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

Similar Messages

Is Time Machine a incremental Backup system???

Dear community,
i have a 500GB HD in the Notebook, and a 500GB HD as a External USB-Drive for the Time Machine Backup. For 1 Jear i had the same problem. I formatted the external Disk, made a Time Machine Backup everything is OK. Than i connectet the HD after 1 Week and the Error cames, that no Backup can be made, because the place on the Time Machine HD is to less.
I had a 60 GB free space on the Notebook. How can it be? I searched in the net, and there was a known issue with the snow leopard. Ok. Than i taket my Credit Card, an bought Lion. nice... now is the same problem... 500GB Bakup HD, 500GB internal Notebook HD... Second Backup to increment the first one and the error: No enought space on the Time Machine HD....On the Internal dist 43 GB Free, on the external HD 100 GB free.
How can it Be? Is the Time Machine a incremental Backup System or a cheap xcopy from DOS-Times?
Pleas Help
Thanks a lot
Bye

To do what you want to do, you may want to consider a cloning program. Some have trail versions.
Clone - Carbon Copy Cloner
Clone – Data Backup
Clone – Deja Vu
Clone - SuperDuper
Clone Software – 6 Applications Tested

Time Machine Stuck (Incremental backup, not Initial)

Hey...me again.
I was finally successful yesterday backing up 160GB of data with Time Machine.
However, this morning, the incremental backup is taking forever. It's been stuck at "3.6MB of 6.7MB" for over 20 minutes. It would seem to me that 6.7MB should be pretty quick to backup.
I have received these messages from TM Buddy:
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb
No pre-backup thinning needed: 100.0 MB requested (including padding), 279.56 GB available
Unable to rebuild path cache for source item. Partial source path:
Copied 305079 files (49.1 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.
No pre-backup thinning needed: 100.0 MB requested (including padding), 279.31 GB available
And Console shows this:
Aug 25 10:23:53 Kieran-Roys-MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[254]: Backup requested by user
Aug 25 10:23:53 Kieran-Roys-MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[254]: Starting standard backup
Aug 25 10:23:53 Kieran-Roys-MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[254]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb
Aug 25 10:26:21 Kieran-Roys-MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[254]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 100.0 MB requested (including padding), 279.56 GB available
Aug 25 10:27:51 Kieran-Roys-MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[254]: Unable to rebuild path cache for source item. Partial source path:
Aug 25 10:41:06 Kieran-Roys-MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[254]: Copied 305079 files (49.1 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Aug 25 10:42:21 Kieran-Roys-MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[254]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 100.0 MB requested (including padding), 279.31 GB available
Any idea on how to resolve?
Thanks,
K

kieranroy wrote:
Hey...me again
Hi again. You seem to have really angered the god of TM, haven't you!
However, this morning, the incremental backup is taking forever. It's been stuck at "3.6MB of 6.7MB" for over 20 minutes. It would seem to me that 6.7MB should be pretty quick to backup.
Unable to rebuild path cache for source item. Partial source path:
This usually doesn't cause a real problem, as long as it's occasional.
Copied 305079 files (49.1 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.
This we see on occasion -- the crazy high file count, and very slow backup.
Aug 25 10:42:21 Kieran-Roys-MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd254: No pre-backup thinning needed: 100.0 MB requested (including padding), 279.31 GB available
Normally, TM will make a second, "catch-up" pass if changes were made during it's first pass. Usually this is very quick, but since the first one way very slow, this one may be worse.
Do you have any folders, particularly email mailboxes, with a very large number of files (thousands), that are actively being added-to or changed? There was a similar situation recently where an app named SpamSieve was putting messages into a "spam" folder, and the user never cleared it out. Clearing it out helped, but excluding it from Time Machine solved the problem.
Click here to download the TimeTracker app. It shows most of the files saved by TM for each backup (excluding some hidden/system files, etc.). I think it will only show completed backups, so you may not be able to find anything. But look at what's being backed-up to see if any of the files, even if there's only one, are in extremely large folders. If so, try excluding the folder (TM Preferences > Options).

