Time Machine filled 300GB HD Now what?
Hi ! I am new to Leopard....! My Time Machine is full after backing up since March 11th. I have deleted the only choices I seemed to have ... systems, library and finally Backup. Still I only have 4GB left on a 300GB hard drive. I don't know how to edit it or make the back ups smaller to remedy this for now and for the future. Any ideas are gratefully accepted! MM
Doubtful. Something else is going on.
Most likely, that's not what you're seeing.
What appear to be duplicate files and folders are actually "multi-links" (sort of like fancy aliases) that look like multiple copies of the same things.
To find out what's really going on, download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget from: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/timemachinebuddy.html. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window. The somewhat-cryptic messages will show roughly how much was copied on each backup.
Also download the TimeTracker app, from www.charlessoft.com.
It shows most of the files actually saved by TM for each backup (excluding some hidden/system files, etc.).
If you find the same files being saved again, even though they weren't changed, post back, and include the results from the widget for that particular backup. Then we can figure out what's really going on.
Similar Messages
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Deleted time machine backups in Finder, now what?
I know this was foolish, but I didn't do any research before hand. My external drive had 8Gs left and the Time Machine window said it couldn't backup because it was almost full. I thought it also said something about deleting previous Time Machine backups, so I selected the first 10 or so and put them in the trash. Then when I tried to empty the trash, it took forever (still going right now at 317,996 items to delete). Anyway, my question is, now what? I am not concerned about the older backups but do I need to do anything special for a proper backup of the iMac now? Should I start over or will Time Machine fill in the gaps. I have been searching on the forum but I still don't understand how this works. Any help is greatly appreciated!
photobug mjm wrote:
do I need to do anything special for a proper backup of the iMac now? Should I start over or will Time Machine fill in the gaps. I have been searching on the forum but I still don't understand how this works.
Sorry, I neglected to answer this before.
Assuming there's no damage, or it's repairable, then no, you don't need to do anything more, although you should do a new backup as soon as you're sure the existing backups are ok.
What you've lost is only the backups of any files and folders that existed only at the time of the backups you deleted.
So if those "first 10 or so" were your oldest backups, all you've done is what TM would have done anyway, although perhaps a bit faster. If they were your more recent ones, then you've lost the copies of items that were added or changed after the time of the oldest one still there.
It is a strange concept, and a very powerful system, but let me put it this way: TM will never delete it's copy of anything that's still on your system, or was there at the time of any remaining backup.
You manually deleting them works exactly the same way.
This is the "magic" of the "multi-links" that TM uses. Think of them as multiple, extra-fancy aliases. Every backup contains "links" to TM's copy of every item that was on your Mac at the time of that backup. So a file that's not been changed in a long time will have a whole passel of them; a new file will only have one, or a few. What you deleted were these links; the actual backup copies are only deleted from the TM disk when the last link to it is deleted.
So . . . you may have dodged a bullet! -
MacPro backed up to Time Machine, added Mac Mini now get "The backup disk image “/Volumes/Data/Jerry Booher’s MacBook Pro.sparsebundle” is already in use." error when Mac Pro tries to back up
It is standard Mountain Lion error due to the networking ability which is comparable to wet string. (actually that was lion.. it dried out some with Mountain Lion.. higher in the hills perhaps!!)
See C12 and C17
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
But many people are suffering the same issue..
And the above is even a little out of date.. you might need to do a reset to the TC.
Welcome to Apple's beta program for everyone. -
Time Machine reports, "backup failed." What do I do?
Time Machine reports, "backup failed." What should I do?
See if Pondini's great site helps...
http://Pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html -
I have backed my Mac Book pro up to my external hard drive using time machine. My iPhoto now does not show any images, even when I upload from my iPhone
Mac 101: File Sharing
Mac OS X 10.7 Help: Transfer files between two Mac computers
Mac OS X 10.7 Help: Set up a Windows computer to share files with Mac users
Mac OS X 10.7 Help: Use iDisk to share files
Mac OS X: Sharing your files with non-Apple computers
How to share a Mac's files with a PC and vice versa. -
I have bought a time capsule to use as time machine device. Until now I have used a external hard disk. How can I transfer the the old time machine datas to the time capsule?
