Time machine is making two backup folders for my external drive

I have two external drives connected to my iMac, running 10.6.8. One is the Time Machine drive; the other is PhotosMovies. I've been having trouble for the last several months where about once a week my Time Machine backups won't finish, no matter how long I wait. I may have figured out that it gets hung when I have left a Sparsebundle open and the computer has gone asleep.
But to my question: while trying to troublesheet this problem I also noticed that for the past several months of my backups, within each backup set there are three folders: iMacHD, PhotosMovies, and PhotosMovies 1. I believe at some point that disk was named PhotosMovies 1 because I replaced an older drive with a newer one and I renamed it after I copied everything over and verified the contents.
If I exclude PhotosMovies from the backup in Time Machine preferences, that folder disappears from the backup set but the PhotosMovies 1 is still there. It is the correct size.
How do I get TM to understand that PhotosMovies 1 is no longer on the system?

Does the drive have its own external power supply brick or is it bus-powered? Firewire or USB?
Try resetting the buses per the five steps listed in this document: What to do if your computer won't recognize a FireWire or USB device

Similar Messages

Can Time Machine be used to backup both internal and external drive?

I have a Mac Book Pro with Lion OSX installed. I have an external fire wire hard drive connected which contains my iTunes Library. I would like to use Time Machine to backup both the internal drive and the attached external drive. Can this be done?

Yes, make sure the drive is not excluded under the Privacy tab in Time Machine.
System Preferences > Time Machine

I just bought and backed up my computer and time machine with a "Seagate BackUp Plus for Mac". Now my time machine is empty. Panicked. can anyone help?

I just bought and backed up my computer and time machine with a "Seagate BackUp Plus for Mac". Now my time machine is empty. Panicked. can anyone help?

Lets start over...
Please restart the network.. shut down everything..
Restart in order.. modem.. router.. if different to TC.. or TC.. client devices.. wait 2min between each startup.
If the TC does not show up on the computer, in finder.. then we need more info.. what OS are you running?
Does the TC show up in Airport utility? Are you running wireless or ethernet?
If you still have issues.. plug the TC directly into the computer by ethernet.
Do a full factory reset of the TC.. and see if it now shows up.
Please tell us exactly what model TC it is and how old.. the A1xxx model number from the base will help if you don't know.
You take a screen shot of the TC opened in finder.
eg..
My TC is named Tardis4.. click on it.. and then open the data folder.. on this one called Tardisdata.
Then take a screen shot of it so we can see what the problem is.. screenshot.. with area selection.. control + shift + 4 .. the picture goes into the desktop.. and then you click the picture icon in the posting web page controls and select the picture.

Time Machine will not properly backup to new 8TB glyph drive.

Time Machine will not properly backup to new 8TB glyph drive. Folder reads ".inProgress". Can't see any files.
How can I set it up to do proper, regular backups?

8TB? holy cow.
It's likely overwhelmed and doesn't know what it's looking at.
Try using Carbon Copy Cloner instead, at least it will be bootable to use the computer.
Most commonly used backup methods

HT201250 Can I do a backup using Time Machine on a server, or it needs an external drive only?

Can I do a backup using Time Machine on a server, or it needs an external drive only?

Time Machine can back up to a server. The drive or partition used still needs to be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
(65169)

How to prevent time machine from deleting certain backup folders?

So, I have problem undrestanding time machine. Time machine has made a backup of my files in Nov 2012 and another backup from Jan 2013. There is some files in Nov 2012 that I want to keep them forever and never be deleted. So, they were backed up by Time machine (I have deleted those files from my computer so they're no lonegr excist in my compuetr). Althought they do excist on my time machine under the Nov 2012 folder, I am not able to modify them at all for example, I'm not allowed to copy them somehwere else. Since, I can not make another copy of them, I am worried if time machine delete my Nov 2012 in future and then they will be gone. Can someone please help me in modifying/ controling my folder so it won't be deleted in future?

You are using Time Machine incorrectly, your files will be deleted from Time Machine after you delete them from your Mac, the only variable is when.
Time Machine is a backup, not a storage system.
Restore them now and copy them to long term storage (another hard drive)

Time machine: Can I target specific folders for back up

As a default time machine backs up your entire drive.
Along with my mac I want to back up a +specific folder+ on my Drobo: an external drive. (it's where I keep my large working files) I don't want to, don't need to and can't back up the entire Drobo.
Currently I am excluding everything on the drobo except the several folders I am working on. I would love to have the option to add folders as well as exclude folders.
Is there a work around I haven't thought of?

well.... lets see here....
I suggest using SuperDuper or another backup program to auto backup these files to your Drobo. Drobo is RAID so you would not need to back the Drobo up.
Also, I don't prefer the idea of using Drobo for a Time Machine Backup. I know people do it, but it's much better to buy a separate external drive for Time Machine, and use Drobo with SuperDuper. You should feel safe letting your large work files reside on the Drobo. If you want these files to reside on the internal, let SuperDuper run a backup. Good Luck.