Time Machine lost old backups :(

I thought I would try doing Time Machine over wireless connected to my AE base station so I connected my existing Time Machine drive to the AE and tried to make it pick up where it left off, which it would not do. It wants to start fresh, which I do not want since I don't want to lose all my old backups. I tried to reconnect it the old way and it doesn't pick up where it left off anymore. I can view my old backups but now I cannot add to them. It wants to start fresh this way too now. Is there any way to fix this? I want to pick up where Time Machine left off.
Message was edited by: Matt Petruzzelli

-(.)^(.)- wrote:
To answer why connecting your USD HDD to your AirPort Extreme doesn't allow you to continue your Time Machine backup, well the backups to a NAS (effectively what you are doing by attaching the HDD to AXBS) are saved as a sparsebundle as opposed to your current file structure.
To use your HDD connected directly to your Mac, try opening TM Preferences and Change Disk. Can you select the USB HDD now?
Thank you. That explains where this odd folder on my HD came from, but it has a little red "x" in the corner. When I tried switching to backing up off of the AirPort Extreme base station I selected Change Disk. I used Change Disk again when I connected it back with the FW800 and it lets me view my old back up, but neither method (shared or wired) allows me to continue my old backup. I don't have enough space on the drive to waste another 80GB on another full backup AND keep my old backups, which happened to come in handy recently, the reason I wanted to switch to the shared drive so I could do it more often.
I'm still unable to continue where I left off. It still wants to do a new full backup
Message was edited by: Matt Petruzzelli

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?
Thanks

I 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.

Does time machine do incrementals backups or full backups each time?

does time machine do incremental backups or full backups each time? in other words, is it only backing up changes or everything that itis told to backup?

+is it only backing up changes or everything that it is told to backup?+
Time Machine makes physical copies of new and changed files for each backup but it just establishes hard links to files previously backed up that still exist on the source rather than making new copies of them.
This Ars Technica article explains how the hard links work.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14

Carbon Clone and Time Machine: developing a backup plan

Howdy all!
This is a second post that sort of flows on from another I have written today
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4649740
I initally put them all together, but they were too rambling and disconnected, so it seemed better to seperate them. The question I have here is how best to organise my backup plan? I have a few ideas, but, basically, want to make sure I get the whole setup right the first time and would appreciate any advice from others that have been down the path before. As I am still waiting for some parts to arrive in the mail, I have a little time to think about how to go about setting up my Mac.
Basically the setup is:
Mac Mini 2012, boot drive is a Samsung 256GB 830 series SSD, seconday drive for data is a 1TB mechanical disk. I plan on having all my data on the seconday mechanical disk (photos, movies, music etc) and only the OS and Applications on the SSD. To this end, I understand I only have to move /Users to the mechanical disk to achieve this. I then also have 2x 2TB Western Digital MyBook Essential USB 3 disks for Time Machine backups. I plan on rotating them on a weekly basis (storing the disk not in use in a safe or offsite), and then, depending on costs a cloud backup service for some data (music, photos etc) which I might want to access when im not at home.
So I have been thinking for a few days now on the benefit of having a Carbon Clone bootable recovery drive. The thinking goes along these lines. As my data is on a seperate drive, and is backed up to Time Machine, in the event of an OS disk failure, I can replace the disk and then point /Users to the new drive, and I can be up and running once I have reinstalled the apps i need. Now, I understand the idea of the Carbon Clone backup is such that it speeds up the time to rebuild the OS disk, but I have to question, how useful is this in reality?
Consider, I can sit down now and write down all the apps I have needed in the past, install Mac OS, set it up (possibly with a generic admin password), install the apps I need from the App store and DVDs etc and then take a Carbon Clone at this point before any setup of Apps are done. If the apps configuration is backed up in the Time Machine backup (i.e.: the config files exist under /Users) then this is almost workable - in a recovery situation, the CC clone is used to rebuild the OS drive, the config files are pulled from the TM backups, and we're back up and running. Where this fails, is if I have installed (or removed) apps since the CC clone was made. At this point then, is it best to (a) make a new clone when a new app is added/removed or (b) make a note of apps added/removed, which will then have to be reinstalled if a recovery is required. I tend to think the (b) method is best here, as it preserves the integrity of the clone. If the machine has been compromised (malware etc) then remaking the clone, causes the clone to be compromised and hence the reinstalled machine as well. Though this method could be a pain if the machine state has changed somewhat over time. Also, it means that the reinstalled system will be missing updates etc which could be time consuming to apply anyway, so the usefulness of a clone is slightly reduced anyway.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Some days I think having a clone will be useful esp. as most of my software was delivered on CD (Adobe Creative Suite, Office) or are large install bases (XCode), but other days I think, "its not a mission critical machine", i can survive a day without it while I rebuild the install, and so I dont achieve much by having a clone which is likely out-of-date by the time I go to use it.
Also, in this backup plan, is it best to rely on TM for things like email backup or a dedicated mail backup utility? can a Carbon Clone exist on the same disk as Time Machine uses, or do I need to invest in a new disk or two for the CC clones?
As I say, I want to make sure I have this machine setup right from the start, and would really appreciate any pointers, tips or advice.

