Time Machine mixed two backups

We have two Macs (call them a.local and b.local) sharing one Time Capsule. We've been using that system for two years without a problem.
Just to be prudent, I delayed the upgrade to Maverick until the .1 release came out. We upgraded to Maverick last week.
Hovever, Time Machine now backs-up both Macs to the same .sparsebundle (call it a.sparsebundle).
How can I restore order in this confusion?

Start with A4 in the 1st linked article.
Time Machine Troubleshooting
Time Machine Troubleshooting Problems

Similar Messages

Time machine makes 30 backups for the last two days, no backups for any earlier times: is there a way to control it?

I've been running Time Machine in the background for as long as I've owned my current Mac--- a few months. It is a completely generic set-up: it's a desktop (rarely shut off or asleep) connected to an external hard drive that is much larger (1 TB) than my internal hard drive (0.5 TB), and Time Machine is configured to save backups of my whole internal drive to the external drive. The external is half-full, and the internal is a little more than half-full. I often hear my external crunching away, working on something.
I recently needed to access an old file, so I went into Time Machine mode on the folder where it had been deleted a few weeks ago. While I'm not upset that it isn't available (it's my own fault for deleting it), I didn't expect the Time Machine to have such a bad distribution of saved backups. There are 30 backup snapshots of the past two days, and nothing earlier. I was expecting something more like a few from today, a few from this week, a few from this month, and a few going all the way back in time--- a broader distribution.
I don't see any way to control this in the Time Machine Preferences (in fact, very little control at all). Is there a secret way to control it, or some tip to ensure a more useful distribution of saved snapshots?
Thanks,
-- Jim

Thanks, but it doesn't exactly address my question. TimeMachineEditor allows me to set the intervals or times when backups occur, but it doesn't control the algorithm that decides which snapshots should be deleted. My problem was that Time Machine chose to delete all of the old snapshots and keep only the most recent ones: I'd like it to keep more of the recent ones than the old ones, but still keep some old ones.
In fact, the (unmodifyable) text on the Time Machine control panel says that it keeps:
hourly backups for the past 24 hours
daily backups for the past month
weekly backups for all previous months
That would be perfect if it were true.
Perhaps the algorithm did the wrong thing because the size of my internal hard drive varied quite a lot a few days ago: a process got out of control and used up all of my internal disk space. I killed the process and deleted its output (several times), so my internal disk eventually went back down to normal. Perhaps in the intervening hours, Time Machine made a backup, once an hour, and used up all of the external drive space. When it had to choose between keeping "weekly backups of previous months" and "hourly backups of the past 24 hours", it chose to keep hourly backups of the past 24 hours. This was the wrong choice in my case (it was the unwanted output) and is probably the wrong choice in most cases.
Is there a way to control the algorithm that decides which backups to keep and which to delete? I would have it delete the hourly, daily, and weekly backups in a way that preserves their relative distribution.
By the way, while I have made it sound like my problem was a runaway log file (something that would be easy to put in an excluded directory with Time Machine's "Options" button), it was a VirtualBox snapshot merge. The data in question are precious, but were unnecessarily copied many times while VirtualBox failed to merge them properly. I can't simply exclude a directory: I'm talking about a more general problem.
Thanks!
-- Jim

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).

HT201250 Can I use Time Machine on two different Macs to back up to one external drive?

Can I use Time Machine on two different Macs to back up to one external drive?
I have one 1T Western Digital backup drive that works well with Time Machine and my MacBook Pro. I now want to back up my wife's MacBook Air using Time Machine on her Mac and want to know if I can use the same WD external drive or if I need to get a 2nd back up drive? If I can use one external drive for the two Macs do I need to do something special on the drive or will Time Machine do it automatically?

Yes. You will need to configure Time Machine preferences on each computer to backup to the same drive. Note that you cannot connect the backup drive to both machines at the same time.

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: "Partially Deleted Backup"

Last night, after Time Machine performed a backup and began its post-backup thinning, it got stalled on "Finishing backup... ." The system log showed that it was attempting to delete a previously partially deleted backup:
Starting standard backup
Starting post-backup thinning
Found partially deleted backup - trying again to delete: 2009-09-30-110803
The backup it was trying to delete was the last one on its list (i.e., the oldest one on that TM volume). And when I opened it up, it indeed appeared to be a partially deleted folder. So I let TM run. However, it never finished "Finishing backup... ," so after letting it run all night and all day, I simply told TM to stop. It did, and the system then added two more messages to the log, acknowledging my cancelation as well as TM's current success:
Starting standard backup
Starting post-backup thinning
Found partially deleted backup - trying again to delete: 2009-09-30-110803
Backup deletion was canceled by user
Backup completed successfully.
However, the next time TM ran, it began all over again:
Starting standard backup
Starting post-backup thinning
Found partially deleted backup - trying again to delete: 2009-09-30-110803
It's still sitting there in its "Finishing backup..." mode.
I was thinking about entering Time Machine, selecting that backup, and telling Time Machine to delete that backup—and only that backup. But I'm (a) not sure that will address the actual problem, and (b) wondering if deleting that particular backup (i.e., the oldest one on the list) is advisable.
Suggestions?

