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.

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Time Machine-A Full Backup

Hello
I started using Time Machine this past January. I backup every few weeks.
I have my Time Machine set to backup my entire internal HD to an external 160GB HD.
I know for a fact I haven't created 24GB's worth of files in the last two weeks.
Today when I started my backup I had about 28GB's left on that EXT. 160GB, when it was done backing up, I'm left with 4.79GB. WHY? & what is Time Machine backing up?
It blew away all the backups from Jan, & gave me a brand new back from today.
I have only used 110.44GB on my internal HD.
Has anyone else run into this?
Thanks

Sometimes creating or changing a file triggers a change and consequent backup of another, larger file.
I suggest you use larger backup drives and swap them out periodically. The 110+ GB on your startup disk is a lot more than what most people have.

HT3728 Time Machine only wants to do full backup not incremental

just replaced hard drive and restored from time machine however time machine looks like it is trying to do a full back up and says not enough space available when should be enough for incremental. Do I delete backup and reconnect to time machine?

There are some cases when you can continue to use the old TM backups and situations where you cannot or should not.. but before you delete your backups .. something I am always very reluctant to do, make sure you have all your files.. If you are talking about a Time Capsule you can archive off the old backup to a USB drive using 5.6 version utility or new 6.3 version. It is not available in 6.0-6.2
Then you can safely erase the drive and start over.
Read pondini on continuing your backups.
B5 and B6 here.
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html

How to restore beyond time machine last full backup

I had a disk problem over the weekend and macbook pro wouldn't boot.
This has happened once before when it was within warranty period and I took it to the Genius bar and they ran diagnostics on the drive and said it was ok. Disk Warrior however was saying it had bad sectors and was failing but Apple disagreed. Apple then resinstalled the o/s and it was working ok and I restored everything back ok.
The same thing happened on Saturday and it wouldn't boot. Disk Utility said it couldn't be repaired and Disk Warrior said it was failing.
I did exactly what the Genius did and booted from internet recovery and went to restore from Time Capsule. During the restore process it listed only the full backups that had been taken so I picked the most recent but that was 6 days ago. It has completed the restore and Disk Utility says disk is fine.
So I'm asking two questions really.
1) Is there a way to restore beyond that last full backup and apply the incrementals to get it to the last hourly Time Capsule backup? When I go into Time Machine now it only has today in it and last hour so doesn't seem to be able to access previous incarnations of the backups.
2) Is there a way to run fsck or something on the disk to get any bad sectors as marked to not be used to prevent the problem from happening again?
I am toying with getting a solid state drive but not immediately.
My urgency is to get some files I was working on (Adobe illustrator) within the last week. They would have been on the incremental backup but everything is restored from that 31st March full backup.
Regards
Mike

Hi
But isn't that based on the fact that those backups are visible in Time Machine? All I see is today, not 2 days ago.
Mike

Time Machine doing full backup of external drive again

I have a Time Capsule, as well as an external data drive connected to my Mac. The external drive (named Yoda) is NOT excluded from backups. Yoda has about 703 GB of data on it.
I recently replaced the hard drive inside my time capsule. Consequently, a full backup was made, which was to be expected.
When the new full first backup was done, I disconnected the Yoda drive. A day later, I reconnected it, and now Time Machine is saying it's doing a 703 GB backup. Since the size TM indicates its backing up is ever so slightly larger than the total amount of data on Yoda, I'm assuming it's doing a full backup of the Yoda drive for some reason (the only other drive, the system drive, only has about 200 GB on it).
The files on Yoda weren't changed, certainly not all 703 GB of them. No hardware changes were made, no updates, tinkering, modifications, or anything. The Mac itself has not even been shut down or logged out. The ONLY thing that's happened was the Yoda drive was unmounted and disconnected, then several hours later it was reconnected.
Why is Time Machine repeating a full backup of this external drive? Is this going to happen every time I disconnect and reconnect the drive? Is there any way to make this not happen, short of excluding the drive (which I don't want to do)?