This is really difficult to the point of not really worth it.
Keep the old TM backups in archive.. and start afresh on the TC.
Time Machine has a different way of backing up on Network drives cf Local drives.
Pondini does have a method to do it... but I would not recommend it.
http://pondini.org/TM/18.html -
I upgraded my macbookpro hard drive to 1 TB then migrated my files from time machine. I'm now locked out of the computer because the password is not the same as my usual one and one that was years old and not retreivable. How do I work around this?
Whether or not you are able to recover the data off the drive yourself will depend on if the drive suffered any impact damage in the crash. You can buy USB SATA or IDE adapters (Intel and almost all G5 use SATA) that will let you connect your hard drive to a computer (like a flash drive) to see if you can recover the data. If the drive has suffered physical damage if may not mount.
If you know someone who has one of these adapters you could try using theirs, otherwise you could buy one but you take the risk of the data on the drive being non recoverable. Regardless, both are much cheaper than $1699!
(Alternatively, if you know of someone with a Mac Pro or PowerMac G5 they may be able to install the drive in their machine and try to boot from or mount it and copy the data off.) -
My 235 MB external HD was full, I bought a new 2TB and dragged and dropped the old backup files to it. Now my iMac is frozen in "preparing copy" mode. How can I 'unfreeze' it? How should I move the backup files from one external HD to the other?
This has been answered here so may times (especially by pondini, e.g. in this thread Time Machine stuck in repeating "preparing files" cycle), so please search this forum the next time before asking such a question.
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Time Machine stopped backing up now
Time machine was working well ( i think!) but now takes up an enormous amount of space 180gb. My external drives are too small at 160gb and I feel time machine has multiplied the amount of space it needs as my hard drive only contains 75gb of data.
Help! I have tried removing files and some applications from the back up volume, but it still wants more space than the apparent volume to back up.
Do I need a bigger external hard drive or will it keep multiplying as I suspect it will.
ThanksRob,
This might give you some ideas as to why it's filling up so fast.
*_Incremental Backups Seem Too Large!_*
Open the Time Machine Prefs on the Mac in question. How much space does it report you have "Available"? When a backup is initiated how much space does it report you need?
Now, consider the following, it might give you some ideas:
Time Machine performs backups at the file level. If a single bit in a large file is changed, the WHOLE file is backed up again. This is a problem for programs that save data to monolithic virtual disk files that are modified frequently. These include Parallels, VMware Fusion, Aperture vaults, or the databases that Entourage and Thunderbird create. These should be excluded from backup using the Time Machine Preference Exclusion list. You will, however, need to backup these files manually to another external disk.
If you do a lot of movie editing, unless these files are excluded, expect Time Machine to treat revised versions of a single movie as entirely new files.
If you frequently download software or video files that you only expect to keep for a short time, consider excluding the folder these are stored in from Time Machine backups.
If you have recently created a new disk image or burned a DVD, Time Machine will target these files for backup unless they are deleted or excluded from backup.
*Events-Based Backups*
Time Machine does not compare file-for-file to see if changes have been made. If it had to rescan every file on your drive before each backup, it would not be able to perform backups as often as it does. Rather, it relies on a process called FSEvents. This is a system log that records changes that occur with all the directories on your Mac. Moving / copying / deleting / & saving files and folders creates events that are recorded in this log. At the beginning of each backup, Time Machine simply looks at this log to determine what has changed since the last backup. [http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14]
Installing new software, upgrading existing software, or updating Mac OS X system software can create major changes in the structure of your directories. Every one of these changes is recorded by the OS as an event. Time Machine will backup every file that has an event associated with it since the installation.
