Time machine not doing incremental backups - instead doing full backups

hi,
Time machine does a complete full backup, and then instead of doing incremental backups, it wants to keep doing full backups.
help.

why do you think it's doing full backups?
install TimeMachineBuddy widget and see exactly what it says. also install TimeTracker and see what exactly is being backed up every time
http://www.charlessoft.com/
but first, verify both the internal and TM drive with disk utility. verify disk, not permissions. if it reports any errors repair both drives. you'll need to boot from the snow leopard DVD to repair the main startup drive.
also, see Pondini's troubleshooting tips at the top of the TM forum.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2057525
Message was edited by: V.K.

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HT3275 Time Machine not deleting oldest backups when the disk is full

Time Machine not deleting oldest backups when the disk is full

Unfortunately, when this happens, Time Machine cannot erase enough space to create room for the new backup. Your options now are:
1) Add a new Time Capsule or a hard drive to the USB port on the existing Time Capsule and continue with backups
2) Manually delete backups from Time Machine....which is a long and tedious process. After a few hours, not much space will be reclaimed and it will not be long before the Time Capsule is full again
3) Erase the Time Capsule....if you really do not need all the old backups from months ago....and start over with a new Time Machine backup and move forward again

Time machine not consolidating hourly backups

For some reason my time machine isn't consolidating backups at the end of the day/week/month. On my time machine drive, I currently have hourly backups going back over 2 months.
As you may imagine, this eats up a lot of storage.
Does anyone have any ideas what might be causing this?

That's odd. Mine go away after 24 hours like clockwork.
As VA2020 says, it's probably not a significant space problem, but worth investigating, especially after that long a time.
I'd suggest downloading the Time Machine Buddy widget, which extracts TM's messages from your logs and displays them in a little window. Check your last few backups, especially for messages about "thinning".
As an example, here's my most recent set, showing routine deletion of an hourly:
*Starting standard backup*
*Backing up to: /Volumes/TmBackups/Backups.backupdb*
*No pre-backup thinning needed: 133.2 MB requested (including padding), 175.83 GB available*
*Copied 492 files (2.7 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.*
*Starting post-backup thinning*
*Deleted backup /Volumes/TmBackups/Backups.backupdb/JPs.G5.iMac/2009-01-19-191145: 175.83 GB now available*
*Post-back up thinning complete: 1 expired backups removed*
*Backup completed successfully.*
If yours look hinky (pardon the technical term), especially any sort of failure message, or not being able to delete old backups, copy and post them here (be careful to get all the messages, as they often overflow the little window).
One question: have you used any of the 3rd part apps or postings about modifying TM's preference file to alter the backup schedule?

Time Machine not thinning older backups (Hourly= Daily= Weekly)

Ever since upgrading to Snow Leopard, Time machine has kept hourly backups of my computer.
In the past under 10.5, after about 24 hours, TM would delete all but the last hourly backup of the day and keep daily backups for 30 days, then after about 30 days delete the daily backups except for 1 per week and keep weekly backups thereafter.
Now, TM does it's hourly backups like normal, but I have hourly backups from today all they way back to 29 August (about 24 hours prior to when I upgraded to 10.6) and then weekly backups from that date until 30 July (i.e. about 30 days prior to the upgrade).
Called AppleCare and talked to 2 different people. Both questioned whether TM really was even supposed to thin old backups like this (um, it's written in the da^^ preference pane, guys) and one admitted that he doesn't even use a Mac at home and that in the support office they don't have TM on their macs, so he's never used it!
Needless to say, not sure how to a) get TM to start thinning the backups like it should and b) also thin out all the previous backups so I don't have a 2 month glut of frequent backups.
I've looked all over and found nothing. Anyone with some advice? I'd like to avoid killing all my backups and starting over.

Forensic
I suggest you follow the advice posted above by V.K., once installed it will provide a log of what TM is doing.
Once you have that info, post back here and someone far wiser than I will help you to resolve the issue.

Time Machine Not Overwriting Older Backups

Time Machine is telling me that the 1TB backup disk is full, albeit there is 62GB of available space (why is TM stating it's full?). In any event, TM is not overwriting the older backups. How can this be enabled?
Thank you!

