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.

Similar Messages

  • Time Machine deleted my old backups and crapped out midstream

    I had just gotten my failing hard drive replaced, and restored from Time Machine backup. So far so good.
    So a week later, I wanted to upgrade to Mountain Lion, but figured I should be responsible and run Time Machine backup again before doing the upgrade just in case something goes wrong.
    The Mac has a 4TB drive, which has 2TB free. The backup drive is a 4TB external drive, which has (or had) Time Machine backups going back two years or so. It still had over a TB of space left. I clicked on Backup Now and let it run overnight. I noticed it said "Deleting old backup to make room" or something like that, which I thought was normal.
    I woke up in the morning to find that Time Machine had crapped out in the middle, and said that it couldn't complete. I realized that it had deleted all my old backups. It didn't need to do that, since the only files that had changed would have been less than a GB, and it had over a TB of space to work with.
    It must have thought that everything on the drive had changed since the last backup, and it wanted to backup the entire drive. As such it tried deleting all my old backups! But it failed, and stopped in the middle.
    Now I have a drive that still says there is only 1.2 TB of space on the drive, but I can't see the files! Even with Tinkertool, I can't see anything beyond the one most recent backup.
    Can these files be recovered? I am totally ticked that there isn't some kind of confirmation like "Are you sure you want to delete X?"
    I actually need to have some of these older backups, as they include files that had been deleted before the latest backup that I may need to retrieve. Any hard drive experts out there? Any terminal commands that can make these files accessible, even if I have to retrieve them manually?

    To clarify, this all happened under Snow Leopard as I had said. My profile lists Tiger, since I haven't cared to update my personal profile since using that OS, and in fact I still use Tiger among other versions. I manage a lot of users. And I never got to upgrade to Mountain Lion on this system, as explained in the post above. So I don't see the confusion.
    I don't think the model of Mac makes a difference for this type of problem, but in case it does, the incident was on a 2010 Intel iMac with a 4TB hard drive and 8GB of RAM. I would have mentioned that if this was a problem with hardware specific to the model of Mac. But this is more of a universal issue.
    But to stay on topic, I'm guessing my old backups are toast. But if anybody has any experience with recovering from Time Machine deleting their old backups, I would be happy to hear from them. In the meantime, I am going to try to do some old fashioned file recovery, and see what I can salvage.

  • Time Machine is Deleting Old backups

    Disconnected my MacBook Pro from its hard drives for two days. Re-connected, and ran Time Machine. It backuped up as normal. I walked away, seeing "49.8GB free of 499GB" on that external hard drive. I come back and Time Machine is "Deleting Old Backups ... " - and now 135GB free, and still deleting.
    I realize that TM auto-deletes ... but does this sound "normal" to start its own deletions when there was 49GB remaining on a 500GB drive?
    It's still deleting ...
    Clint Bradford

    If I said I connnected two disks, I apologize. One 500GB external hard drive is dedicated to just being a Time Machine backup for my 17" MacBook Pro.
    Not sure what has happened ... but Time Machine cleared up space, and is now performing a 110GB backup ... kinda like it doesn't know it's the same computer attached to it.
    This is NOT a critical problem ... I have full backup elsewhere. Just a little weirdness today ...
    Clint Bradford

  • HT3275 My Time Machine deletes ALL previous backups

    Every so often, Time Machine deletes ALL previous backups and starts over from scratch. It has done this several times in the last year.  I have not changed any hardware or the name of the computer. Why is this happening?  Makes me very concerned that I now have NO backups while it chugs away rebuilding a 210 GB backup. 
    Just got an error message:
    Time Machine couldn’t complete the backup. Time machine could not delete the backup disk image "/Volumes/Joe's iMac.purgeable"
    HELP!
    iMac 27: 8GB, 2.9 GHz Intel Core I5
    OS X Yosemite 10.10.1
    Backup volume is Western Digital MyBookLiveDuo with 2TB and 1.8TB available

    Hi Joe,
    Have you Repaired both drives first, then Repaired Permissions on both?
    Have you looked through Pondini's extensive TM help site?
    http://Pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
    http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
    Can't imagine something not being covered there.

  • Time Machine Deleted ALL the backups!

    Today, TM was cleaning up the old backups as it does every so often, however it inadvertently deleted ALL of the backups.
    1) Can I recover my backups?
    2) If so, how can I recover said backups?
    3) How can I prevent this from happening again?
    Thanks.
    What a bummer....