Pondini wrote:
Maxwell’s Demon wrote:
I'm aware of the multilink nature of TM's backups. What I don't understand is how you immediately concluded that the backups were corrupted.
TM finding partially deleted backups, trying repeatedly to deleted them, and failing to.
(And yes, I though you meant that you'd tried to delete the backup yourself.)
It took forever. I ran TechTool Pro, and it "choked" (i.e., ran out of memory) trying to rebuild the directory. When I asked Disk Warrior to graph the directory, it revealed that it was more than 40% fragmented!
I'm not sure fragmentation is a problem, or even applies, given the structure of TM backups.
So I ran Disk Warrior. It ran without incident. When I then looked inside the TM drive, I discovered that along with rebuilding the directory—which is what I understood its job to be—DW apparently removed/deleted the offending (partially deleted) backup. The next time Time Machine ran, everything went smoothly. It's been running fine ever since.
Great! And yes, there are times it can repair/rebuild TM backups that nothing else can (I guess that's why it costs $100!).
I'm obviously quite pleased with the results: Not only did DW perform an incredible directory rebuild (fragmentation went from more than 40% to less than 1% !!) but it cleared out the partially deleted backup that was causing TM to stumble. But I remain awfully curious: Had I simply gone into Time Machine and deleted the partially deleted backup myself, wouldn't that have fixed the problem? (Granted, DW not only got TM back on track, but it also rebuilt its directory, which is a definite plus in my mind...I'm just trying to understand.)
It's possible you couldn't have deleted it completely, any more than TM was able to. Remember, a single backup folder has hard links to hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of other items. Just one of those being screwy can have a ripple effect through the whole structure.
And if you could have, it might well have left some of the actual backup files "abandoned" -- some or all of the hard links to them deleted, but still somewhere in the disk directory, so still taking up space.
I got the idea from
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20090515063602219
which provided a link to the "solution" when partial backups remain that result in TM "error: 11" failures:
http://www.bytebot.net/blog/archives/2008/08/13/fixing-time-machine-backup-faile d-with-error-11
Admittedly, mine wasn't an "error: 11" problem, but it sure seemed similar. My hesitation/concern was due to the fact that the partially deleted backup was the last one (i.e., the "oldest") in my TM volume: I wasn't sure if deleting it would screw up all of the links used by the remaining backups. However, since DW removed it without causing any problems, it seems like I may have been able to accomplish the same result by removing it "manually" from within TM. If that is the case, then it suggests that there may not have been any actual "corruption."
Again, I am very happy with the result, and likely will resort to DW again the next time I have similar problems. The only reason I'm harping on it is simply to try to gain a deeper understanding of how to determine when such problems are indeed due to corruption as opposed to simply an errant file that causes TM to stumble. (Had TM indicated that it stumbled and was unable to successfully perform the backup, then I would have little doubt that there was actual corruption.)

Time Machine Error: "The backup disk image could not be created." Help.

I have two Macbook Pro's. One is able to backup to the Time Capsule with no problems. The other connects just fine to Airport Utility, but I get the following error after I attempt to backup: Time Machine Error: "The backup disk image could not be created."
I have reset the Time Capsule several times, so that is not the fix.
The first thing I see when attempting to open Time Machine is the following message: :The storage location for Time Machine Backups can't be found." It gives me the option to setup the Time Capsule, which I select. The next thing I select is to Change Disk. The window that opens has the Icon with Three people on it. The name of that Icon is The Moreman Time Capsule. I select it, and enter the password I created. I then choose to Backup. Then I choose to backup now. That is when I get the error: Time Machine Error: "The backup disk image could not be created."
Any ideas? Has anyone encountered this problem?

You have to delete the .dmg file and start over. This happened to me 3 times already, I finally switched to Déjà Vu, works perfect and only once a day instead of 24 times a day.
http://propagandaprod.com/

Time Machine Very Large Backup Space Requirements

I'm having a bit of trouble with Time Machine. I recently recreated a User Account. The old User account's home library permissions had become corrupt. Rather than try to sort through the permissions, I opted to just move all the personal data to another account (the primary admin), delete the old user account, recreate it, and move all the personal data to the new account. This worked splendidly. However, now Time Machine claims it needs about 2.1 TB to do it's next backup. I find this odd because a full backup is estimated as only 384 GB, and the computer's hard drive is only 1 TB to begin with. So, it needs a factor of 2 more space than is available on the computer. So, there is something amiss. I imagine Time Machine tracked the data being moved to the admin account and to the new account, and it wants to back all of this up. I don't want it to do that. Is there someway to cause Time Machine to forget the most recent changes?
Clearly, I don't want Time Machine to not backup the new account's information. However, I'm would like not to loose the previous backups. Any solutions?