About TM "Backup Drive is Full"
Alert TM only deletes older files if they have been deleted from the source and when TM needs space on the backup drive for a new incremental backup. Time Machine "thins" it's backups; hourly backups over 24 hours old, except the first of the day; those "daily" backups over 30 days old, except the first of the week. The weeklies are kept as long as there's room.
So, how long a backup file remains depends on how long it was on your Mac before being deleted, assuming you do at least one backup per day. If it was there for at least 24 hours, it will be kept for at least a month. If it was there for at least a week, it will be kept as long as there's room.
Note, that on a Time Capsule the sparsebundle grows in size as needed, but doesn't shrink. Thus, from the user's view of the TC it appears that no space has been freed, although there may be space in the sparsebundle.
Once TM has found it cannot free up enough space for a new backup it reports the disk is full. You can either erase the backup drive and start your backups anew or replace the drive with a larger drive.

Does Time Machine still do incremental backups after a restore?

Hi --
We have a 500GB external iomega drive that just died and I have been working to restore it's files from Time Machine onto a new 500 GB drive. I formatted the new drive and gave it the same name as the old one, and it looks like Time Machine was smart enough to do the right thing and restore the files to their original locations.
However, this morning -- within 24 hours of completing the restore -- we see an error message from TM saying it is out of space and it cannot perform a backup. It claims that about 450 GB are needed, which is about the same size of all the files we restored. Is it possible that once backup files are restored they are not longer considered backed up, and thus Time Machine immediately tries to back up all the files it just restored? I assumed it would still do incremental backups but recognize that restored files do not need to be backed up again unless / until they are edited...
Thanks,
Ram on

felciano wrote:
Hi --
We have a 500GB external iomega drive that just died and I have been working to restore it's files from Time Machine onto a new 500 GB drive. I formatted the new drive and gave it the same name as the old one, and it looks like Time Machine was smart enough to do the right thing and restore the files to their original locations.
That's quite unusual. Normally it does a full backup immediately: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1338
See #C4 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).

Why does Time machine not delete old backups

I dont understand Why time machine is not deleting old backups. As it worked first time with the same size backup drive as the drive its backing up, I assumed it would just delete the old backup as needed. Do I need a bigger backup drive?

Roglee wrote:
I just want it to delete the old backup & replace it so i just have a copy. I guess i could just re format the drive each time but that just seems a waste of my time when TM should do this for me!
If this is all you want to do, turn off Time Machine, download SuperDuper! and use it for free. This will clone whatever drive you want and the free trial will erase your back up drive each time. I can't remember if it will let you choose what to back up or if it wants the entire drive. Also, I'm not sure if the Scheduler works with the free trial. Below are some verbiage for SuperDuper!. Looks like if you want Scheduling you will have to purchase a license.
Download Now!
You can download SuperDuper! v2.7.1 right now and back up and clone your drives for free— forever!
Buy Now!
Buy now to unlock scheduling, Smart Update (which saves a lot of time), Sandboxes, scripting and more!
Time Machine will keep making back ups and when it determines it needs space, it will delete older back ups. But it doesn't delete older ones each time it backs up.

Time Machine not doing any backups.

Hello,
Recently, my TM is unable to do any backups on my Imac. It was working before, however when I initiate the backup now... it starts with the message "Calculating changes" and it sat there the whole night.
When I verify the log it tells me the following:
"No space left on device...Waiting for index to be ready".
Can someone help me resolve this issue... I tried deleteing all old backups but while it got to removing 5 million or so files... it gave me an error on delete..
Can someone help please?
Thanks,

_To erase the Time Capsule disk:_
Open AirPort Utility (Hard Drive > Applications > Utilities > AirPort Utility)
Click Manual Setup
Click the Disks icon at the top of the setup window
Click the Disks tab just below the icons
Click Erase. The "Zero Out Data" option will work fine, but may take several hours.
If AirPort Utility cannot "see" the Time Capsule and you are using wireless for this, try temporarily connecting an ethernet cable from your computer to one of the LAN <-> ports on the Time Capsule.
_To setup Time Machine backups:_
Open System Preferences (gear shaped icon on the dock)
Click Time Machine
Click Change Disk
Click your Time Capsule to highlight it
Click Use for Backups