Time Machine not making restorable backups

I've been having a few problems with Time Machine - this began when I un-installed Boot Camp, having reluctantly had to invest in a full Windows PC - and discovered that both the utility and recovery system were unable to repartition the Hard Drive in my MBP back to full size. Currently, OSX effectively uses 380GB of a 500GB HD (less space taken by partitioning, recovery partition, etc...) I was particularly perturbed by the error thrown up by Disk Utility in OSX recovery that it was unable to dismount the HD for repartitioning, irrelevent the size I attempted to make the new OSX partition.
Having exausted options I was aware of then, I decided the safe option was to re-install OSX to the entire HD, restoring it from the Time Machine backup, but (checking that this was feasible before starting) I found that the last restorable backup Time Machine claimed to have was from 2011, about the time I moved from my previous MBP to this one. I reformatted the drive Time Machine was installed on, and setup the programme from scratch again to try and create a useable backup, but in spite of this it refuses to work properly - Time Machine claims to have backed up, but upon trying to use the backup the restore programme states it isn't there. For reference, I'm using a 1TB, FireWire 800 external HD for the backups.
At this point, I've run out of knowledge of how OSX works, and would really like some help getting things back on an even keel. Obviously, my major concern is that I'm not getting proper backups anymore, but I would also like to recover the space on my HD that's otherwise lost. Googling the problem led me to an issue which sometimes occurs that Time Machine can get flagged to ignore system files, but checking through Terminal it appears that that isn't the case (all it's set to ignore is my Steam folder, as that's all available online anyway.) Might anyone be able to help with this?
Many thanks in advance.

This simple procedure will clear your Time Machine settings, including exclusions. The backups won't be affected. If you have a long exclusion list that can't be recreated easily, you may prefer a more complicated procedure that preserves the exclusion list. In that case, ask for instructions. Otherwise, do as follows.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist
Right-click or control-click the highlighted line and select
Services ▹ Reveal
from the contextual menu.* A Finder window should open with a file selected. Copy the file to the Desktop. Then move it (the original, not the copy) to the Trash. You'll be prompted for your administrator password. Reboot and recreate your settings in the Time Machine preference pane. It will show that you have no backups. Don't worry; that's expected. Run a backup to test. The backup may take much longer than usual. If TM now performs as expected, delete the file you copied to the Desktop.
*If you don't see the contextual menu item, copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. In the Finder, select
Go ▹ Go to Folder...
from the menu bar, paste into the box that opens (command-V). You won't see what you pasted because a line break is included. Press return.

Time Machine not making hourly backups since Mavericks upgrade

Recently upgraded to Mavericks from Lion 10.7.5 (took 14 hr.). Since then, when I enter Time Machine (without being connected to my external backup drive) I get a notification "your time machine backup disc can not be found". The only options given are to "set up time machine" (which I have done) or "cancel". My previous backups to my external hard drive are shown in the back ground but can not be opened and there are no hourly or weekly backups shown.

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.
Click the Clear Display icon in the toolbar. Then try the action that you're having trouble with again. 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 (command-V).
When posting a log extract, be selective. In most cases, a few dozen lines are more than enough.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Important: Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

External Hard Drive for Time Machine - 2 TB. Can I remove other external drives it was backing up?

I have an external drive dedicated for Time Machine, it's 2 TB. Last year I started backing up computer (500 GB) and one external hard drive that has 500 GB. IAlso, I have another external drive that is 1 TB connected to my computer. I noticed last week that I was hearing that other external drive sounding funny, so I thought I would add it to Time Machine to back up. Now today my Time Machine failed. I tested the drive or verified the drive and all was well. My thought is because I added this drive to Time Machine it failed because of not enough room? Is there a way to remove that other external hard drive and go back to just the computer and the 500 GB?
I did btw out of a panic mode buy the GDrive that has Thunderbolt with 3 TB, yet I can't use Thunderbolt because that plug is used for my monitor, bummer. But, maybe using this new external drive I can back up the 500, the computer and the 1TB. Any thoughts?