After posting this thread, I did find a similar thread (in the "More Like This" section) and saw your responses in it. You had suggested the same thing, as well as doing #A5 if that didn't work.
I tried #A4 and although that seemed to work in the other thread, unfortunately it didn't work for me. So I moved on to #A5, but I could not get my Time Capsule drive to show up in the Disk Utility. I didn't see a "data folder", but I did try directly dragging the sparsebundle to the left pane of the Disk Utility, but that seemed to hang Disk Utility.
At this point I'm probably going to try deleting the plist file as per #A4, erasing (reformatting) the drive, rebooting, and starting a whole new backup from scratch. It's not going to take much longer than backing up the entire external drive by itself would have, and I still have older backups (up to a few days ago) on the original Time Capsule drive in case of massive disaster.
So we'll see how that goes...

Time Machine missing full backups - Need help.

I was going to restore my Imac from Time Machine, and when I went to restore, its last full backup was from December 25, 2009 and nothing from 2010. I had checked it recently and saw backups images from January. Is there anything i can do? If i restore from the 25th, will my images from January February still be there?

Are you doing a full system restore, booting from your Leopard Install disc?
If not, please explain just what you're doing.
If so, there are two possibilities:
Did you rename or replace your internal HD after 12/25? If so, those are treated as two separate disks; thus there may be two drives in the "pop-up menu" above the list of dates. See item (f) in question #14 of the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
Have you excluded any System files from Time Machine backups? If so, you cannot do a full system restore (since you didn't back up the entire system).
Where are your backups, and why are you restoring? If your Mac is still functional, try looking at your backups with the Browse option, per #17 of the FAQ Tip, to see just what's there.

Time Machine makes full backup after permission repair.

I am struggling with this a couple of months but now I am sure. Each time I do a permission repair of my hard drive, Time Machine makes a full backup of roughly 200G. In this way my Time Machine disk can be full rather quickly. I seem not to be able to prevent this. Anybody having the same issue? Or, even better, having a solution? Thanks, Pierre

Thanks for your reaction.
No, only 10-20.
I do permission repair once every 4-6 weeks more or less as a kind of maintenance. No idea why but it happens to be like this.
This is in the log (and somewhere here the trouble occurred):
Jun 28 19:33:16 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[355]: Disk image /Volumes/Time Capsule Disk/iMac van Pierre.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
Jun 28 19:33:16 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[355]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
Jun 28 19:33:22 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[386]: Mounted devices (\n "/Volumes/pierre.wolters",\n "/Volumes/Time Machine Backups"\n)
Jun 28 19:33:22 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[386]: Wont clean Time Machine Backups because disk image
Jun 28 19:33:22 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[386]: Mounted devices (\n "/Volumes/pierre.wolters",\n "/Volumes/Time Machine Backups"\n)
Jun 28 19:33:22 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[386]: Wont clean Time Machine Backups because disk image
Jun 28 19:58:02 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[355]: Ejected Time Machine disk image.
Jun 28 19:58:04 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[355]: Ejected Time Machine network volume.
Jun 28 20:13:30 imac-ethernet fseventsd[48]: event logs in /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/.fseventsd out of sync with volume. destroying old logs. (930 2 930)
Jun 28 20:13:31 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[504]: Disk image /Volumes/Time Capsule Disk/iMac van Pierre.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
Jun 28 20:13:31 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[504]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
Jun 28 20:13:33 imac-ethernet fseventsd[48]: log dir: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/.fseventsd getting new uuid: 87C9B931-FE3E-48EF-818C-B78899942EB3
Jun 28 20:13:35 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[536]: Mounted devices (\n "/Volumes/pierre.wolters",\n "/Volumes/Time Machine Backups"\n)
Jun 28 20:13:35 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[536]: Wont clean Time Machine Backups because disk image
Jun 28 20:13:35 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[536]: Mounted devices (\n "/Volumes/pierre.wolters",\n "/Volumes/Time Machine Backups"\n)
Jun 28 20:13:35 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[536]: Wont clean Time Machine Backups because disk image
Jun 28 20:22:47 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[504]: Disk image /Volumes/Time Capsule Disk/iMac van Pierre.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
Jun 28 20:30:28 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[504]: Ejected Time Machine disk image.
Jun 28 20:30:29 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[504]: Ejected Time Machine network volume.
Jun 28 21:08:34 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[694]: Disk image /Volumes/Time Capsule Disk/iMac van Pierre.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
Jun 28 21:08:34 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[694]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
Jun 28 21:08:37 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[727]: Mounted devices (\n "/Volumes/pierre.wolters",\n "/Volumes/Time Machine Backups"\n)
Jun 28 21:08:37 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[727]: Wont clean Time Machine Backups because disk image
Jun 28 21:08:37 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[727]: Mounted devices (\n "/Volumes/pierre.wolters",\n "/Volumes/Time Machine Backups"\n)
Jun 28 21:08:37 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[727]: Wont clean Time Machine Backups because disk image
I will check your suggestions.
Once again, Thanks.
Pierre