Files or folders that are simply moved or renamed are counted as NEW files or folders. If you rename any file or folder, Time Machine will back up the ENTIRE file or folder again no matter how big or small it is.
George Schreyer describes this behavior: “If you should want to do some massive rearrangement of your disk, Time Machine will interpret the rearranged files as new files and back them up again in their new locations. Just renaming a folder will cause this to happen. This is OK if you've got lots of room on your backup disk. Eventually, Time Machine will thin those backups and the space consumed will be recovered. However, if you really want recover the space in the backup volume immediately, you can. To do this, bring a Finder window to the front and then click the Time Machine icon on the dock. This will activate the Time Machine user interface. Navigate back in time to where the old stuff exists and select it. Then pull down the "action" menu (the gear thing) and select "delete all backups" and the older stuff vanishes.” (http://www.girr.org/mac_stuff/backups.html)
*TechTool Pro Directory Protection*
This disk utility feature creates backup copies of your system directories. Obviously these directories are changing all the time. So, depending on how it is configured, these backup files will be changing as well which is interpreted by Time Machine as new data to backup. Excluding the folder these backups are stored in will eliminate this effect.
*Backups WAY Too Large*
If an initial full backup or a subsequent incremental backup is tens or hundreds of Gigs larger than expected, check to see that all unwanted external hard disks are still excluded from Time Machine backups. Time Machine will attempt to backup any hard disk attached to your Mac, including secondary internal drives, that have not been added to Time Machines Exclusion list.
This includes the Time Machine backup drive ITSELF. Normally, Time Machine is set to exclude its’ own backup disk by default. But on rare occasions it can forget. When your backup begins, Time Machine mounts the backup on your desktop. (For Time Capsule/AirDisk users it appears as a white drive icon labeled something like “Backup of (your computer)”.) If, while it is mounted, it does not show up in the Time Machine Preferences “Do not back up” list, then Time Machine will attempt to back ITSELF up. If it is not listed while the drive is mounted, then you need to add it to the list.
*Recovering Backup Space*
If you have discovered that large unwanted files have been backed up, you can use the Time Machine “time travel” interface to recovered some of that space.
Launch Time Machine from the Dock icon.
Initially, you are presented with a window that represents “Today (Now)”. DO NOT make changes to file while you see “Today (Now)” at the bottom of the screen.
Click on the window just behind “Today (Now)”. This represents the last successful backup and should display the date and time of this backup at the bottom of the screen.
Now, navigate to where the unwanted file resides.
Highlight the file and click the Actions menu (Gear icon) from the toolbar.
Select “Delete all backups of <this file>”.
*FileVault / Boot Camp / iDisk Syncing*
Note: Leopard has changed the way it deals with FileVault disk images, so it is not necessary to exclude your Home folder if you have FileVault activated. Additionally, Time Machine ignores Boot Camp partitions as the manner in which they are formatted is incompatible. Finally, if you have your iDisk Synced to your desktop, it is not necessary to exclude the disk image file it creates as that has been changed to a sparsebundle as well in Leopard.
If none of the above seem to apply to your case, then you may need to attempt to compress the disk image in question. We'll consider that if the above fails to explain your circumstance.
Let us know if this was helpful.
Cheers! -
Time Machine backup behavior erratic, now not working at all
[ Using Lion 10.7.2 on a Macbook Pro 15" with 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB RAM. ]
The Macbook is connected to our home LAN, and I have been using (since September) a Synology NAS drive on the network which is set up as the Time Machine backup drive. Most of the time for these past months it has been fine; some issues initially with connectivity which were finally solved by using a static IP address for the NAS.
Recently it did the first strange thing. It had been performing incremental backups as normal, when a message came up saying the backup was unreliable and it needed to carry out a complete new backup. Anyway - no drama - I took it up and plugged it into the router to speed up the transfer (around 200GB on the drive). It worked fine and thereafter it went back to doing incremental backups normally.
