Time Machine Keeps Thinking That it's a New Backup

We're running Snow Leopard Server on a Mac Mini, and are using an external FW drive for Time Machine backups of the server and shared data only, no client backups. Time Machine has not worked since we setup the Mac Mini, but was working well on the previous server using Leopard Server. Here are the troubleshooting steps I've taken, as well as the latest log.
Erased and re-setup the Time Machine drive using another drive name. I've encountered issues where Time Machine doesn't like to use the same drive name after a migration.
Repaired permissions
Trashed Time Machine preferences
Made sure that all updates are applied
Made sure date and time are correct on the server
Made sure that the backup hard drive was not damaged or corrupted
The error:
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/Graphics Backup/Backups.backupdb
Starting pre-backup thinning: 235.12 GB requested (including padding). 164.53 GB available
No expired backups exist - deleting oldest backups to make room
Error: backup disk is full - all 0 possible backups were removed, but space is still needed
Backup failed
Every time it fails, I wipe the drive and the preferences hoping that something will fall in to place on the next backup attempt. This happens every time after we complete an initial new backup where Time Machine doesn't recognize that there is an existing backup for the server on the external drive and that it only needs to create an incremental. It's extremely frustrating. We're not using any type of software that is using any crazy sql databases that would be flexing while backing up. Shoot, we have it set to backup at 5AM when no one is in the office nor connected remotely (which we don't allow nor have setup anyway). We are merely using the server for a share point for our digital assets (overkill, but not my idea). Indexing of the initial backup occurs in a reasonable time. Super frustrated at this point.

Still having this issue. Now with TWO servers, two different clients. Nothing had changed prior to this error.

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I am trying to update my time machine backup on time capsule, but time machine keeps trying to create an entirely new backup (evidenced by the 200GB backup size). How can I get time machine to modify my old backup rather than create a new one?

I am trying to update my time machine backup on time capsule, but time machine keeps trying to create an entirely new backup (evidenced by the 200GB backup size). How can I get time machine to modify my old backup rather than create a new one?

It must have found the old backup corrupt.. so you will more than likely have little choice. You can archive off the old backup if it is still useful.
You can also verify it. See A5 http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
He also has some info on this problem. eg C13.

Time Machine says it needs to make a new backup.....

I have a Time Capsule. I did the initial backup via ethernet cable as instructed, then moved my iMac downstairs where it needs to be. The Time Capsule is upstairs functioning as my wireless network router and backup disk. I then connect the iMac via wireless to the Time Capsule backup disk upstairs and begin to do my subsequent backups wirelessly. All goes well for several weeks, then one day I get a message on my iMac that basically says that Time Machine has verified that it must do a new backup. Another full backup. OK, so I bring the iMac upstairs to do another backup via ethernet cable, then back downstairs to connect wirelessly. All goes well for another several weeks, then again it tells me I need to do another full backup.
What gives? What is the point of having a Time Capsule as a router and wireless backup disk if I have to keep connecting every few months to do an ethernet backup? It kind of defeats the whole purpose. I have another backup disk connected to the Time Capsule doing daily backups via SuperDuper and that goes on and on with never a problem. Why does the Time Capsule have so much trouble with wireless backups via Time Machine?
Am I doing something wrong?
Is this happening to anyone else? If this is the case, it was a real waste of money buying the Time Capsule. I should have bought an Airport Extreme and connected a hard drive.
Thanks for any ideas or comments you might have.
Len

See Pondini info about the issue.
C13 http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
And yes, we find that wireless is much less robust than ethernet.
There is too much automatic stuff in the wireless of the TC.
Lock it down.. I recommend a full reset.
Give it all new names.. short, no spaces and pure alphanumeric. That includes TC name, wireless name for 2.4ghz and different name for 5ghz.
Lock the wireless (called radio) channels. Especially for 2.4ghz .. try 11, 6, 1
Otherwise the TC can swap channels at any time.
Make sure you use WPA2 Personal security. Make sure you get good signal in your location.
Airport Extreme with disk is
1. Not authorised by Apple for use with TM.
2. Suffers the same problem.
See http://pondini.org/TM/Airport.html
TM is very exacting.. and very difficult.
SuperDuper will create a simple file structure that isn't dependent even on AFP.
As alternative to wireless you might find EOP adapters will work better for you.
Another alternative which I highly recommend for iMac, as a desktop is to simply plug in an external drive and use that.
It is cheaper, faster and more reliable than TC.. you can then do a backup from this drive to the TC occasionally by superduper as a further protection.