    TheChemist wrote:
    May 30 15:12:50 francoisimac com.apple.backupd[500]: Starting pre-backup thinning: 423.93 GB requested (including padding), 123.83 GB available
    The "padding" is workspace, etc., that TM needs on the backup drive. It's about 20%, so Time Machine estimates it needs to back up about 350 GB. That's the symptom: there isn't enough room for that.
    The one question I would love answered is what would trigger a pre-backup thinning?
    Not enough room for the new backup. In that case, Time Machine first deletes "expired" backups, then your oldest ones.
    Unfortunately, there's no way to tell what that 350 GB was. After a backup finishes successfully, you can see what was backed-up, but not before.
    So, you need to start with #D4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum). Something you're running is apparently causing a very large, but not full, backup (a full one would need about the 500 GB that's on your internal HD, plus another 100 GB temporarily).
    If you still can't figure it out, erase the drive and do a full backup. Then immediately do another. If it's quite large, see #A2 in Troubleshooting to download +Time Tracker+ or BackupLoupe to see what's causing the huge backups.
    If it's small, turn Time Machine off. Periodically, run a backup manually. (Select +Back Up Now+ from the TM icon in your menubar, or by right-clicking the TM icon in your Dock). Sooner or later, you should see a very large one, and hopefully it will complete so you can see what caused it, via +Time Tracker+ or BackupLoupe.

  • I was trying to back up my mac by using my external hard drive.  Without realizing it, time machine erased all my backups from my other computers.  Is there any way to recover these files?  I can't even get the external hard  drive to work on my pc.

    I was trying to use my external hard drive to back up my mac computer.  It had files on it from my pc computer.  Time machine erased all my existing files. (I thought it was only going to erase the duplicate files and rewrite them).  Is there anyway to recover these files from my external hard drive.  My mac has renamed the hard drive time maching and it will no longer show up on my pc.  What can I do?

    Yes, the Old Master file has a folder for each year where I find all photos from that specific year. I am attaching a screen shot of the file.
    In the meantime i have managed to download all photos (it did not download any video files though in mpg, avi, 3gp, m4v,mp4 and mov format) to a new iphoto library. Unfortunately the photos are quite mixed and often doubled up. I ma considering to purchase iphoto library which checks all duplicates in iphoto. this will save me a lot of time. What do you think?

  • 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.

  • OMG... Time machine deleted ALL the backups, even latest..

    Hey All...
    I have just experienced a nightmare.  If anyone can help I would be in your debt.
    Here we go...
    I was trying to move the backup of old computer ( partition A ) to a new partition ( B ) on same ext. hard drive.   Not enough space in partition b so I looked into deleting some old backups before copying A to B using restore in disc utility.
    Inside time machine I was using the cog thing to select delete backup... selected the oldest backup, thinking this would delete only the oldest backup. 
    It deleted ALL the backups on A, including the latest. 
    This had work files on it that are important so it's a bit of a disaster.  I have had a great backup stradegy for the last 15 years and have NEVER before lost anything.  Here is my details...
    Macbook Pro 2.2 GHz
    10.7.5
    External drive 4 partitions
    Partition A was backed up using 10.6
    From a G5 which I deleted the files from.
    I am hoping the files could be recovred from either the G5 or the hard drive or my trash on the macbook pro?
    I have and will not do too much on my computer like disc utility stuff or empty trash etc.
    It's a long shot, but anyone have any ideas..? 
    Thanks in advance..

    The...........Haggis wrote:
    Thanks for your prompt reply Pondini,
    I could have selected all in error but I am sure I didn't.  I guess I must have.. grrr.
    I cannot see any when I enter time machine.
    Ok.  It's just that I've never heard of it erasing more than what was selected.     
    It's possible something went wrong, and at least some of the other backups are still there. Especially if no other changes have been made to the TM drive, you might try running Repair Disk on it with Disk Utility.  Unlikely to help, but it's worth a try.
    The G5. I erased the drive using disk utility and haven't used it since.  There is 2 drives on that machine, the drive we are talking about is not bootable it's just storage.
    Since you already have it, you might want to try running the File Salvage app on it (you'll probably need another HD, or at least partition, to receive whatever it finds).   The results might be more usable than the results from the TM drive, since they're "ordinary" files and folders, not all the "hard links" Time Machine uses.
    EDIT: 
    I had the ext drive hanging off my Mac Book pro 10.7.  Ext drive had TM backups of 2 laptops and G5.
    Hold on a minute -- how were all those backups made -- by connecting the drive directly to each Mac, or were any made over a network (wired or wireless)?  Are they / were they all in the same partition, or separate ones?
    Message was edited by: Pondini

  • Why did time machine delete all my backups ??