Yesterday morning I noticed it was apparently running and running without progress, clicking on the bar icon revealed that TM was "Preparing Backup"; this state continued for several hours. So I stopped the backup, restarted the machine, and then last night at 22h00 I restarted it - by 08h00 this morning, ten hours later, it was still "Preparing Backup", so clearly something is wrong.
The NAS drive is accessible, ie.
- The 'Time Machine Backups' icon for the drive has appeared on the desktop
' The 'Diskstation (Time Machine)' is available in Finder under 'shared'
So this seems to be something to with Lion and/or with Time Machine.
Considering the infrastructure environment has been stable for months, the IP address of the drive is static, there appear to be no network connectivity problems... I am at a loss as to why now this irritating behaviour and, more to the point, at the moment I cannot make the Mac backup. I would be happy to do another full backup but, really, should not be necessary since this only happened (due to the recently problem) a few weeks back - and anyway what's the point of automated incremental backup if (a) it doesn't work reliably and (b) every 2-3 weeks you have to manually perform a full backup anyway??!!
Thanks in advance
AlastairAlastair Mac wrote:
thanks. unfortunately a locally attached drive isn't a option that will work well for me (too long to explain, but it just won't - personal logistics rather than technology issues).
Are you sure about that? I have a Time Capsule (2nd hand) but I've switched back to a locally attached disk with Lion. Lion's new mobile backups provide some measure of backups when not connected to the backup drive. It protects against accidental deletions, but not hardware failure. Plus, the new bootable recovery partition in Time Machine and encryption tip the balance back in favor of the local drive - for me at least.
1. does it make sense to you that, until yesterday, it was working fine and then quite suddenly it stopped working?
I will say that it isn't surprising. There are some changes in Lion that affect networked Time Machine devices. The early versions of Lion got pretty annoying. 10.7.2 seemed to be better. I had to erase my Time Machine drive a couple of times and do new backups when it decided it needed to keep rebuilding the Spotlight index. Unless you connect with Ethernet, the reindexing will never finish. In your case, I would expect a 3rd party, flaky open-source product to perform even worse.
2. in my specific situation (going around and around "preparing backup" without any progress even in 24hrs of preparing, what can i do to restart the backup process? even if it means doing a clean backup i.e. junking the old one, i would live with it as at present (touch wood) my hard drive is OK and i have no historical version recovery issues.
With Time Machine, the only quick and easy way to reset things is to erase the Time Machine volume.
3. did apple / synology reach a point in previous releases of OSX and DSM which was stable and DID work, despite the need to use Netatalk? in other words, if i soldier on patiently, is it likely this will eventually get solved? or will this be a perennial problem? in the end, if twice a year i have to intervene, it doesn't really matter PROVIDED the backup itself is intact should the HD finally die. of course, if i have to intervene every couple of days, i may as well do it all manually.
I can't really answer that. I used Netatalk briefly several years ago and it scrambled my files. It has certainly improved somewhat, but obviously isn't stable. The part that really annoys me is that the change that Apple introduced in Lion wasn't really new. Apple introduced a more secure version of the AFP protocol 9 years ago. In Lion, all they did was make that more secure protocol the default and disabled the older protocols. There are a number of hacks that have been posted (sometimes by me) about how to set a flag in Lion so that it will continue to use the older protocol.
Synology seems to have better Mac support that some NAS vendors. Still, there was no reason they had to wait so long to update their software. Developers have had access to Lion for almost a whole year.
I would expect that companies would be always trying to improve their products, but the evidence doesn't support that assumption. I don't like Netatalk's shady open source extortion practices, but then no one else has stepped up to fund a stable open-source implementation of AppleTalk. People tend to blame Apple but they published the new specifications a decade ago and no one bothered to read them. Why should they care?