There is one big advantage of a clone. You can immediately reboot
to it and continue working and deal with the regular boot drive faiure,
what ever it may be, later. Especially since all your data and such
is on another drive. If you use your computer for work and time
critical projects, this is a major plus!
In the case of a hard drive failure/replacement, copying the clone
to the drive is the fastest way to get the system and all your settings
back.
Time Machine and incremental backups have a place as well. It is best
suited for "incremental" problems. Examples are installing an upgrade to
software that doesn't work or just don't plain like. With Time Machine it
is easy to just restore back to the point before the install.
Something else I do is backup current project files to USB memory sticks.
If you are using your computer for business, you can never have too many
backups. Coralllary 456 of Murphy's Law is the "number of backups that
you need will be one more than what you have!"

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 making full backups--not incremental

Hi,
I just installed Snow Leopard on my Mac Pro a couple of days ago, and have been using Time Machine to make backups (never used it before now). I have TimeMachineEditor installed, and have it set to make a backup daily at 3:30am. It backs up data from my 500GB main hard drive to another internal 500GB hard drive.
The first backup went without a hitch, and did a full backup as expected (everything). But the second, third, and fourth backups all were full backups as well....not incremental as they should've been. The fourth one was actually a manual backup I did to test it...I chose "Back Up Now" to see if it did full or incremental. It did a full backup.
So, after four backups, each a little over 100GB, I'm already running out of space Has anyone else run into this behaviour? Is this a consequence of TimeMachineEditor having screwed it up somehow? Even if it has, shouldn't a manual backup still do an incremental backup?
Very strange....

canadavenyc wrote:
V.K. wrote:
yes, well, if Toronto ever gets a team in any sport worth rooting for, I might stop posting on apple forums and start watching them.
lol...well, seeing as how you'll clearly be here a while then... ...perhaps I can prevail upon you to answer one last question that just occurred to me.
Let's say I have tons of TM snapshots on my backup drive, and at some point I want to delete a few to clear some space. I know TM automatically goes after the earliest ones when the drive fills up,
You should know that TM also constantly thins recent backups. It keeps hourly backups for 24 hours and then deletes all but one for every day; it keeps daily backups for 30 days and then deletes all but one for every week. it keeps all weekly backups till the TM drive gets full at which point it starts deleting the oldest ones.
but let's say I manually want to delete a few snapshots that contain, say, a massive cache file or something totally useless to keep around, which I could afford to delete and would gain me a lot more drive space.
When I go into the TM interface to do the removal, how can I figure out which snapshots to get rid of? How would you do it?
TM offers two options. you can delete an entire backup corresponding to a time point or it can delete all backups of a given file/folder. to do that enter TM and scroll back in time to some time point. select something and click on the "gears" action button in Finder toolbar. you'll see options "delete backup" (deletes the entire backup for that time point), and 'delete all backups of this item". deletes all backups of the selected item from all time points. I use the latter sometimes to get rid of backups of very large files.

Time Machine Lost Backups... Without Losing them!

Hey you guys,
I don't know if any of you met this kind of strange behaviour (looked but didn't find...): Time Machine told me yesterday that the backup had failed. I was working rather heavily at the time, trashing folders and putting some order into the main HD. I then did a Backup now and everything went fine. My curiosity was aroused, so I went into Time Machine... and discovered that my backups prior to two days ago had disappeared.
I opened the Time Machine HD: everything was there. I checked, all the info is OK. I decided to sleep over it. Well, this morning everything is back to normal and Time Machine "recovered" what it didn't see the day before.
Understand, this is a new machine with almost new hard drives, checked regularly and apparently working fine.
Did somebody encounter this kind of problem? Is there something I should check, or modify, or whatever?
Thanks for your time, and have a good day.
RTP