    In time machine, I wanted to delete an old Lion backup to make more space for my new Mountain Lion. So within the "Star Wars" interface, I selected a few old backup directories (with the date on them), from year 2012. I had several backups from year 2013 I still wanted to keep... So i used the action button (the icon with the wheel) and asked to delete the selected directories of year 2013... But after waiting about 15 minutes to complete, all the backup including from year 2013 are GONE ! And the automatic backup from the new Mountain Lion started.
    How come ?

    Natael wrote:
    @Pondini : yep, everything. 4 weeks ago was the most recent backup of all the Lion's ones.
    Maybe.  How did you do the upgrade?  If you erased and installed, that could explain what seems to have happened, depending on how you put your stuff back.  If so, there may be a fix, and you may not have lost the backups.
    If you don't put things back in just the way Time Machine expects, it treats the drive as a different one, so does a full backup.  And you've got messages for a full backup.
    We have seen a few reports that TM occasionally does that even on a normal upgrade "in place" but I'm not sure how accurate they are.
    See if the procedure in #E3 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting will display the old backups.
    Now i'm reluctant to remove some old backups of my other macbook Snow Leopard's time machine... they are saved on the same HDD that i'm using for the ML.
    In the same partition? 
    The widget doesn't "recall" removing anything. It seems to mention the error because of the lack of space, and/or a mounting problem.
    No, no space problem.  If it deleted backups, each one would be documented, although that might have been done on an earlier backup.
    Could not back up OS X Recovery to /Volumes/MACDATA/Backups.backupdb: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=-69737 "Unable to mount recovery partition" UserInfo=0x7fd01438a350 {NSLocalizedDescription=Unable to mount recovery partition}
    That's Time Machine trying to copy the Recovery HD to the Time Machine drive.  Either there isn't one, or it may be damaged.
    Error: Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-50 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (OSStatus error -50.)" (paramErr: error in user parameter list) deleting backup: /Volumes/MACDATA/Backups.backupdb/Macintosh/2013-06-06-114031.inProgress/BD2B91 A4-6790-42E6-AEBE-E631D990D253
    That's a bogus message; trying to delete something it couldn't find from the work file.
    Message was edited by: Pondini

  • 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.

  • Time Machine deleted all my backups after upgrading to Yosemite!!!! Help!!!!

    Hi all! I'm in deep, deep trouble!! I was on Lion, and had all my backups on an external hard drive done by the Time Machine.
    So after I did a clean install to upgrading to Yosemite. So I was left with my Imac with nothing on it, Yosemite, and the applications that I've been installing manually.
    However, Time Machine starting backing again my Imac with Yosemite, and decided to delete ALL BACKUPS of when I was with Lion!!!
    Now I'm only have my new Backups(3 days old), and ALL MY WORK IS GONE!! (About 1TB of precised organised info!!!)
    I tried a software called Data Recovery and whilst is recovering only a 50% of all deleted data after a scanning, now its retrieving that info with new names i.e. 0001,0002,0003 and organising depending on name of extension i.e: PDF,JPEG...therefore becoming totally useless as it will take literally YEARS to put it back the way it was.
    Please HELP, I don't know what to do!!!
    My profesional life is depending on it!!
    iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10)

    Hi there The Zach,
    I would recommend taking a look at the troubleshooting steps for Time Machine backup issues found in the article below. 
    Time Machine: Troubleshooting backup issues
    -Griff W.

  • Time machine deleted all my backups instead of the one selected

    I have a one year old Macbook Pro with 16 GB of RAM, running OSX v10.9.5 (Mavericks).  I use a LaCie 2TB external hard drive for my time machine backups, and I needed to delete some of the old TM backups to make space.
    Following the instructions at pontini.org (http://pondini.org/TM/12.html ), I opened TM, navigated to the external HD and selected the oldest folder in backups.backupdb, right clicked it and selected 'Delete all backups in [the oldest folder's name]'.  Then I went home for the weekend, and when I got in this morning, Voila!  ALL files in the backups.backupdb folder were gone!  Not only that, but there was nothing in the trash to restore!
    Has anyone else had this wonderful experience?
    Thanks,
    Casey