Hello again:
Erasing and then formatting the Time Machine volume and having Time Machine make a new backup would be the way I would do it.
As an aside, I use two external hard drives. I have Time Machine set to make alternating backups on the externals, and I also make a bootable clone (SuperDuper!) on one of the externals. Short of a meltdown, I am reasonably well protected.
Barry

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!"

Using Time Machine with two external hard drives

Hi. I use Time Machine to back up the hard disk on my MacBook Pro onto a Western Digital external drive. For secure storage of family photos and things we don't want to lose, I would like to do the following:
For a week or two, back up my MacBook Pro onto a Western Digital drive. Let's call this WD Drive 1. Then walk downstairs and put WD Drive 1 in a fireproof safe. For the next week or two, back up my MacBook Pro onto a different Western Digital drive. Let's call this WD Drive 2. Then put WD Drive 2 in the safe, take out WD Drive 1, and use WD Drive 1 as the back-up medium for the next week or two. Then keep alternating between WD Drive 1 and WD Drive 2 every couple weeks. This way, I will always have up an to date back-up on the WD drive that is connected to the MacBook Pro, and I also will have a two-week old back-up on the WD drive in the safe in case of a fire or something.
Can Time Machine be used in this manner, alternating between two different external back-up disks? Will Time Machine "know" when I change external drives and manage all back-up files appropriately?
Thank you!

pomme4moi wrote:
Can Time Machine be used in this manner, alternating between two different external back-up disks? Will Time Machine "know" when I change external drives and manage all back-up files appropriately?
Yes. Each drive will have an independent set of backups; and each will be a complete "snapshot" of the way your system looked at the time of the backup.
When you swap drives, the first backup will be somewhat longer, and may involve a "deep traversal," while Time Machine "catches up" with all the changes since the last backup to that drive.
And try not to go too long between swaps; it's undocumented, so we don't know the exact parameters, but after at least 10 days (apparently), Time Machine may do a new, full backup instead of an incremental one of changes only.
And you only need to worry about Time Machine deleting old backups if you've deleted the originals from your system; TM will never delete the backups of anything that's still there.
But . . .
As MusicWind says, thats' probably not the best strategy. One of the reasons you want dual backups is because no hardware is perfect -- it all fails, sooner or later, right? Similarly, no app is perfect, either. The "works" of Time Machine are more complex than most backup apps; it's pretty reliable, but if you're going to have dual backups, you're probably a bit safer with a different app for your secondary backups.
I don't know about SuperDuper, but CarbonCopyCloner does have an "archive" feature, where it will keep copies of things you've deleted. I've never used it, so don't know just how it works.
Also see Kappy's post on Basic Backup, complete with links to the web sites of each product.
p.s.: Don't try copying Time Machine's dated folders; you'll get a complete copy of your entire system.

Time machine will not backup after maverick

This is a major problem, not addressed in the installation instrucitons. The disk runs eternally "preparing backup", I mean all night.
This happened to two machines on entirely separate backup disks. And if we are sacraficing the old data in reformating the drive, I would like to know about that before choosing to upgrade.

Update: Finally...
At least for the Promise Pegasus R4... but I noticed on other threads that WD drives are also acting up too so this might work with them too.
I turned off Time Machine, and deleted that pesky .plist file, again. I unplugged the R4, power and thunderbolt, then played whack the gopher with the drives swapping them around randomly. I reintalled Mavericks from a fresh download, yet again, then set Time Machine to backup on a fast USB 3TB drive (which it did in 6 hours or so). Then I turned off Time Machine, deleleted that .plist file again, rebooted the iMac, plugged in the R4, reformatted it again with Disk Utility, then hooked it to Time Machine, said a few slightly heretic prayers to whatever demons came with Maverick, and 2 minutes later Time Machine started to backup and report 1 hour to complete... the hour isn't up yet, but I'm crossing everything I have 2 of...
I've noticed a few other 'didn't copy over or mesh well' things with Maverick, but that's a different thread and 2 updates from now once we all suffer through this extended beta-test by Apple.
John Galt posted this on another thread... to find and delete that pesky .plist file:
or "error ... while creating the backup folder."
and follow that to:
http://pondini.org/TM/A4.html