RTP,
I then did a Backup now and everything went fine. My curiosity was aroused, so I went into Time Machine... and discovered that my backups prior to two days ago had disappeared.
Just curious, did you attempt to launch TM while that successful backup was still going on, or had it completely finish (TM menu clock icon had stopped spinning)?
As V.K. stated, sometings TM just hiccups on one attempt, but succeeds on the next. Just for inormational purposes, the following are some other reasons why previous backups may not appear in Time Machine:
*Previous Time Machine Backups Are No Longer Visible*
There are several reasons why this might be the case. Consider the following:
If Time Machine can successfully launch into its’ “time travel” interface then the software is seeing backups. It you only have two time travel windows to chose from, “Today (Now)” and a single window behind that, then Time Machine has only performed its initial full backup. You can verify this by looking at the time scale on the right. If no dates appear other than Now and the date of your first full backup then subsequent incremental backups have not been taking place.
If it has been MORE than an 1 ½ hours since the first full backup completed, then you need to determine why Time Machine has stopped backing up. It might simply be that the Time Machine Preference has been turned off.
If, on the other hand, you look at the time scale on the right and you see multiple dates going back to the time of the first full backup, but they are grayed-out, then Time Machine knows that incremental backups have been taking place. Nevertheless, only the front most window “Today (Now)” shows content. Take a look at the Sidebar of the Finder window. Among the various Devices, Shares, and Places, what is highlighted/selected? If it is the Time Machine backup disk itself that is highlighted, then click on some other location in the Sidebar to make the former backup windows appear.
You see, the Time Machine “time travel” interface displays the historical backup state of what ever location is highlighted in the Finders’ Sidebar. Since Time Machine does not back itself up, then there will be no historical backup windows visible.
Bear in mind as well, if you have added locations and items to the Time Machine “Exclude From Backup” list, then there will be no visible history of these items either if they too are highlighted or selected.
And of course, if you are looking at a file or folder that has only recently been created, then there will not be many, or any, backup copies of it depending on how long ago it was created.
*Anti-Virus Software*
If you have anti-virus software running try disabling, launch Time Machine again, and see if you can access previously backed up data. Sometimes such programs scanning processes can interfere with Time Machine.
*File Vault*
Did that user account happen to have File Vault active?
In another thread V.K. stated: "if you start TM from a filevaulted home directory all you'll see is present. you could browse your old backups of files outside your home directory but not anything in it."
*For Time Capsule / AirDisk users*
If you are backing up to a wireless device, and you have the Time Machine backup disk image (sparsebundle) mounted on your desktop while you are trying to access it via the Time Machine "time travel" interface, you may not be able to see any files from previous backups.
You see, if the backup disk image (sparsebundle) is already mounted on the desktop (a White drive icon) then Time Machine may conclude that the disk is “in use” and fail to mount it properly. Obviously, this is not a factor when backing up to a locally connected drive.
A I said, none of it may apply to your case, but it is nonetheless helpful to keep in mind.
Cheers!

Warning: Time Machine won't backup iPhoto if left open

I just learned the hard way that Time Machine will NOT backup iPhoto if you leave it open. In the past, I usually have iPhoto left open, and now I've lost TONS of data. Can Apple change how Time Machine works so that it backs up data of open applications?
http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/2009/05/timemachine-doesnt-back-up-iphoto-if.h tml
The next question is, does this mean I haven't had a REAL iTunes backup for months either? I AWLAYS keep that one open.

polishedstaple wrote:
I just learned the hard way that Time Machine will NOT backup iPhoto if you leave it open. In the past, I usually have iPhoto left open, and now I've lost TONS of data. Can Apple change how Time Machine works so that it backs up data of open applications?
Probably not. Few backup apps can manage to back up a single file that's being written-to by another app at the same time. What would it do with a partial file? What would YOU do with part of a photo, if you had it and could restore it?
iPhoto is much more complex than a "normal" folder -- it's a "package," with various files, indexes, and cross-references, many of which can be open at the same time -- worse, all the data that the app has written isn't necessarily on the disk yet; it's likely in an OS buffer somewhere, and may not actually go out to disk until the app is closed.
The next question is, does this mean I haven't had a REAL iTunes backup for months either? I AWLAYS keep that one open.
I can't be sure, but I think iTunes is probably ok (but by all means check it), depending on what you were doing at the time of the backup. If you were downloading a file, that file most likely wasn't backed-up; but if you were just playing songs, it's probably up to date.
Click here to download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window. If you look at the messages for various backups, you may see some that mention doing a "deep traversal" on your iPhoto library, because of a "missed reservation." That's a clue that some things weren't backed-up earlier because of open file(s).
But I would agree entirely that Time Machine ought to send some sort of message when it skips things -- perhaps if something like iPhoto doesn't get backed-up in a 24-hour period.
Feel free to suggest that to Apple at: http://www.apple.com/feedback