    Wow -- thanks for all the comments, folks, I must have struck a nerve!  I'll try to respond to all of them here, in sequence:
    John Galt: I loved your comment about "no user serviceable parts inside"!  It was echoed by etresoft, too, later in the chain; sounds like good advice if this ever happens again.  You mentioned that Yosemite incorporated a lot of changes to TM, but I'm not using Yosemite (have been avoiding this upgrade, as it sounds too buggy).  But apparently your advice holds with Mavericks, too. 
    Etresoft (3:17am): very good point -- I think that's exactly what I did.  What I'm still not clear on is: are the backup files themselves (ie the actual data being backed up, as opposed to hard links) stored in the backup folder that TM creates, or are they kept in a separate file or folder?  It sounds like it's the former, as I had originally thought.  But pondini led me to believe that, if the data WAS stored in the folder, it would not be deleted if there were any links to it in future backup folders.  From what you said, I'm thinking that's probably true IF you are dealing with a backup that's INSIDE TM, but not if its a folder OUTSIDE TM.  Is that right?  If so, this really is a pit that's ripe for idiots like me to fall into.
    Lex Schellings (3:52am): I don't think I understand your comment -- you said "All these instructions are to delete a specific file... You should never deleted a dated FOLDER".  But instruction #2 says "One or more individual backups -- it's best to use Time Machine, per the green box below" --  then, in the green box, it says " Locate the backup or item you want to delete via the Timeline or "cascade" of Finder windows".  Since I was trying to delete a "backup", what was I supposed to select, if not a folder?
    Etresoft (4:15am): that's an interesting thought, but I don't think I used the sidebar to navigate to the backup I deleted.  When I opened TM, it showed me a sequence of Finder windows with the Star Wars background, but the external hard drive in the Finder window was grayed out and inaccessible.  So I checked pondini again, and it said I could get to it by right-clicking on the TM icon in the task bar (after exiting TM), selecting 'Browse other TM Disks', and selecting the one I wanted.  After I did that, I could see the external hard drive in TM was not gray anymore, and I navigated to the first backup folder.  Apparently, that's what took me "outside" of TM, even though I thought I was inside it.  I will definitely follow up on your suggestion to go to Apple's bug report site and file a report; thanks!
    Lex Schellings (4:39am; do you guys ever sleep?): I didn't hear that pondini had died -- I hope you folks weren't close to him; sounds like he was very thorough, and trying to do the right thing.  He just didn't realize there were people like me out there.   
    I'm surprised at your comment that "the behaviour of deleting one of the TimeMachine dated folders in Finder has always been the wrong way, leading to unhappiness."  That is exactly what our tech support department (which is run by Lockheed Martin; they're supposed to know what they're doing -- at least they certainly charge JPL enough for their service) said was the approved way to delete old TM backups, and in several cases in the past, it has worked for me.  In any event, I didn't think I was deleting the TM dated folder through Finder -- I thought I was doing it through TM, as pondini recommended.  Silly me.
    Etresoft (5:24am): It's a little scary that you said "I don't know of anyone who knows Time Machine well enough to actually update it."  Were you joking?  I definitely agree with your (and John Galt's) advice that "I wouldn't recommend any kind of interference with Time Machine, especially with the Finder".  In the future, I think I will just set up a separate partition on my external drive for TM backups, and let TM figure out how to thin itself out.
    Lex Schellings (5:43am): "a magic black box" -- that's a very good take-away from this misadventure. Thanks for your advice.

  • Time Machine deleted ALL my backups prior to 4AM this morning.