How can i open iPhoto Library on Time Machine after full Backup?

After i had a full backup to iomega external hard drive i wonted to see photos in iPhoto library by using Time Machine. I can see the iPhoto Library icon on
Time Machine, but when i click on an icon it does not open the folder and i can't see the pictures stored on iomega external hard drive. All other backed up
documents i can see and restore if i ineed it. Please help. Thank you.

Thank You for your help. I did what you sugested and it works. Only one more question. Just to make sure.
When you wrote: "Control-Click the iPhoto Library icon and choose Show Package Contents there will be a Masters folder with you photos inside."
Under Master folder did you mean LibraryiPhoto or something else?
Thank You

Time Machine dong full backup all of a sudden - why?

I have had time machine going for months, from both my Macbook and my Mac Mini, and this AM I noticed that it is doing a full backup, instead of the incremental backup it normally does. Yesterday, I updated this Macbook with the latest iDVD update, and I installed iLife '11 on my Mac Mini, but that's it. My Mac Mini uses a referenced iPhoto library on a NAS, but that is a different NAS drive than the time capsule. The only thing the time capsule is used for is or backup.
Could the upgrading of my iPhoto library on my Mac Mini have messed something up?
I will see if my Mac Mini does a full backup also.
Thoughts anyone?

Hi moviewbuffking - this could have a number of reasons, so have a look at these:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1964018
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2057525
Cheers
Michael

Time Machine Just Churns; Backups Not Performed

Time Machine, which is connected to Time Capsule, has not completed a backup for about 3 weeks. It just says "Preparing to Backup," the clock icon spins for hours, and no backup is ever completed.
I tried to to a manual backup but got a message that the disk is full. Tried to delete stuff off it to free up space and got error messages there, too.
Any idea what's going on and how I can fix?
Thanks!

Try powering off both the TC and your Mac
Wait a minute
In addition to the connection from the modem, make sure that you have another Ethernet cable connected from one of the LAN <-> ports on the TC to the Mac
Start the TC first and let it run for a minute
Then start up the Mac and wait a minute
Open AirPort Utility again to see if the TC will appear.
If yes, click on the TC icon, then click Edit on the next window that appears. Then click the Disks tab to see the Erase Disk button.
By the way, you are not using the OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8 as your profile indicates. You are using Lion 10.7.4. Please update your profile to include that important information.

Time Machine won't backup notes

Notes.app in the new Mountain Lion stores its data in a very deeply hidden set of files NotesV1.storedata-wal and NotesV1.storedata-shm found in Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Notes.
Running Time Machine with Notes in the foreground switches to Finder. When navigating to the path of the actual files, only today's versions with today's date appear in the directory although we are looking at a state saved in the past.
Notes is essential and backup of notes is a vital function, especially for people with hundreds of notes they rely upon.

Make sure that the first Mac is not backing up at the time....then....
Pull the power cord from the back of the Time Capsule
Count to ten
Plug the power cord back into the back of the Time Capsule
Try a backup again from the second Mac in a few minutes
Post on your results

Time Machine directory locked - backups not working

My Time Machine directory is locked - that is, when looked at in info, the directory icon shows a silver padlock at the bottom left-hand corner. Also, in Finder, it has a lock too. If I try to get into the volume, even as owner and/or admin, I have the message 'The folder "Time Machine" could not be opened because you do not have sufficient access privileges'.
I've researched this and it seems to be because there are access control lists applied to the volume. Running the command xattr -l Time\ Machine in a Terminal shell shows that the comp.apple.metadata"kMDItemFinderComment is set to say 'bplist00_ Backup disc for {machine name}'.
Now, I recently changed the machine name. This might be the root of my problem. But I can't see how to fix this, because when I try to remove the attribute with attr -d it says 'no such xattr'.
What is going on here? I've tried, to unlock the drive, using 'chmod -R 777 {volume}', but this doesn't work as the command fails on a number of entries.
Any suggestions gratefully received!

