Time machine lost all but one backup
I ran apple software update yesterday. Today Time Machine says disk is too full to run backup and shows only one backup. I used the finder to look and sure enough, only one backup is there.
I don't think there's any need to "re-establish" your TM drive.
In a stupid interface move, even if you check "Warn when old backups are deleted" in TM options, it doesn't always do that - it usually tells you after the fact, when it's too late to get rid of some big files, or certain backup dates, etc; whether you get the warning or not has to do with the size of the last backup, the space left, and whether TM thinks it can squeeze in another backup, but it seems to make that decision based on the size of your last backup; if the current backup is unexpectedly large, it just erases old backups without telling you.
You may be backing up space-hogging items that you don't really need to back up: the Trash for instance; the legendary giants Entourage and PC-emulators on an IntelMac; the Downloads folder (which gets piled up with stuff that you don't need to keep, or you have copies elsewhere, or it's a movie you already watched...); maybe you don't need a System backup, but just your User folder/Documents assiduously copied...
There's lots of ways to trim what's being backed up so you can use a smallish drive to back up the most important things from your main drive.
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I bought a new mac and i migrate with time machine...but the backup was a little bit old and weren't save the latest modify i made in my website.. is it possible take the uploded site in iweb? sorry but i don't speak english very well
But what can I cut and paste? the html code or image and text directly?
depend on which template you used.
if you use iweb photos page template then you need to search for my photos page solutions in this forum.
@ot: cut and paste from the online version
@rw: You can drag an image from the website to the Desktop
have your try your methods in iweb photos page? -
Time Machine deletes all but latest two backups
Hello,
Today I was backing up my macbook, with about 38 GB of space left on my harddrive, and Time Machine deletes everything but the latest two backups (from Feb 2012 to May 2012).... I had things on there from 2009. TM preferences now says I have 27 GB of free space, after the latest backup. I didn't have anything big enough on my computer to be backed up that justified deleting years of data, over 200 GB, in order to compensate for the new data that had to be backed up. Is there any way to recover the files that were erased off of my external hard-drive that were deleted during Time Machine's semi-routine back up?
Thank youSebastian Kuhn wrote:
Is there no way to set up Time Machine such that it will ASK before destroying a (potentially valuable) "old" backup
That's how it worked at first, on Leopard. But many users either didn't understand it, or never got around to doing anything, so had no backups at all when disaster struck. It was fairly common, so Apple changed it with Snow Leopard.
Why does Apple assume that it is always the OLDEST backup (which will be hardest to retrieve) that people would be willing to loose?
That's usually correct. Time Machine is not a traditional archive-type app; if you need archives, make archives.
If you frequently need things from your backups, you may have a deeper problem. But most likely, you just need a larger backup drive.
That all applies to the vast majority of users -- they have a single internal HD with less than 1 TB of data, so a 2 TB backup drive is ok, 3 TB large enough for most everybody.
If that's not enough for your setup, you probably need a different strategy anyway. You may have some data that changes frequently and should be backed-up hourly by Time Machine, plus something like a large media drive that's best backed-up only once a day or so by a different app, such as one of the "cloning" products.
there should be the option to exclude different items when backing up to different disks. Is there?
No. Apparently Apple wants to keep it as simple as possible, with few options that may confuse some folks, so instead of making a decision, they do nothing (that's not just Time Machine, either). Remember, most of the folks using Time Machine have never used any backup app at all.
Apple's resisted all suggestions (and there have been many) for things like the ability to limit the size or age of backups, reduce the 10-day warning when no backup has been done, etc. Like it or not, that's Apple's approach to pretty much everything -- streamlined, simple, easy to use. Very successful for the majority.
Is there any workaround other than the cumbersome procedure of turning Time Machine off, and under "options" re-select the correct set of folders to exclude every time I move from one disk to another? Not exactly what I would call a user-friendly interface...
Best of course, is get a larger disk. Is your data worth the price of a 2 TB disk?
There are some elaborate workarounds involving automatically swapping destinations and exclusions, but they're very "iffy" as they do things that TM (and OSX) don't anticipate so don't react well to.
Effective with Lion, however, there's a new tmutil command that in theory would allow you to write an AppleScript to set a destination, add or remove exclusions and run a backup. Many things could go wrong, of course, but I know of no way to detect which destination is available.