Time Machine repeatedly does full backups, including FileVault while logged in

So let me preface this - for months I'd hoped for a way that Time Machine could backup my FileVault encrypted account without logging out. Last night Snow Leopard spontaneously started doing this. I know many may think that I'm looking a gift horse in the mouth, but read further and hopefully someone can help me make sense of this.
Last night I attached my external 1TB USB hard drove to my 15" MBP (spring 2010 model) running OS X 10.6.7. It started doing a Time Machine backup automatically, as usual. Since I was logged into my account that uses FileVault (a massive home folder - 220GB) I expected a fast backup of things only outside my home folder. As i looked at the details, however, i quickly realized that it was backing up all 270GB of data on my hard drive - including my FileVault account while still logged in!
At first i thought i just got lucky - i'd been craving this feature for years and it just happened to me without even doing anything. Curious guy that i am, i logged out of my acct with my USB drive still attached to see what would happen. After FileVault cleared out space in my home folder, it did _another_ backup, that took about 10 minutes to complete. This seemed strange so i logged back in and started another backup manually. To my utter shock, it started doing the whole 270GB over again!
I even cleared out my TM drive, erased, reformatted, checked permissions, etc etc and did the same on my system drive, hoping that it was just a matter of broken permissions. No change.
So there's two things going on here and i'm pretty concerned about both:
1) Why is TM backing up my entire encrypted home folder while i'm still logged in??? Apple has clearly designed TM and FV to NOT work this way for data integrity reasons and the fact that it's happening has me freaked out a bit over the reliability of my backups.
2) Why is TM doing full backups after each time i login to my account? If i stay logged in, it appears to only do incremental (normal) backups but if i logout, then re-login and allow the hour to pass and let a backup start on its own, it starts the whole 270GB again.
I'm getting to the point of wiping the system and starting from scratch but since i presently live in a country with no Apple store and extremely poor internet access, that prospect horrifies me
any ideas?
many thanks,
-Tim

Thanks for the input Pondini -
I tried deleting the file as mentioned in #A4 and it still had the problem. Last weekend i finally got a brand new hard drive and reinstalled OSX 10.6.3 from scratch, then promptly applied the 10.6.7 combo update. I purposely chose to NOT import my old user from backup and instead set up everything again manually (royal pain, but the only way i could be sure that i wouldn't bring the problem with me). Today i whipped out my TimeMachine drive and set it up for backups. I crossed my fingers and it AGAIN started backing up all 250+GB of my system from within my FileVault protected account.
My wife's MBP is still running 10.6.4 and i'm beginning to wonder if his is an issue with 10.6.7 since i'm relatively certain i didn't experience this before that upgrade.
I've checked my wife's exclusions under Options and her home folder is NOT in that list, yet her TM is not attempting to backup everything until she logs out of her FV acct.
In response to Linc Davis, _yes_ it was backing up my info into a sparsebundle file, not just the raw unencrypted data, which is extremely strange.
If i DO add my home folder to the exclude list, will it still be backed up when i log out?
At this point, i'm thinking my next steps are:
1) try a different TM backup drive, even though i've wiped and checked my current drive numerous times
2) downgrade to an older version of Snow Leopard to see if 10.6.7 is the culprit
Any other ideas?

Safari bookmarks lost - Time Machine not doing his job ?!?!

I recently made a clean install of my system (10.6.6). I backed up everything before, did it again to make sure it was really backed up, and then I inserted the DVD.
Now back in OS X, I wanted to take my bookmarks from my back up. I know where they are /user/Library/Safari/bookmarks.plist
The thing is that this bookmark file is like a couple of days old. There are bookmarks that should be there that aren't ! Same thing with the history.plist file : I looked at it while thinking of the last websites I went to before doing the back ups and these websites aren't there too !
What's wrong with Time Machine ? I ******* hate it when machines don't do there job correctly.
Is there a place where these missing bookmarks might be ? Or should I start using something else than Time Machine ? Where's the problem ?
Thanks in advance.
(edit: sorry, wrong subforum : this belongs in the Mac OS X v10.6)
Message was edited by: jeremu19

You might have been bitten by a fairly rare but long-known bug in Snow Leopard. See the yellow box in #D5 of [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).
Probably no way to tell at this late date whether that was the cause or not.