Trick Time Machine into thinking that an incomplete backup is complete?

Hi all! My iMac has a failed hard drive, so I went out to get an external hard drive to make a backup (better late then never, eh?). I went through the process and it started making its initial backup. Unfortunately, the computer completely froze (even the beachball stopped spinning) very close to the end of the process. Am I able to convince Time Machine that the backup was complete so that I can restore it, or should I just manually copy over files that I need once we get a new hard drive?
Thanks for the help!

Charles.Melbye wrote:
I opened up Terminal on the Mac OS X install disk, went through the folders on the backup hard drive and found my hard drive's entire file system, including our Music, Photos, my code, etc. I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to restore from this... Do you have any technical evidence to back your advice up?
then you might actually have a complete backup. when TM makes a backup it first creates a package with a .inprogress extension. do you see that? it basically creates the entire backup in that and only at the very end of the backup it writes it to the hard drive. there is no way TM will restore from an .inprogress package. but if it's already been written to the drive and there is no .inprogress package then it may be possible to restore. However, if it couldn't finish the backup it's very possible that some files or metadata didn't make it. there is really no way to be sure.
Message was edited by: V.K.

Time machine says it can't create a new backup folder.

Time machine fails to create a backup because it says it had an error creating a folder. When I go into finder and try to manually create a folder, I get a -50 error. I used disk utility to verify the time machine partition and it said it appeared to be fine. Any ideas?

See Pondini info about the issue.
C13 http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
And yes, we find that wireless is much less robust than ethernet.
There is too much automatic stuff in the wireless of the TC.
Lock it down.. I recommend a full reset.
Give it all new names.. short, no spaces and pure alphanumeric. That includes TC name, wireless name for 2.4ghz and different name for 5ghz.
Lock the wireless (called radio) channels. Especially for 2.4ghz .. try 11, 6, 1
Otherwise the TC can swap channels at any time.
Make sure you use WPA2 Personal security. Make sure you get good signal in your location.
Airport Extreme with disk is
1. Not authorised by Apple for use with TM.
2. Suffers the same problem.
See http://pondini.org/TM/Airport.html
TM is very exacting.. and very difficult.
SuperDuper will create a simple file structure that isn't dependent even on AFP.
As alternative to wireless you might find EOP adapters will work better for you.
Another alternative which I highly recommend for iMac, as a desktop is to simply plug in an external drive and use that.
It is cheaper, faster and more reliable than TC.. you can then do a backup from this drive to the TC occasionally by superduper as a further protection.

My time machine keeps saying the backup disk cannot be mounted. how do I fix it?

my time machine keeps saying that the backup disk cannot be mounted. we cannot figure out why this is happening. We have a 500GB time capsule /wireless router and using a Macbook . any ideas?

Try deleting your iPod Photo Cache folder. See:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1314

Qnap time machine keeps disappearing

I'm new to Macs since January and we got a new Window 7 PC at the same time, along with a qnap, because it could do Time Machine backups.
I've had the same problem as many people since I got the kit - i.e. Time Machine insisting I need to make a new backup, which I've always done, though it was annoyingly frequent. Anyhow, that's not the real issue.
For the third time since January, the whole Time Machine set-up has just disappeared from my Macbook Air. Only this time I can't get it back. It can't see it in my Finder, but I can find it under servers, in Recent Items. Last week I was able to connect to it by this means, though not reinstate backups. Now, when I try to connect is says it is unavailable. We've not changed anything and as I am the sole user of Mac in our household, the Mac is getting the blame!
Sadly the demarcation lines extend to the QNAP, which is NOT mine, and unless I can find the cause of the problem and provide the fix, I'm not going to get any support. I've googled the issue extensively and passed on the results to the QNAP owner, but we've not been able to fix it and I've had no backup for over a month.
Aside from asking for a Time Capsule for Christmas, and doing my own thing, does anyone have any suggestions, or similar experience, or even know of a good resource for QNAP problems?

The device is either misconfigured or is unsuitable for use with Time Machine. I suggest you stop using it and back up to a locally attached external hard drive. If you don't want to do that, stop using Time Machine and use some other backup software. I don't have a specific recommendation.