Much safer, easier, and more reliable to get a larger drive (or better strategy). -
Time Machine lost all old backups
I have an iMac 24" with a 750GB drive that only has about 200GB full. I have been using Time Machine to do backups onto a 400GB hard drive, and it has been working fine for a few weeks. Last week I copied 250GB of material onto my Mac's HD (as a backup of an external drive), but set that folder NOT to be backed up in TM (this worked fine). Then yesterday I renamed that folder... and Time Machine tried to include it in the next backup... and that backup failed, of course, since there is now more that 400GB of material to backup. Ooops... I have put that renamed folder onto the exclude list.
BUT, in the process of failing to backup, Time Machine appears to have deleted all of the previous backups from the 400GB Time Machine drive. The weeks of backups are gone. THAT was very disappointing. I thought Time Machine wasn't supposed to delete old backups without warning me (I have that option checked). Why did it do that??
(Happily, I have also been making backups manually onto other drives, and my main drive is still happy, so no files were lost... but I want to understand what happened before I trust my backups to Time Machine. I realize that I accidentally asked Time Machine to do an impossible thing by suddenly dropping that extra 250GB folder into its world, but why did it fail so ungracefully and delete all my old backups? This could be very bad if it happed to someone who was counting on Time Machine.)This is TRULY a serious software design bug IMO and should be reported to Apple via their Feedback procedure. I also have seen this bug and I've reported it to Apple. You should also to add more weight to the bug report and to hopefully have Apple resolve this soon for all of us.
TM does fail to alert the user with a request that to free up backup space some older backups will need removing. Not only this but it silently removes the oldest backups trying to free up space only to find there's still insufficient space. This is clearly a very serious problem as you've discovered. -
Time Machine lost all backups after Lion upgrade
After Lion upgrade TM asked me to perform a 13 hours backup; I've agreed but now the oldest backup is 3 days ago. What is happened?
Please can somebody help me?
ThanksI can't help here, but before I upgraded my old G5 (OS 10.5.8) TM popped up a message saying that old files had just been deleted. That was what TM does when its HD is getting full. But this was strange because I knew that I had lots of TM space, and since the last use of the conputer (about 2 hours before) I certainly had not saved to the internal HD several GB of files. To my astonishment, all but the last 4 weeks of files had been deleted, back to Jan 2010! GetInfo said that the space left was about the same as before the incident, whereas it should have shown a huge amount of free space.
I deleted all the remaining backup files and started again. It shook my confidence in TM's ability ot provide a reliable backup system. Now I regard it as a useful source of recovering old versions of files (eg., text, images etc.), rather than as a means to restore the system hard drive. Fortunately, I have been using Carbon Copy Cloner for years to make bootable backups of the whole system HD which can then be used, by simply cloning back to the system HD, to get back to work using the state of the HD when I last cloned. Alternately, the clone on the backup disc can be simply examined in the Finder to recover individual files. -
Time machine says "success," but no backups
I noticed today that none of the backups on my Time Machine disk have any data in them. Just a bunch of empty "Macintosh HD" folders going back several months. Yikes!
I've been through a tech support session plus a few hours of troubleshooting on my own. Their suggestion is to reinstall the OS and restore my data from a backup... which is kind of impossible* since I can't get Time Machine to back up. Here's what I know:
1) A new backup drive doesn't help
2) My hard drive is not excluded
3) I have plenty of space on my backup drive (2TB for a 500GB machine).
4) It's a system-wide problem that shows up in both Safe Mode and with a new user account.
Time Machine basically looks at my drive and says, "Nope, nothing new to back up here. Move along now, move along..."
Here's the log from console. It starts immediately after launching Time Machine using a blank backup drive.
4/15/14 4:36:12.660 PM UserEventAgent[838]: com.apple.TMHelperAgent.SetupOffer enabled
4/15/14 4:36:12.672 PM UserEventAgent[838]: com.apple.TMHelperAgent.SetupOffer disabled
4/15/14 4:36:12.726 PM UserEventAgent[11]: com.apple.backupd-auto launchd job enabled
4/15/14 4:36:13.153 PM WindowServer[798]: _CGXGetWindowOrderingGroup: Operation on a window 0x6f requiring rights 0x5 by caller System Preferences
4/15/14 4:36:17.983 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Starting manual backup
4/15/14 4:36:18.001 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Backing up to /dev/disk1s2: /Volumes/TIME MACHINE/Backups.backupdb
4/15/14 4:36:18.003 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Ownership is disabled on the backup destination volume. Enabling.