Time machine won't backup, yet plenty of space & not much used on Mac HD

Well, this is yet another "Time machine won't backup becuase there is not enough space" thread. I have searched Google and threads here but it's still a mystery why this error is occurring and it seems there is no clear solution. I also looked at the Apple Time Machine errors FAQ as well.
Here are my specs and what I have tried so far.
2010 Mac Pro Quad Core with 1 TB hard drive with 12 GB RAM. (137 GB used so far on internal Mac hard drive disk, so about 863 GB free space).
- New external 1 TB hard drive initialized as Time Machine backup disk when inserted for the first time.
The exact error I am getting is this: "This backup is too large for the backup disk. The backup requires 1.80 TB but only 999.20 GB are available."
I have tried deleting the Time Machine system preference, reinitializing the external disk, clearing the system caches with Cocktail, restarting and letting Time machine ask me all over again if I wanted to use the external drive for Time Machine. Still the same error.
My question is how on earth can 1.80 TB be required for the backup when I only have 137 GB of used space?

danomatic12 wrote:
My question is how on earth can 1.80 TB be required for the backup when I only have 137 GB of used space?
Two possibilities:
There's another disk (or disks) connected to your Mac. If they're formatted HFS+, Time Machine is trying to back it/them up as well. You can exclude them per #10 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). The 1.8 TB includes 20% for temporary workspace on the TM drive, so TM is estimating the backup at about 1.5 TB.
Something on your internal HD is corrupted, causing an incorrect calculation. Verify your internal HD, per #6 in [Formatting, Partitioning, Verifying, and Repairing Disks|http://web.me.com/pondini/AppleTips/DU.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of the +Using Snow Leopard+ forum).

How do I use a Mac Mini + Airport Express + Time Machine disk to backup another iMac

How do I use a Mac Mini + Airport Express + Time Machine disk to backup another iMac?
The question pretty much says it all.
I have a Mac Mini with an attached 3TB Hard Drive used for Time Machine Backups.
I have an Airport Extreme base station which services that machine plus several others.
I would like to backup my new iMac and a MacBook Pro to the Mac Mini.
What do I need to do on the mini to export that hard drive so that it can be used as a Time Machine target from the other systems?
All systems are running 10.6.8.

Well you would have to do backups over a network which is much slower and has highest chance of becoming corrupt. I think your best option would be to get an apple time capsule to act as a network and back if thats how you wanna do that

HT201250 Can I recover the backups from Time Machine, but the backups is deleted by the Time Machine!

Unfortunately, the Time Macchine deleted my oldest backups in my hard drive.
I have the important files in the backups.
So hope someone could help me to recover the backups.

Time Machine will remove old backups automatically. It tells you when it does, but of course by then it's too late.
There is no recovering deleted backups, since it was necessary to overwrite them with newer backups.
For further explanation read the following entries from Apple Support Communities contributor Pondini's Time Machine FAQ:
12. Should I delete old backups? If so, How?
20. Once my Mac is backed-up, can I delete some stuff to save space?
Time Machine is for backups. It is not an archiving utility. To archive files requires something like one of these:
Carbon Copy Cloner ($39.95) http://sites.fastspring.com/bombich/product/ccc
or
SuperDuper! ($27.95) http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Time Machine does not backup home/user directory (on separate drive)

I recently installed a SSD into my Mini. Due to size restrictions, my home/user directory has to be kept on another drive. I retained the stock 1TB drive that came with the Mini for this.
Ok, installed the SSD, restored a Time Machine backups (sans user data). Used a different admin user and configured my user to use the 1TB drive for it's home directory (/Volumes/1TB/home/<user>). Restart, log in as my user, all is good. All data, settings, etc is there. Everything looks normal.
Time Machine REFUSES to backup this directory. It will backup the 1TB drive and anyting else I create in it, but not the home directory. I tried every permission trick I could think of or found online. I even tested it further by formatting the 1TB drive fresh, adding a new user, configuring the user to use the 1TB for their home directory and it still won't back it up (this was a test of permissions the OS set, to make sure I didn't change my data perms somewhere along the way). Time Machine would not backup the new user's home directory on the 1TB drive.
Any thoughts? I can't be the first person to have their home directory on a non-OS drive.
If I were to create a folder/file in /Volumes/1TB/<test file> ... Time Machine gets it perfect. It just will NOT touch /Volumes/1TB/home/<anything here>
Thanks!

Open the Time Machine preference pane and unlock the settings, if necessary. Click the Options button. If there is one particular folder with items that are not being backed up reliably, add it to the list of excluded items. If there are many such folders, add your home folder to the list, or add a whole volume (i.e., what Apple calls a "disk.") Save the changes.
Start a backup, or wait for one to happen automatically. When it's done, open the preference pane again and remove the exclusion(s) you made earlier. Back up again and see whether there's a change.

Time Machine - lost incremental backup

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