Personally, I think backups are too important to rely on such flaky software. I really like Time Machine but it is pretty complicated. Apple is able to make it functional over a network, but just barely. If you are using a 3rd party NAS, my suggestion would be to use NFS instead and backup with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!. Even if you want to continue to try using Time Machine, a Carbon Copy Cloner backup would be a good thing to have too. -
I recently completely rebooted my macbook, and restored it from a time machine backup. Now all my previous backups have been deleted and when it tries to make a new backup I get a message telling me that i do not have enough space on my external harddrive. The problem is that before my backup i had loads of backups and still space left. Now it's telling me that it can't even backup once?
I don't understand what's happened. HELP!likefoxes,
Actually, it did not "delete" your old backups. They are still there. However, because you reinstalled your OS, TM perform a new full backup. You can still access the old backups but they will not be linked to the new ones. See the following:
*_Time Machine Always Performs a Full Backup After a Full Restore_*
Actually, this is normal. Anytime your hardware has changed, or you have reinstalled the operating system again, Time Machine will perform a new full backup. Consider the following according to the KB article below:
*Full Backup After Restore*
Bear in mind that in all cases Time Machine will perform a full backup after a full restore. This is normal. Time Machine will resume incremental backups after the full backup has completed. To view previous backups, Control-click or right-click the Time Machine icon in your Dock or Option-click the Time Machine menu extra and Choose "Browse Other Time Machine Disks," then select your previous backup volume. You will enter Time Machine and be able to browse your previous back ups and restore files. [http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1338]
So even on unchanged hardware, if you reinstall your system software and restore your user data, Time Machine starts anew, and you will not be able to resume backing up with the same history as the previous backups.
While there may be ways to fool/hack Time Machine into recognizing previous backups without performing another full backup, they are likely rather elaborate.
Ultimately, though, in a couple of months, all the effort to preserve old backups may seem pointless. After all, Time Machine will eventually purge away that data anyways as it replaces it with new files.
It may simply be easier to begin a fresh series of backups while saving the previous backups until your satisfied that you have enough history built up. Then delete the old backups.
Hope this clarifies some things.
Cheers! -
I deleted my Time Machine backups using Finder, now the trash won't empty
Hello
I've just been to the Apple genius bar and thought this was solved, there the trash emptied no problem. But I realized that the problem has to do with two external drives that have time machine backups on them. I deleted some of the older back ups because my drive was filling up and I didn't see any other way to delete them.
Now they can't be reinstated back where they were, and the trash won't empty using any method. I've even tried the Terminal SUMO methods on here and other sites, and the Trashi It app, and Cocktail app - nothing works.
The only solutions I've found say to wipe your back up drive completely and start over but that is NOT an option as I have ALL of my photos on there. I use my external drive for my images (I am a photographer) and use time machine to back up my MacBookPro onto there as well. I had no idea deleting those was going to be an issue. Now I've tried to delete other things on both external drives and they are all stuck in the trash.
Someone please help!photogirl67 wrote:
I use my external drive for my images (I am a photographer) and use time machine to back up my MacBookPro onto there as well.
Not a good idea, as you've learned the hard way.
And especially bad in the same partition, as you can't just erase the TM partition.
Plus, how do you back up the images?
For best results, consider getting another external HD; one for the images, and one for TM. Then you can have Time Machine back up both your Mac and the external. See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #32 for details and considerations.
But my question for Pondini is this - if I use that command will it erase that entire drive, or just the trash on it?
Just the trash folders. I've reworded those instructions a bit, hopefully more clearly and safely, and put them in #E6 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting. -
HT201250 Lost important files on Time machine it is decrypting now.
I recently had to install OSX lion I screwed up something with bootcamp, I deleted the partition and then lost a hundred gigs of space on my harddrive that I really needed. Before I did a clean install, I backed up three times with in an hour with time machine. I checked to make sure everything was there which it was.