4/15/14 4:36:18.557 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Forcing deep traversal on source: "Macintosh HD" (device: /dev/disk0s2 mount: '/' fsUUID: 64CC60C4-5A82-3554-9FA2-EFBC82CBCDD6 eventDBUUID: A4A02834-E179-4900-BA13-17F10A47AA31)
4/15/14 4:36:19.338 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Total content size: 433.87 GB excluded items size: 2.2 MB for volume Macintosh HD
4/15/14 4:36:19.338 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Found 1793930 files (433.87 GB) needing backup
4/15/14 4:36:19.339 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: 455.35 GB required (including padding), 2 TB available
4/15/14 4:36:19.361 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
4/15/14 4:36:21.473 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Copied 1 items (Zero KB) from volume Macintosh HD. Linked 0.
4/15/14 4:36:22.042 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Created new backup: 2014-04-15-163622
4/15/14 4:36:22.000 PM kernel[0]: hfs: mounted Recovery HD on device disk0s3
4/15/14 4:36:22.410 PM mds[36]: (Normal) Volume: volume:0x7fe7a3210800 ********** Bootstrapped Creating a default store:0 SpotLoc:(null) SpotVerLoc:(null) occlude:0 /Volumes/Recovery HD
4/15/14 4:36:22.514 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Copying OS X Recovery set
4/15/14 4:36:22.525 PM fseventsd[47]: Logging disabled completely for device:1: /Volumes/Recovery HD
4/15/14 4:36:41.000 PM kernel[0]: hfs: unmount initiated on Recovery HD on device disk0s3
4/15/14 4:36:42.464 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Starting post-backup thinning
4/15/14 4:36:42.468 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: No post-backup thinning needed: no expired backups exist
4/15/14 4:36:42.495 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Backup completed successfully.
And here are the logs for a subsequent backup:
4/15/14 4:39:07.451 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Starting manual backup
4/15/14 4:39:07.457 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Backing up to /dev/disk1s2: /Volumes/TIME MACHINE/Backups.backupdb
4/15/14 4:39:08.061 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Will copy (Zero KB) from Macintosh HD
4/15/14 4:39:08.062 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Found 0 files (Zero KB) needing backup
4/15/14 4:39:08.063 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: 104.9 MB required (including padding), 2 TB available
4/15/14 4:39:08.100 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Copied 1 items (Zero KB) from volume Macintosh HD. Linked 0.
4/15/14 4:39:09.054 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Created new backup: 2014-04-15-163908
4/15/14 4:39:09.205 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Starting post-backup thinning
4/15/14 4:39:09.205 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: No post-backup thinning needed: no expired backups exist
4/15/14 4:39:09.210 PM com.apple.backupd[1017]: Backup completed successfully.
*Remember when I said I didn't have a backup? That's kind of a lie, since my Mac gets backed up to the server. But it's only the data files. I would really, really like to not have to reinstall all my applications and settings.
Does anyone have a suggestion about how to fix, or where to start looking? There must be a corrupt setting somewhere than can be fixed. If it comes down to it, yes, I can reinstall, but I kind of feel like giving this a shot.
Any thoughts? I have an iMac 3.06GHz i3 w/ 16GB RAM running 10.9.2.Fixed! I deleted the hidden file, /.Spotlight-V100, then rebooted my Mac. After that, Time Machine backups started working.
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Adobe Updater has lost all but one registered products
I have a range of Adobe products registered. I recently installed Dreamweaver CS6. This has overwritten this list on the Updater, so eg Photoshop and Illustrator do not now appear on it, and they receive no updates. Equally, the Dreamweaver install does not appear on my on-line list of registered products here at Adobe. Can soemone please tell me how to reset this?
Contact Adobe Support either by chat or via phone and see if they can provide guidance or adjust your account data.
Here is a link to a page with options to help make contact:
http://www.adobe.com/support/download-install/supportinfo/ -
Time Machine Combines all Backups?
Hey,
Why did my time machine combine all my old backups? I can no longer go past my last backup. It's like it merged them all into the most recent. This is the second time it has done this. Does anyone know why or how to stop it from doing it?
I already checked out this page http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306928
and I have an apostrophe in my name but it hasn't ever been a problem. It's like when I reach a certain number of backups it consolidates them into one and starts over?
Message was edited by: amsgatorThis is normal time machine behavior. After 24 hours, the backups collapse into 1 day. After 37 days or so, the first seven days collapse into 1 week. At some point you will have the last 24 hours, the last 30 days and weekly backups going back in time until your disk is full. If you think about it, it is very unlikely you will need a file from a certain hour 1 week or 30 days ago. It makes sense to collapse the backups into snapshots as time goes on. The more recent backups are more important. I hope I understood your question...