After upgrade to mavericks: time machine keeps asking for my back up disk and won't open unless i plug in the disk. any solutions?

after upgrade to mavericks: time machine keeps asking for my back up disk and won't open unless i plug in the disk. any solutions?
before the upgrade, i could open time machine without the need for having the back up disk plugged in.

Ok. I got it to work, sort of....
As I mentioned before I tried the "disk password" and the "Time capsule Password" options to see if I can start the back up again or start a new backup. Neither worked. So I tried the firmware down grade, but like you said that did not work. I then decided to try the "Account password" option and I have never used this option before becasue it states that if there is data on the drive it would not be acessable after creating an account. Since I wiped out the disk that was nno problem. When I created the new account and choose the drive it asked for the user name and password. I entered the info for the new account I just created(FYI this has nothing to do with your login username and password), bingo! It worked!
Now I have two partitions on the TC disk. The old one and now the new account. I am guessing this is to be used if I have multiple computers, which I don't.
I any case, I am going to wipe out everything again and try again to do a backup the way I had it before.

My Time Machine keeps backing up and won't stop.

My Time Machine keeps backing up and won't stop. The problem started when it said I was out if space. It is supposed to delete the oldest backup. Now I cannot even backup at all. It just keep going and never stops, although it really does not work at all. I have used the disk utilities and iI have Zeroed out. The TC is a 1 TB and is about 13 months old. Right now it says "79.9 MB of 104.9 MB" and "backing up 961,837 items". I do not have the check mark in "Notify after old backups are deleted." It will stay stuck like this for hours and hours. The TC is plugged into a U-verse router and the 27" MAC is plugged into the TC.

So you already wiped the old backup and started again??
If that is the case it did a fresh full backup ok?
How much free space is on the TC now?
Do you happen to have multiple network links? Meaning do you have TC bridged to the U-verse router.. with both ethernet and wireless working at the same time. I discovered this one all by my loansome.. having multiple paths does not seem to worry most things on the computer.. but it totally kills TM.
I had the same sort of thing happening in testing a TC I am fixing. So I have multiple ethernet and wireless. The incremental backups became extremely slow.. by turning off wireless and one ethernet so there is only one route to the TC.. it flys again.

I was unable to access migrate assistant to reinstall my hard drive. I didn't know if it would work but I used the time machine restore button that opens up in the space movie. The computer said it would download it to "Volumes". Now I can't find it.

I was unable to access migrate assistant to restore my hard drive. Out of desperation and ignorance I opened up Time Machines space page and selected my most recent backup and pushed restore. The system accepted it and said it would intall in in "volumes". I was unable to figure out what that meant but I went a head a tried it. The download took four hours and then puff it was gone and so was my data. I can't find the back up anywhere. The only thing I think it might be is that I had named the hard drive a different name than the original (don't ask me why). Have any ideas?

Choose Go to Folder from the Finder's Go menu and provide /Volumes/ as the path.
(71792)

Change which old backups Time Machine keeps

Any body know how to change what older backups Time Machine keeps? I know how to change how frequently Time Machine backs up (sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int XXXX),
but what I want is for it to not save so many recent backups and keep more of the old ones. Right now it saves hourly backups for the last 24 hours, daily for the last month, and weekly for each month until you run out of space. I don't need all the daily stuff, and would really like to keep more of the monthly. The older the info, the harder it is to recover by other means. What I'd like to do is keep older backups and lose more of the intermediate ones.
Any ideas?

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.
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. Post the messages timestamped from then until the end of the backup, or the end of the log if that's not clear.
Post the log text, please, not a screenshot. 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 a message.
Some personal information, such as the names of your files, may be included — edit that out, too, but don’t remove the context.

Time machine keeps losing backups

Time machine keeps losing backups on 10.8 machine.
I do Verify Backups or Enter Time Machine or Browse Other Time Machine Disks and all I can see is an older, concurrent machine.
While I can tell it to run a backup, and it will complete apparently successfully (and I'll be able to view it) the backups won't be there tomorrow. This makes Time Machine unusable at best.
What gives? Why are the backups vanishing?
WD MyBookLive
2010-mid MacBook Pro
This maching is also having trouble with scp, and other secure connections. But why would Time Machine report that it works, only to throw everything away?
Need help.
-Crissa

Triple-click anywhere in the line below to select it:
tmutil listbackups | awk -F/ '{print $NF}'
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C).
Launch the Terminal 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 Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window (command-V).
Post any lines of output that appear below what you entered — the text, please, not a screenshot.