aashton wrote:
Now today my Time Machine failed. I tested the drive or verified the drive and all was well. My thought is because I added this drive to Time Machine it failed because of not enough room? Is there a way to remove that other external hard drive and go back to just the computer and the 500 GB?
When you say the Time Machine failed, do you mean the drive containing the Time Machine backups failed, or what failed was trying to back up the new drive you added? If Time Machine was able to complete the first full backup of the new drive, then adding Time Machine didn't cause the problem, it was a coincidence. If Time Machine runs out of space it just starts deleting the oldest backup. I suppose it might fail on the first Time Machine run after the initial backup if it didn't have space to delete stuff. When you look at the Time Machine drive in the Finder, is it in fact full? If there's plenty of space left on it, it's not clear what the failure was about.
Also, testing and verifying with Disk Utility will spot some problems but not all.
aashton wrote:
I did btw out of a panic mode buy the GDrive that has Thunderbolt with 3 TB, yet I can't use Thunderbolt because that plug is used for my monitor, bummer. But, maybe using this new external drive I can back up the 500, the computer and the 1TB. Any thoughts?
Thunderbolt can be daisy-chained, so if it or other Thunderbolt devices have a pass-through port it might be possible to do all that. But it might be better to return the drive and get a USB 3 drive instead. It would be fast enough, cheaper, and more versatile. For a single hard drive (not a RAID or SSD), Thunderbolt is not really much faster than USB 3.

Time Machine suddenly refuses to backup to non case-sensitive drive

There is another thread on this which for some reason is marked as resolved, so I thought I'd post a new thread. Suddenly after months of no complaints I get the following error:
*+Time Machine Error+*
+A volume you are backing up is case-sensitive, but the backup volume is not.+
+To Select a different backup volume, or to choose not to back up the case-sensitive volume, open the System Preferences and choose Time Machine.+
The only thing I've changed is that yesterday I ran Software Update. Unfortunately I can't remember exactly what was updated, but I suspect Quicktime was one of them since I needed to reboot. So now I'm at 7.4.5 in Quicktime.
Time Machine refuses to backup my drives now complaining about the case sensitive filesystem. The thing is, *NONE of my drives are case sensitive.* Looking at the Change Drive window in Time Machine, I see that most of the drives on my system say "reforat required" if I am to use them with Time Machine. All drives on my system are *Mac OS Extended (Journaled)*. The fact that some drives are not requiring a reformat and some are, even though they all are the same format is quite puzzling.
I took a spare drive and allowed Time Machine to reformat it for it's use. It has now reformatted the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Case-Sensitive).
Can anyone shed any light as to why TM would suddenly require my backup drive to be case sensitive when none of my drives are?
This make no sense...
-K

Ok - Running Disk Utility Verify on both the system disk and the TM disk seems to have magically stopped this error. Note that Disk Utility didn't actually find or fix any problems with either disk. The problem just went away....
It doesn't make any sense.
-K

Time Machine stopped updating files in subfolders on my external drive

I've been using Time Machine for about a year. I have two external drives connected. One is 2TB and is the "BACKUP" drive used for TM backups. The other, "VOLUME ONE" is 1TB and is used for client and media files. I went to look for a file in TM backups that had been on Volume One and it's not there. I then noticed that TM while had been performing backups, nothing was actually updating since August 3 (I'm not sure if that's the actually date but it was the most recent date on a quick check).
I then repaired permissions on the iMac Hard drive, repaired both external disks, trashed TM preferences, and shut down and then restarted. Seems everything is now backing up correctly except if you go into the subfolders on Volume One. For instance, "TestFile" is updated when it's VOLUME ONE/Folder1/Folder2/TestFile, but not if it gets placed one position down, VOLUME ONE/Folder1/Folder2/Folder3/TestFile. The only items I have excluded from backups are the BACKUP drive, /Applications and System Files and Applications. The files not being updated are not applications or preferences. Also, my BACKUP drive says it has 1.2 TB available.