After the clean install I plugged in timemachine it asked me for a password I typed it in, it asked me to set up a new timemachine and I did with out encryption it also kepted my old backups so i restored all the folders I needed and left it to run over night, when I woke up my timemachine disk was decrypting and I thought nothing of it.
When i got to work I noticed that a bunch of files from the last two weeks were missing and half my music collection and a bunch of other files that I didn't need as much as the work files.
I noticed that I only had stuff from two weeks prior.
My downloads folder was up to day from what I had on tuesday and except my documents folder and my music folder.
When I got home checked my timemachine ever all those files are missing, I nearly passed out in fear knowing that I need this work files due by friday and I don't have time to recreate EVERYTHING.
I backed up on the 14th of January, and for some weird reason the files from that day that should be on my computer are not there either. Files I knew I had. Files that i could update intime for friday if they so happen to of been there.
It's almost like timemachine erased all those files I NEEDED just to **** me off.
Time machine is currently Decrypting the backup disk and it's at 35% which means it's going to take about 48 hours to get to finished based on the time it has taken to get this far.
I guess what I am freaking out about is not knowing if those files will be recovered once the timemachine has finished decrypting.
What's really strange is disk utiliy on the mac states the drive is open and not encrypted.
On the recovery HD it won't even let me look at the drive because it is locked.
diskutil cs list in terminal with lion shows this
Name: T***************
Sequence: 1
Free Space: 0 B (0 B)
|
+-< Physical Volume 6**********************************************
| ----------------------------------------------------
| Index: 0
| Disk: disk1s2
| Status: Online
| Size: 2000054960128 B (2.0 TB)
|
+-> Logical Volume Family 0**********************************************
Sequence: 19
Encryption Status: Unlocked
Encryption Type: None
Encryption Context: Present
Conversion Status: Converting
Has Encrypted Extents: Yes
Conversion Direction: backward
|
+-> Logical Volume F**********************************************
Disk: disk2
Status: Online
Sequence: 4
Size (Total): 1999736188928 B (2.0 TB)
Size (Converted): 692009828352 B (692.0 GB)
Revertible: Yes (unlock and decryption required)
LV Name: Time Machine
Volume Name: Time Machine
This does not update or change as the decryption process gets farther along.
Does anyone know if once the decryption process completes my files will magically appear?
What's weird is if I go into the time machine on the Tuesday jan 17th to look at the backuplog file. It says it's locked and I can't even copy it to my desktop and open it with out saying it's locked.
What is also weird the farther along the decryption process goes, it's elimination my three backups of Jan 17th I am only down to one now...
Really FREAKING OUT....Factory reset the TC and redo the setup.. any time you change network the TC needs to be redone.
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Time Machine Filling Up My Time Capsule
I use a time capsule for file storage, and also for backups. The backup is filling up my Time Capsule so I cant store any files on it. How can I set Time Machine to only fill up a certain of space or delete older backups?
blackbeardesign wrote:
I use a time capsule for file storage, and also for backups. The backup is filling up my Time Capsule so I cant store any files on it.
Welcome to Apple's discussion groups.
That's the way Time Machine (which I presume you're using) is designed. See this: http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/3.html
How can I set Time Machine to only fill up a certain of space or delete older backups?
It may be impossible to partition a Time Capsule disk with resorting to surgery. There are two things you could try: (1) Create a large "disk image" (.dmg) file and copy it to the Time Capsule disk. This will reserve that much space on the Time Capsule disk. Then mount the disk image and copy into it what you want to store there. (2) Get an external USB drive, connect it to the Time Capsule, and use it for the non-Time Machine data. -
I have been using an external Iomega HD for back-up. It has stopped working automaically ( I have used disc utility to verify and repair the disc). I get a message that disc was unable to back-up. Mac help describes a menu which appears when you click on the Time Machine icon that includes the option to "back up now". This menu does not appear when I click the icon. What can I try next?
See Pondini's TM FAQs for starters.
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