Time machine will not backup but does restore

My Time machine will not backup, but will restore from prior backups - the last made three months ago (end of January). Can anyone help? When trying to run a backup the screen shows:
Select Disc (which I have already done)
704 GB of 1 TB available
Oldest backup: none
A continuosly revolving progress bar
"Preparing Backup"
Note that when I run Time Machine in order to restore, all backups prior to Jan 30th are there.
I am running OSX Mountain LIon Version 10.8.3

Mickmannock wrote:
I followed the proceedure described to delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist. However I note that there are very many versions of this file in other locations.
There shouldn't be. Delete any others.
Make sure the one you deleted was in your top-level /Library folder (not the Library folder inside your home folder). If you got the right one, when you went back to the Time Machine Preferences window, it should not have shown your TM drive or anything else.
I am running Parallels 8 and windows 7 in a Virtual machine, but these do not appear to have created problems in the past - over two years now.
You probably should exclude the VM files from Time Machine backups. That shouldn't be the cause of much of this problem, but may be a problem in the future. The reason is, to OSX, a VM file is one huge file -- if anything at all is changed, TM considers the whole thing changed, and will back it up again, taking time and lots of space on your backup disk.
Have you Verified your internal HD, and Repaired any other disks being backed-up, and your backups, per #A5 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting?
What are you backing-up to (external HD, Time Capsule, etc.)?

Time machine doesn't backup EHD

I have 2 EHD: one 500gb with two partitions (music and photos) and a 1TB with two other partitions one of which is my time machine. The issue is that time machine does not backup the Photos partition of the other EHD. It does the other one fine. I have verified the preferences panel and everything seems OK, meaning that that partition is not in the exclude list. What can I do?

docdowney wrote:
I have 2 EHD: one 500gb with two partitions (music and photos) and a 1TB with two other partitions one of which is my time machine. The issue is that time machine does not backup the Photos partition of the other EHD. It does the other one fine. I have verified the preferences panel and everything seems OK, meaning that that partition is not in the exclude list. What can I do?
How is the Photos partition formatted? If it's any variant of +Mac OS Extended,+ it should be backed-up. If it's anything else, it should be listed in the exclusions box, in gray, meaning Time Machine cannot back it up.
There is an occasional problem with iPhoto: if iPhoto is open, Time Machine may not be able to back the iPhoto library up: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4116 But unless iPhoto is open all the time, sooner or later, it should be backed-up.
Note, however, that you won't see much of the iPhoto Library via the "Star Wars" display via the Finder; just the library, not the contents. Try the procedure in the pink box in #15 of [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).
If you're still sure it's not getting backed-up, put a small test file on that partition, outside of the iPhoto library, then run a backup and see if the test file gets backed-up.

Time Machine 2nd Copy Backup

My question is: is it possible for me to backup a second copy of my computer onto a second hard disk that is partitioned with one partition FAT32 and the other Mac Extended?
I use Time Machine to back up my computer to an external hard drive and it works fine. I am now paranoid and want to have a second backup. I have a second external hard drive that is ready to go - maybe. This second external hard drive is partitioned so that one part is FAT32 for compatibility with a PC. The other partition is Mac Extended (not journaled) as this was the instructions given by Tech Support for this hard drive (WD Passbook Studio). I would like to back up the hard drive to the Apple partition of the second hard drive, and use Time Machine.
In looking through the help files, couldn't find anything about using Time Machine to create backups of the same hard disk on two different hard drives - I could envision that Time Machine might get confused unless it specifically first reads some type of information file when scanning the backup.
Second, there was one discussion file that suggested the external hard drive needs to be formatted HFS. When i tried to format the partitioned external hard drive, it wouldn't allow me to format one partition with Apple Partition map and the other with Master Boot Record (necessary for the FAT partition), so I had to have both as Master Boot Record. However, the Apple partition is still formatted as Mac Extended.

Thanks. I think the solution is to use two different backup programs that backup by different means.
The archive attribute is an attribute with each file (I read through Silverkeeper and it uses this). It has to settings - "a" and "". When you create or edit a file, it is set to "a". When you back it up, the back up program resets it to "". So a backup program can quickly scan the hard drive for all files that are set to "a" and know that only these files were changed.
In non-Time Machine programs, a full backup backs up all files regardless of the attribute setting, and a differential backup backs up all files that have "a" set to it, and resets the "a" to "". Some programs have an additional setting where it backs it up, but does not reset to "a". There are times when this is convenient because it gives you copies of changes made each day since the last full backup (useful for business) but not if you work on a lot of files each day because then it becomes time consuming by the end of the week, unless your backups are run overnight.
Just to make sure, I will try this out and post a message later indicating if this indeed worked.

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.

Time Machine mixed two backups

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for