Time Machine Repeatedly Does Full Backup

I have five volumes with about 3.7TB of data backing up to Time Machine on a four drive Drobo with 4.9TB available. I've excluded troublesome files such as the Aperture Library. I've only two internal drives, one SSD and another two SSD raid. All other drives work via USB, USB 3.0, Firewire 800 (Drobo) and a proprietary 3waresidecar raid drive. The external drives are not always present.
It takes days to do a fresh backup of 3.7TB and then things work fine for a few days and then, once again, a full backup is started.
I've not changed the computer name, done a restore, or done any service to any drives.
I would be appreciative of any suggestions as to what I must do in order to get Time Machine functioning.
Thanks...

Thanks for the input Pondini -
I tried deleting the file as mentioned in #A4 and it still had the problem. Last weekend i finally got a brand new hard drive and reinstalled OSX 10.6.3 from scratch, then promptly applied the 10.6.7 combo update. I purposely chose to NOT import my old user from backup and instead set up everything again manually (royal pain, but the only way i could be sure that i wouldn't bring the problem with me). Today i whipped out my TimeMachine drive and set it up for backups. I crossed my fingers and it AGAIN started backing up all 250+GB of my system from within my FileVault protected account.
My wife's MBP is still running 10.6.4 and i'm beginning to wonder if his is an issue with 10.6.7 since i'm relatively certain i didn't experience this before that upgrade.
I've checked my wife's exclusions under Options and her home folder is NOT in that list, yet her TM is not attempting to backup everything until she logs out of her FV acct.
In response to Linc Davis, _yes_ it was backing up my info into a sparsebundle file, not just the raw unencrypted data, which is extremely strange.
If i DO add my home folder to the exclude list, will it still be backed up when i log out?
At this point, i'm thinking my next steps are:
1) try a different TM backup drive, even though i've wiped and checked my current drive numerous times
2) downgrade to an older version of Snow Leopard to see if 10.6.7 is the culprit
Any other ideas?

Time machine not deleting oldest backup on full network drive

Hi All,
I backup my iMac over the network to a share on a mac Mini. After around three months, the share is full. I expected Time Machine to just start deleting old backups, but it is not.
Time Machine gives me the following error:
"This backup is too large for the backup volume".
This is correct, but i thought Time Machine should have just deleted the oldest backup in this instance? Or does this not work when backing up over the network?
Thanks in advance for help and advice.
Cheers,
mdavis75
Message was edited by: mdavis75

I have the exact same problem, but I am not using TM over a network... Only my local Mac Pro w/ a 600gb external drive. I recall back when I first got Leopard that time machine did in fact ask me if I wanted it to delete old backups after the drive filled up. Then one day it randomly decided to not delete old backups anymore... Instead displaying the same error message you get.
Can anyone help? (Besides telling me not to back up certain files, and to do it less often. Those are BS solutions! I want my entire HD backed up every time automatically erasing old backups when necessary. Is that too much to ask for?)

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).

Time Machine not backing up - Backup disc could not be found

Time Machine has not backed up since April 2 because the backup disc could not be found. It was working prior to this. I cannot restore from prior backups - Restore button is greyed out. Time Capsule is not connected in AirPort Utility.

Installed Dr. Cleaner 3/29 and Memory Clean 3/29 - both were updates.
That.....is the problem. Time Machine does not like "cleaners", "optimizers", "keepers".....anything like that. Your Mac does not need these types of applications since they generally do more harm than good.
Anti-virus applications will drive Time Machine crazy as well.
My advice would be to remove this type of software from your Mac according to the software manufacturer's instructions.
Then power cycle the entire network.
If the Time Capsule disk comes back into view, you should run a Verify Disk operation as soon as possible. Your backups may now likely be corrupted, and if that is the case, Time Machine will not be able to back up until you erase the Time Capsule disk and try to start over again with a new backup.

Time Machine not performing automatic backups

Time Machine performs a backup when I select Back Up Now, and the Time Machine preferences shows that a backup is scheduled, but Time Machine is not performing automatic backups. How can I can it to perform automatic backups?

The same thing happened to me a while ago. Doing a full reset solved the problem.
Start with A4 in the 1st linked article.
Time Machine Troubleshooting
Time Machine Troubleshooting Problems

Time machine not doing incremental backups - instead doing full backups

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