Message was edited by: Myron Jones -
Time Machine - lost incremental backup
The preferences panel for Time machine says it keeps
* hourly backups for the past 24 hours,
* daily backups for the past month,
* weekly backups until your disk is full.
I notice that the reduction of hourly backups to one backup for a day appears to keep the earliest (incremental) backup for that day and deletes the rest.
To test this, I created a small file on the desktop on 13th Oct 2008 at 18:30, let time machine back it up at 18:45 and I then moved the file from the desktop to the trash at 19:00.
I checked that the file existed in the time machine backup for 18:45.
As I suspected, Time machine has only kept one backup for 13 Oct timed 12:01 am. The file is not in the backup for the 13th or 14th Oct (it is now 15th Oct). The original file is still in my trash.
If this had been an important file that I had deleted accidentally, I would not be very happy.
For the record I am using a MacBook running OS 10.5.5 using a 500Gb Seagate FreeAgent drive connected via firewire.
Shouldn't Time Machine consolidate all the incremental backups for one day into the one backup that it keeps (and eventually consolidate the daily backups into the weekly one that it keeps) so that files are not 'lost' in this way?
Arthur L.Welcome to Discussions.
[This|http://weblog.infoworld.com/enterprisemac/archives/2007/12/howleopardtim.html] explains it well:
"As Apple presents the Time Machine filesystem view, you can see your system approximately:
As it was at the top of each hour today
As it was each day for the past 30 days, starting yesterday
As it was each week, starting 31 days ago, going back as far as disk space permits
A distraught user might only be interested in the amount of data he may have lost:
If you accidentally deleted a file today, you lose up to an hour's work
If you deleted it between yesterday and 30 days ago, you lose up to a day's work
If you deleted it more than 30 days ago, you can lose up to one week's work, or all of it."
Hopefully the file you've lost took longer than an hour to create than the example you tried.
/p -
Time Machine : Deleting all local backups of one of several computers leaves files behind
Hi,
I'm in the process of transitioning my Time Machine setup. For the moment, I have a local Time Machine volume backing up three Macs to the same Backups.bakupdb folder (I had set that up two years ago before reading Pondini's Time Machine FAQ).
Basically what I want to achieve is have a partition per computer that I'm backing up. So what I did was I partitioned a second external drive into 3 partitions, and I copied my TM partition to each of these 3 temporary partitions. I did that using Disk Utility's Restore tab. My plan was then to delete the backups of two computers off each temporary partition (per question 12 of Pondini's FAQ), to get 1 computer per partition on the temporary drive, then partition my main external drive in 3 and copy back each temporary partition to the main drive.
(The second external drive is lent, I can't just switch to using it.)
From what I read on question 12 of Pondini's FAQ and this reply by Pondini to a similar thread, I thought that deleting all backups of one computer via the Time Machine interface would leave me with an empty folder for that computer under Backups.backupdb, and that I could just delete this folder via the Finder. This is * not * what happened.
After all backups for the first computer I wanted to delete off the first temporary partition are deleted, the folder for this Mac is not empty ; it still contains all the 15 dates folder of the individual backups. What's more, these date folders aren't empty either. The first 12 of them I deleted (the most recent ones) each contains a Macintosh HD folder, under which remains a System/Library/CoreServices hierarchy. The (locked) boot.efi file is alone in the CoreServices folder. The last 3 dates I deleted (the oldest backups), however, still contain an even bigger hierarchy. Applications, Library, System and Users exists in all three, with a lot of subfolders and lots of files, totalizing around 2 GB of data. Most of the files are locked, even logged into root (very diverse files : plists, dylibs, rtf files, fonts, etc) but some are not (apps, and other diverse files : colorsync profiles, dashboard widgets, bundles...). Seems like Time Machine could not delete everything. (Why ?)
Note that I deleted the backups for one computer using that same computer, first using an Admin account for the first 3 or 4 dates and then using the root account to avoid having to always authenticate. (I didn't think it would create a problem... maybe it has?)
When I go back into Time Machine for this computer, no backups remains. It's like if Time Machine doesn't see the data that it could't delete... This is all very strange.
My question is : can I delete these leftover files and folders bia the Finder without fear it's going to break the backups for the other computers on the same partition ? If not, what should I do ?