    I had been using time machine and time machine editor to backup once a day at 4am. Somehow this morning instead of a normal backup it received an 'unknown instruction' and thought that there was no more room on the disk partition. Actually as of yesterday there was a huge amount of room compared with what it had been using.
    When I looked in the TM folder it showed that my backup drive and edrive had been backed up every hour since 4am, so it's no wonder that it ran out of room. I looked in the console's system log and this is what seemed Germain:
    Aug 5 04:00:24 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Starting standard backup
    Aug 5 04:00:32 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Backing up to: /Volumes/TimeMachine/Backups.backupdb
    Aug 5 04:00:32 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Ownership is disabled on the backup destination volume. Enabling.
    Aug 5 04:00:32 Macintosh-2 KernelEventAgent[63]: tid 00000000 received unknown event (256)
    Aug 5 04:05:29 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Starting pre-backup thinning: 30.75 GB requested (including padding), 4.80 GB available
    Aug 5 04:05:29 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: No expired backups exist - deleting oldest backups to make room
    Aug 5 04:06:13 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Deleted backup /Volumes/TimeMachine/Backups.backupdb/Office-omputer /2008-07-07-041140: 4.90 GB now available
    My questions are these:
    1. What the heck was the 'unknown event' that screwed everything up and lost all my b/u's since april?
    2. How do I delete the copies of emachine and the b/u drive from TM? They take up far to much room and were never backed up before 4am today. Do I have to remove TM entirely and reinstall?
    3. Is it possible to recover the backups that were deleted?
    Is TM really this sensitive to random bits flowing around the system? And if so what good is relying on a backup system that can be wiped out by a random and unknown bit or series of them?

    I had been using time machine and time machine editor to backup once a day at 4am. Somehow this morning instead of a normal backup it received an 'unknown instruction' and thought that there was no more room on the disk partition. Actually as of yesterday there was a huge amount of room compared with what it had been using.
    When I looked in the TM folder it showed that my backup drive and edrive had been backed up every hour since 4am, so it's no wonder that it ran out of room. I looked in the console's system log and this is what seemed Germain:
    Aug 5 04:00:24 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Starting standard backup
    Aug 5 04:00:32 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Backing up to: /Volumes/TimeMachine/Backups.backupdb
    Aug 5 04:00:32 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Ownership is disabled on the backup destination volume. Enabling.
    Aug 5 04:00:32 Macintosh-2 KernelEventAgent[63]: tid 00000000 received unknown event (256)
    Aug 5 04:05:29 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Starting pre-backup thinning: 30.75 GB requested (including padding), 4.80 GB available
    Aug 5 04:05:29 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: No expired backups exist - deleting oldest backups to make room
    Aug 5 04:06:13 Macintosh-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1865]: Deleted backup /Volumes/TimeMachine/Backups.backupdb/Office-omputer /2008-07-07-041140: 4.90 GB now available
    My questions are these:
    1. What the heck was the 'unknown event' that screwed everything up and lost all my b/u's since april?
    2. How do I delete the copies of emachine and the b/u drive from TM? They take up far to much room and were never backed up before 4am today. Do I have to remove TM entirely and reinstall?
    3. Is it possible to recover the backups that were deleted?
    Is TM really this sensitive to random bits flowing around the system? And if so what good is relying on a backup system that can be wiped out by a random and unknown bit or series of them?

  • Time Machine deleted ALL my backups

    I was using time machine for quite a while to backup my hard drive and then stopped it for a while. When I turned it back on today, it backed up my ENTIRE hard drive (50 GB) and deleted ALL the old files & time machine backups.
    The files and information on those old backups were extremely important. Is there any way of getting these back? Or am I SOL.
    Thanks in advance, I really appreciate any help.

    If TM completed what was most likely a new, full backup (which it will do after a long period without backups), then much (or most) of your old backups have already been overwritten.
    It is possible that you might be able to recover some data from the rest of the disk with a +Data Recovery+ app, such as Data Rescue II, or a 3rd-party service. Neither is cheap or certain.
    If you want to try that, stop using the disk immediately. To find such apps & services, look for +Data Recovery+ or +Disk recovery+ via Google, VersionTracker.com, or MacUpdate.com

  • Backup disk is full ... Time Machine not deleting old backups

    In my Time Machine preferences it says "The older backups are deleted when your disk becomes full." Well ... my disk is full but Time Machine is not deleting its old backups to make more room.
    So now TM is failing to backup.
    Any suggestions for freeing up some disk space and getting back to getting backed up?
    Thanks.
    Ramone

    ramonekalsaw wrote:
    In my Time Machine preferences it says "The older backups are deleted when your disk becomes full." Well ... my disk is full but Time Machine is not deleting its old backups to make more room.
    So now TM is failing to backup.
    What message does it send? See #C2 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
    It will show you how to locate the message(s) that describe the problem, then help you fix it. If that doesn't help, post back with details, including all the messages, your setup (especially the destination for the backups), what you've done, and the results.
    Any suggestions for freeing up some disk space and getting back to getting backed up?
    Do you have other data on the disk, in the same partition? If so, that's not a good idea, and may be the source of the problem. See #3 in [Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/FAQ.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

Maybe you are looking for