Time Machine keeps giving me an error message when I try to back up to my Lacie drive.

Time Machine keeps giving me an error message when I try to back up to my Lacie drive. It won't back up and I can't find where to fix it.

I was having the same problem with my LaCie hard drives, both of them had errors like that and wouldn't eject properly. They would be fine after turning off and then remounting and so on, but then it would start again after a while. So I looked on LaCie's web site for any software updates and I found a usb firmware update from last October and applied it to both drives and now they're perfect. Sorry, I can't find it on their web site right now, but you might want to remember this if it persists and apply the update if you haven't.

TS1550 My time capsule will not back up. There is a time machine error message that states "The backup disk image "/volumes/Backup/Jane's MacBook Pro.sparsebundle" is already in use. How do I correct this problem?

My time machine will not back up. I get a Time Machine Error message that reads: "The backup disk image "/Volumes/Backup/(myname)'sMacBook Pro.sparsebundle" is already in use.
I have not been able to back up for two weeks, I think this occurred after an update to the operating system, but I am unsure.
How do I correct this problem?

Have you tried restarting the computer? Also, see Time Machine Error from this pages sidebar under More Like This.

Time Machine Keeps hanging

We had a power failure in our street for 24 hours over the weekend. So I assumed my Time Machine would have failed also.. no power etc... So I decided to look at the Time Machine widget I had to see where I was... and found out my back ups had been failing for weeks!!!! with the following message:
This was the first message after power restored..
Starting standard backup
Attempting to mount network destination using URL: afp://[email protected]/WD_Backup
NetAuthConnectToServerSync failed with error: 89 for url: afp://[email protected]/WD_Backup
Backup failed with error: 19
Attempting to mount network destination using URL: afp://[email protected]/WD_Backup
NetAuthConnectToServerSync failed with error: 89 for url: afp://[email protected]/WD_Backup
& this the subsequent messages..(& this message was the one that had been there for the previous 10 days - every day)
Starting standard backup
Attempting to mount network destination using URL: afp://[email protected]/WD_Backup
NetAuthConnectToServerSync failed with error: 89 for url: afp://[email protected]/WD_Backup
Backup failed with error: 19
So I disconnected & rebooted the external HD (WD MyBookWorld) and tried to reconnect through TM. However, although my WD MyBookWorld is there in Finder & has the other Macs on my LAN and their respective backups, when I go into TM and ask to chose a Backup destination it hangs and I have to force quit System preferences. I just can't get past the chosing of the WD as a back up... It is driving me MAD
HELP!

Ok hadn't changed password... Got onto WD support. We ended up restoring to factory settings. Interestingly the othe MAC on my LAN seems to have backed up fine - there are two sparse bundles on it.. one mine one the other machine. I have used Disk Utility to check out the Time Machine Backups and the Sparse bundle. Both had problems but now Disk Utility says they are fine. However, I keep getting this error from my Time Machine Widget....
Starting standard backup
Network destination already mounted at: /Volumes/WD_Backup
Warning: Destination /Volumes/WD_Backup does not support TM Lock Stealing
Warning: Destination /Volumes/WD_Backup does not support Server Reply Cache
Failed to attach to image: /Volumes/WD_Backup/Alex.sparsebundle, DIHLDiskImageAttach returned: 35
Disk image /Volumes/WD_Backup/Alex.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
No pre-backup thinning needed: 116.25 GB requested (including padding), 912.88 GB available
Indexing a file failed. Returned 200 for: /Users/alex/Documents/TomTom/HOME/Backup/GO/Backup01/InternalMemory/Western_and _Central_Europe/cspeech_FRA.dat, /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Alex/2011-06-20-174808.inProgress/7C790CB6-F696-4C20-B 782-890C64D7B1D2/Macintosh HD/Users/alex/Documents/TomTom/HOME/Backup/GO/Backup01/InternalMemory/Western_a nd_Central_Europe/cspeech_FRA.dat
Aborting backup because indexing a file failed.
Stopping backup.
Copied 102 files (101 bytes) from volume Macintosh HD.
Copy stage failed with error:11
Backup failed with error: 11
Ejected Time Machine disk image.
Ejected Time Machine network volume.
New error message... it's gone from 89 to an 11!

Time Machine Keeps Thinking That it's a New Backup

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