Sorry for the long post, but I hope I was clear...Phil_6379 wrote:
After all backups for the first computer I wanted to delete off the first temporary partition are deleted, the folder for this Mac is not empty ; it still contains all the 15 dates folder of the individual backups.
It shouldn't; when you delete a backup, the date-stamped backup folder and all it's contents should be deleted.
Most likely, there was some sort of corruption, either on the original or the copies, that left some pieces. On occasion, that will happen even when Time Machine is doing it's normal "thinning:" there will be a message in the log about finding a "partially-deleted" backup, and trying again. Sometimes the second try will do it, sometimes not. In that case, you might be able to delete it after running Repair Disk; if not, sometimes you can delete it via the Finder.
Under Lion only, deleting backups via the Finder is supported by Apple; you'll get a message about how it can't be undone. But it doesn't always work, so is recommended only as a last resort. Holding the Option key while deleting may help with the locked files.
If you can't get rid of the detritus, however, I'd recommend erasing the affected partition(s) and starting over. I'd not continue backing-up to a set of suspect backups -- the way they're all linked together, there's just no telling whether you could do a full system restore successfully.
In addition, as Linc says, even if you have some things off-site, I'd strongly recommend getting another external HD for "secondary" onsite backups. Externals are getting much less expensive all the time, and if there's a problem with the old one (either the drive itself or the backups on it), you'll be in a large pickle. Plus, of course, drives don't last forever. See #27 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions for some suggestions. -
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 will not let me restore from backups after June, 2013. I can see the files on the external hard drive but Time Machine skips all of them and goes back to June, 2013. Does anyone have any idea what the problem is?
rtilghman wrote:
telling me to buy a new router is NOT a solution.
And why not? Apple is selling these things like BigMacs. They can't make enough of them. You've been suffering since May because you refuse to get a decent router.
Can you imagine if a company that makes a refrigerator told me that I needed to upgrade my electrical system to rectify a problem with their device? What kind of response IS that?!?!
What if the problem with their device is that it requires a new-fangled "grounded" outlet and your circa 1890 house doesn't have grounded outlets. Would you refuse to purchase a $ 25 adapter on principle? -
How can I force Time Machine to make a complete backup of my Hard Drive. I just installed a new external drive for Backup since my previous one failed. Now when I back up, Time Machine only backs up my data folder and the Users folder.
When I start a backup. Time Machine says "Oldest Backup: None; Latest Backup: None", so it seems like it should do a complete backup, but it only does a partial.Hi I'd like to jump in here. Your app showed me this:
Time Machine:
Skip System Files: NO
Mobile backups: OFF
Auto backup: YES
Volumes being backed up:
Macintosh HD: Disk size: 749.3 GB Disk used: 453.81 GB
Destinations:
Plastic Wrapper [Local] (Last used)
Total size: 999.86 GB
Total number of backups: 64
Oldest backup: 2013-07-24 23:25:11 +0000
Last backup: 2013-11-17 01:40:47 +0000
Size of backup disk: Too small
Backup size 999.86 GB < (Disk used 453.81 GB X 3)
Time Machine details may not be accurate.
All volumes being backed up may not be listed.
/sbin excluded from backup!
/usr excluded from backup!
/System excluded from backup!
/bin excluded from backup!
/private excluded from backup!
/Library excluded from backup!
/Applications excluded from backup!
Aside from the size of my backup drive, which I will increase at some point, I'd really like to have time machine backing up all system folders, especially Applications. How to I reset this hidden exclusions?
Thanks,
Darcy -
If my backup HD is not large enough, can Time Machine use more than one destination HD?
Hi, I have about 0,8 Tb on my Mac + 0,9 Tb in an external HD + 2,5 Tb in another external HD.
I have plenty of other HDs with 1-2 Tb that I could use as backup. Can I use them in Time Machine? Can Time Machine split all the data from my Mac and source HDs in more than one destination HD? I would love it if I could avoid buying large 6-10Tb HDs; they are still expensive... I'll appreciate your kind inputs!Technically, you could store parts of your backup on different drives, but it would require you to be constantly changing the items excluded. It is designed to be a single backup, which you can do the entire backup to more than one drive.
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If time machine puts all of my photos onto my external hard drive using time machine, can I then delete the photos from my computer but view them again from the external hard drive? Basically, can I free up space on my mac but not lose years of photos?
To add to Niel's comment bear in mind that if you have a backup copy on an external HD and later delete the orignals on your Mac HD you will then only have one copy - so no backup.
If the pictures are precious you should have at least two copies, and ideally another copy kept off site,
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