That's not how you access Time Machine backups.
TM uses special "deny everybody everything" permissions to keep us mere mortals from changing, moving, or deleting it's backups, thus corrupting them.
Use the "Star Wars" interface, via the +Enter Time Machine+ option from the TM icon in your menubar, or the TM icon in your Dock.
Changing the machine name might mean you need the (badly named) +Browse Other Time Machine Disks+ option instead. It's available by holding down the Option key while selecting the TM icon in your Menubar, or by control-clicking (right-clicking) the TM icon in your Dock.
You'll see a selection screen showing all the disks/partitions that have TM backups on them. Select the one you want, and you'll be taken to the normal TM "Star Wars" interface, where you should see all the backups on that disk/partition.

Time Machine making Daily backups of Entire Itunes Library

Hi There,
I have searched around the forums and cannot find an answer to my problem.
I am using time machine over a 1TB time capsule, my laptop is the only computer that is backing up to the drive,
Originally I noticed that my time machine backups were taking a long time (over 7 hours while connected through Ethernet)
I have downloaded BackupLoupe and using this utility I have found that daily backups of my entire Itunes music Library are being made (122GB).
Does anyone have any idea what may be causing this issue? I have followed the Time machine trouble shooting guide and Completely wiped the drive and started again,
I have performed a disk and permission repair on both the time capsule drive and on the Macbook through the install DVD, however each time I initiate time machine on the freshly reconditioned drives it happens again.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, I am going slowly insane.
Cheers
Josh

bigjnz wrote:
I have downloaded BackupLoupe and using this utility I have found that daily backups of my entire Itunes music Library are being made (122GB).
Is it only the iTunes folder; and the entire contents?
If so, the iTunes folder itself may be damaged. That happens occasionally; something in a folder object gets corrupted, and Time Machine either doesn't find real changes, or thinks everything changed.
In those cases, the only solution we've been able to find is to rename the folder, create a new one, move the contents, and delete the old one. The first backup afterwards will back up everything, but thereafter it should be ok.

Time Machine makes full backups on dual boot MacBook Pro

Since installing Lion alongside Snow Leopard, Time Machine insists on backing up everything on the Snow Leopard side (around 190GB) and a large portion of Lion (around 35GB) each time I run it from either partition to a 2TB Time Capsule.
When I first installed Lion I just backed up everything from there but then discovered I couldn't restore files that belonged to Snow Leopard, so I started backing them up separately, and that's when the real trouble began.
Any ideas as to what to do? Should I back up each partition to a completley separate HDD?
Ivo

I have since devised my own workaround - one that I call CrissCross.
Since I have 2 Time Capsules - one for the MacBook Pro and one for a G5 Tower - I set it up so that each partition on the MBP backs up to separate TC's while the G5 shares one.
Not really a fix but it works beautifully

TimeMachine not backing up, as hard drive is full. Can the time machine clear old backups and replace them with new?

Time Macine not backing up.
As the harddrive is full, Can the time machine clear old backups, and override them with new backups. For example 5 - 6 days +++ old. Backups were proformed dayly
Any help much appreciated
Many thanks,

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Enter the word "Starting" (without the quotes) in the String Matching text field. You should now see log messages with the words "Starting * backup," where * represents any of the words "automatic," "manual," or "standard." Note the timestamp of the last such message. Clear the text field and scroll back in the log to that time. Select the messages timestamped from then until the end of the backup, or the end of the log if that's not clear. Copy them (command-C) to the Clipboard. Paste (command-V) into a reply to this message.
If there are runs of repeated messages, post only one example of each. Don't post many repetitions of the same message.
When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Some personal information, such as the names of your files, may be included — anonymize before posting.

Time Machine making full backups--not incremental

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