My understanding of how this works is that hourly & daily backups "expire" & are automatically removed after 24 hours & one month respectively, but weekly backups never expire -- they are kept, as the preference panel says, until your backup disk is full.
Thus, if your backup drive fills up, TM will try to create space by removing older, unexpired hourly or daily backups (& optionally warn you about this) to make room for new ones, but it will not remove older weekly backups to make room for new hourly or daily ones.
If you think about it, this makes sense: a weekly backup is most likely much larger (in terms of actual file space) & contains many more files than a daily or hourly one, so it would be undesirable to delete a lot of files to make room for relatively few others.
IOW, the drive will eventually fill up with weekly backups & at that point, it is full, period.
Related comments:
I believe there is no danger in using the Leopard Finder to 'delete a file' in the time-stamped folders it exposes. Because of the changes made in the file system to support TM, what happens is only the link in that folder is deleted. Links in any other folders remain unaffected. Only when you remove the last link to the actual file does the file system mark its space unused in the directory, effectively the same as a normal file delete.
This is why just deleting an instance of a TM backed up file won't gain you more than a few bytes of drive space -- only by deleting all instances is the file space of the actual file freed up.
For similar reasons, Disk Utility's 'erase free space' function should be safe to use on a Time Machine volume for security reasons. Just don't use any disk utilities on this or any other Leopard-formatted drive that aren't rated for use with Leopard -- they don't know about the changes in the file system & could really mess things up if (for instance) they try to rebuild the directory structure from scratch.

Time Machine doesn't manage the space on my external drive- no space left

I have a 500GB internal drive and have a 500Gb external firewire drive. I have around 200Gb of music and video files but had been happily letting TM get on with things. Today i started to get an error screen saying that the external drive was out of space and the backup had failed. Does TM not manage the backups and automatically delete the oldest to make space for the newest one?
I'm a little confused and the logic used in the help options seems to point to me either excluding items going forward (which seems counter productive) or buying a new external drive to fill up each month. Can someone please shed some light for me.

My understanding of how this works is that hourly & daily backups "expire" & are automatically removed after 24 hours & one month respectively, but weekly backups never expire -- they are kept, as the preference panel says, until your backup disk is full.
Thus, if your backup drive fills up, TM will try to create space by removing older, unexpired hourly or daily backups (& optionally warn you about this) to make room for new ones, but it will not remove older weekly backups to make room for new hourly or daily ones.
If you think about it, this makes sense: a weekly backup is most likely much larger (in terms of actual file space) & contains many more files than a daily or hourly one, so it would be undesirable to delete a lot of files to make room for relatively few others.
IOW, the drive will eventually fill up with weekly backups & at that point, it is full, period.
Related comments:
I believe there is no danger in using the Leopard Finder to 'delete a file' in the time-stamped folders it exposes. Because of the changes made in the file system to support TM, what happens is only the link in that folder is deleted. Links in any other folders remain unaffected. Only when you remove the last link to the actual file does the file system mark its space unused in the directory, effectively the same as a normal file delete.
This is why just deleting an instance of a TM backed up file won't gain you more than a few bytes of drive space -- only by deleting all instances is the file space of the actual file freed up.
For similar reasons, Disk Utility's 'erase free space' function should be safe to use on a Time Machine volume for security reasons. Just don't use any disk utilities on this or any other Leopard-formatted drive that aren't rated for use with Leopard -- they don't know about the changes in the file system & could really mess things up if (for instance) they try to rebuild the directory structure from scratch.

HT201250 Can I back up with time machine AND store additional files on the same external drive?

I just bought an external drive to move and archive some files off my iMac to free up some space. I'm being asked if I want to use the drive to back up files with Time Machine. Can I use this drive to do both? (Back up with TM AND store other files?
Your input is appreciated.

Technically you can but it is not a very good idea at all. The reason it is a flawed idea is if the HD fails (not really if but when) you will have defeated the whole idea of backup. A failure means you will lose the data files you stored on it and it's backup! A good backup plan has at least 2 forms of backup because backups can fail too. I would strongly recommend getting at least one additional external HD and use it for storing the data files you wanted off the internal HD and use the second for a Time Machine backup drive.
Personally I have 3 external HD's attached to my computer. Disk 1 is my Time Machine backup, Disk 2 is a Bootable Clone of my internal HD and Disk 3 stores my music, photography and movie libraries.
Please read these articles, they will discuss different backup strategies and I think you will see that each suggest redundant backups.
Backup Plan I
Backup Plan II
Backup Plan III

Time machine broke my Events an Projects on my external drive, help?

So, for reasons I'm not going to get into (or debate), I had to start using my scratch disk as a time machine backup today. When I set the computer to do the backup, it made it so that all of my events and projects on that disk no longer show up in FCPX. Anybody have any ideas?

Nothing you can do except either switch off Time Machine or move the Events and Projects to another disk.

Time machine is making two backup folders for my external drive

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