yourself if Time Machine has saved data you might need before deciding what to do next:
If you are sure you won’t need anything backed up before today, click “Start New Backup” and let Time Machine do its thing.
Otherwise, click “Back Up Later” and save a copy before letting Time Machine start a new backup. Just look for a file called “computername.sparsebundle” (for network backups) or “Backups.backupdb” (for local ones) and create a copy with a different name. You can open sparsebundle files with DiskImageMounter and browse them like any other disk. More information is available here.
There you go. If you click “Start New Backup” when you see this dialog box, Time Machine will erase all of your old backup data and start a new bundle. It won’t be corrupt, but it will be empty.
Note that you can manually initiate a Time Machine backup integrity check by option-clicking the “Time Machine” icon in the menu bar and selecting “Verify Backups.”
http://blog.fosketts.net/2010/08/11/time-machine-completed-verification-backups- improve-reliability-time-machine-create-backup/
According to This Time Machine resource “This appears only on Snow Leopard, and started with the Time Capsule Backup Update 1.0 in mid-May of 2010. It also seems to have been included in the 10.6.3 v1.1 update and 10.6.4.”
So, what can you do about it? Grin and bear it, it seems, until Apple fixes it.
One thing you can do to make the backup take less time is to connect your machine to your Time Capsule or other backup drive via Ethernet for the duration of the initial backup.
http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/the-dreaded-time-machine-has-completed-a-verifi cation-of-your-backups-to-improve-reliability-time-machine-must-create-a-new-ba c kup-for-you-message-and-why-you-are-seeing-it/
Time Machine: About "Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you."...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4076
Or a different/better solution in my experiences...
Get carbon copy cloner to make an exact copy of your old HD to the New one...
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
Or SuperDuper...
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/
Or the most expensive one & my favorite, Tri-Backup...
http://www.tri-edre.com/english/products/tribackup.html

Time Machine:The backup disk ran out of space unexpectedly. .....

Hi,
I upgraded to Mountain Lion when it was released and yesterday I began getting this notice from Time Machine:
"The backup disk ran out of space unexpectedly. Time Machine will try to make more space available by removing expired backups during the next scheduled backup."
I have a one terra external hard drive with exclusively Time Machine. It says it has 3.4 gigabytes available, but isn't deleting old backups and making room for new, like before. I tried the "encrypting" solution, but it still keeps on giving me this message. Should I erase and format? If so, what option should I chose to format?
My Hard Drive has 240 gigabytes, so 1Tb should be more than enough.
Thank you!
Gloria

SuperDuper and Time Machine are two completely different backup utilities. If you want something like what SuperDuper does then don't use Time Machine. You have many other options that won't use up all the space on your backup drive:
Backup Software Recommendations
Carbon Copy Cloner
Data Backup
Deja Vu
SuperDuper!
Synk Pro
Tri-Backup
Others may be found at VersionTracker or MacUpdate.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.
Do the following to erase your drive:
Erase a Drive
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. 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. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.

Time Machine - Deleted Backups/backupdb

I've searched everywhere but I haven't seen this exact scenario. So, here's the deal: I got a new AirPort Extreme, recently, and was reading online that I could attach my external HDD to it, via USB. I'm thinking, "Great! I can take this thing off my desk, to give me more room." I ejected the XHDD and connected to the APE. I could see it under Devices/Shared, and when double-clicking on it, I could access all my files. (I have other folders on the drive; Movies, iTunes Music, eBooks, etc. Using AirPort Utility, I could not select the drive to use as a Time Machine backup drive. I had been using this XHDD for TM backups, for a while, when connected directly to the iMac. I then read "Sadly, we can't do a Time Machine backup and then move it to the AEBS, so we have to do it this way." So, I deleted the Backups/backupdb folder, and everything in it, so I could then reattach the XHDD to the AE and set it up to work for TM backups. I DID NOT delete my other folders. When the Trash finished emptying the 2.5+ million files, I tried to eject the drive, but got a message saying that it was in use and could not be ejected. I thought it might be performing some residual background task. After about an hour, I tried again to eject - No Joy! So, I rebooted the iMac. Now, the volume won't show up on my desktop and it has been sounding like its working (doing something) for the past couple of hours. I can see the drive in DiskUtility, but there is no volume listed under it. Not sure what I should do to get this thing to mount. I'll worry about the TM issues later -- right now, I just need to access the other folders on the drive. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I do have Data Rescue, as a last resort, I guess...

Hi, and welcome to the forums.
Ouch!
First, you need to know that Time Machine backups via an Airport Extreme are "iffy" and +*not supported by Apple.+* See Using Time Machine with an Airport Extreme Air Disk (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
Second, Time Machine works best when the backups are in a separate partition. See #3 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum). If yours had been done that way, you could have simply erased the partition via Disk Utility, in a matter of moments.
I don't know what's wrong with the disk now.
Disconnect it from your Mac. If it has it's own power supply, unplug it or turn it off for a few minutes. Reboot your Mac again, just to be sure everything's cleared, then reconnect it (via a different port, if possible) and power it on.
If that doesn't help, what does Disk Utility show for the *Partition Map Scheme* on it (at the bottom of the window when you select it)?
If it's either +Apple Partition Map+ or GUID, that's correct. If not, that may be at least part of the problem. Does it show the correct *Total Capacity?* What does it have for *Write Status?*
If you have a copy of +Disk Warrior,+ or another 3rd-party heavy duty disk repair app, it might be able to fix it.
Otherwise, yes, you may need +Data Rescue.+ Make sure it's a compatible version.

Time Machine thinks backup disk is full but its not

I just purchased a new 1 Terabyte hard drive for backup. In the past I backed up both my internal Mac harddrive (250 Gb with 8gb free) and an external iOmega archive drive (DRIVE H 320Gb with 41Gb free) to a 500Gb Lacie drive. I purchased an iOmega 1 Terabyte drive (DRIVE G) because the Lacie drive was full. I went into Time Machine and changed the backup drive to the G one terabyte drive and did a full backup of my internal hard drive. When I did this I did not have the external H archive drive attached so Time Machine didn't back that up. I did it that way because I wanted to first backup the internal drive then do some work and then go backup the external archive drive over night. I plugged the H archive drive in, so it show up in the finder and then told Time Machine to Backup Now. It started the back up but right after doing the initial computations when it actually started backing up I got the standard error message that "the backup disk ran out of space unexpectedly..." I've double checked that the backup disk is set correctly in Time Machine to the 1Tb G drive and when I do a Get Info on the G drive it shows Capacity: 1TB, Available: 713.54 GB.
Is it possible something is wrong with the new drive? Can I test that?

Its funny how sometimes asking a question can prompt your thinking. As soon as I finished posting this I thought "of course Disk Utility". I ran a check disk and got the following error message:
Unused node is not erased (node = 107)
I did a restore which corrected the error. Turned Time Machine back on and its backing up the rest of my data now.

Time Machine dumping backups when it shouldn't!

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