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

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Time Machine not performing routine backups

Hi all,
I noticed recently that Time Machine has not been completing my scheduled backups. A full backup has not been completed since December of 2011. The backups start but never progress past "Preparing Backup", today I let it sit with no other applications open or processes running for 4 hours and nothing occured.
I have reviewed many discussions here and so far nothing seems to be working. I deleted the preference file and have powered the Time Machine off and on to no avail.
Here is a snippet of the log from my latest attempt at running a backup. I'm sure I need to give more information but I'm not sure what that is. I would appreciate any help.
QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN
Disk image /Volumes/Data-1/Jen Bradshaw’s MacBook Pro.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Capsule
Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Capsule/Backups.backupdb
Error writing to backup log. NSFileHandleOperationException:*** -[NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:]: No space left on device
Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Macintosh HD
Error writing to backup log. NSFileHandleOperationException:*** -[NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:]: No space left on device
Exception writing exclusions cache. NSFileHandleOperationException:*** -[NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:]: No space left on device
Unable to create exclusions cache data.
Failed to write exclusions cache. Continuing anyway.
Error writing to backup log. NSFileHandleOperationException:*** -[NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:]: No space left on device
Waiting for index to be ready (101)
Waiting for index to be ready (101)
Waiting for index to be ready (101)
Waiting for index to be ready (101)
Waiting for index to be ready (101)
Waiting for index to be ready (101)
Waiting for index to be ready (101)

volley15 wrote:
Error writing to backup log. NSFileHandleOperationException:*** -[NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:]: No space left on device
That's a problem writing to the (hidden) log Time Machine keeps on the Time Capsule, not your internal drive. (As Linc says, you also need free space on your internal).
Do you have other data there, besides Time Machine backups? Usually that's how this condition happens -- Time Machine always leaves a bit of space, so the next backup can get started, see if there's enough room for the backup and if necessary start deleting old backups to make room. But if the very last of the free space gets used, it can't get started.
First, connect via Ethernet cable if at all possible. What you have to do, and the next backup, will take a while, but be 2-3 times faster than via WIFI.
If you have other data there, copy some of it elsewhere and delete it (50 MB should be enough), and copy it back after the next backup completes.
If there isn't any other data there, delete your oldest backup, per Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #12, and "compact" the sparse bundle per the pink box there.
The next backup will take quite a while -- TM has to do a "deep scan" first, to see what needs to be backed-up (since the previous backup failed), then "compact" the sparse bundle, then start deleting backups to make room.
Once you get this sorted out, if you have other data on the TC, see #Q3 in Using Time Machine with a Time Capsule for some workarounds to keep this from happening again.
Message was edited by: Pondini

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 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.

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 performing housekeeping - previous days' & weeks' multiple backups remaining

As you can see from this image, time machine stopped cleaning backups from previous days and weeks.
A bit of background, this is a networked backup for a MacBook Pro. (Thus, the backups only happen when I'm at home on my home network.) The MBP: OS 10.8.4 2.4 GHz, 8 Gb: 750 Gb drive, currently using 125 Gb - 625 Gb free.
The time machine "drive" is a 350 Gb partition on a 1 Tb drive, 75 Gb free; the other parition has the time machine backup for another MBP, also OS X 10.8.4; this problem does not occur on that time machine partition with that computer. The problem started on 5/12 with previous days multiple entries not being deleted. (The timing does not seem to align with a software update: 10.8.3 on 3/25 and 10.8.4 on 6/6.)
One more thing, backups take much longer (around 25 minutes for just a few Mbs) than they do on the other MBP which uses the other partition. The other MBP has many more files and folders and the .sparsebundle is bigger (252 Gb).
I have read through Pondini's wonderfully thorough website on time machine (pondini.org) and looked through discussions here. All seem to focus on ways in which time machine prunes old backups to make space. In my case, space is not (yet) a problem, but I am concerned that these problems indicate time machine is not working properly and that there may be other problems.

I gave it a try last night. For the record it is item A4 at the pondini.org site. The result:
- the back up was 1.43 Gb (rather large considering that the only activity on the MBP since the previous backup had been to read mail).
- no change to the list of previous back up entries and the mulitple backups from the last few days were not pruned (that is, the problem perists).
- I looked at the backups using the Time Machine interface and only the ones snce removing the .plst are visible. (All of the prior backups are still visible using the finder interface looking at the mounted virtual disk.)

Time machine not deleting old backups of recovery partition

I have a Mac Mini running Lion Server. I have an external disk partitioned with a space for network backups and a smaller partition for backing up the server itself. The server has a 160GB disk, it is only using 29.27GB, the partition for backing up the server is 152GB (it's what was left over after creating the partition for the network backups). I figured since I'm only using about 30GB, 152GB should be plenty of space. However after 3 months of use I get the error "the backup is too large for the backup disk". In the past I have formatted the partition and restarted the backups, however it always fills up after 3 months. This time I decided to dig into it a bit more. I looked to see what was available in my backup, it only has one previous restore point. I browsed the disk and opened the backups.backupdb folder, checked the size of the folder with the computer name, it is only 9.44GB. I was wondering where all of the space went so I enabled hidden files, I found the .RecoverySets folder and found it was taking up 141.95GB. I looked at the recovery sets, there are 295 copies of com.apple.recovery.boot which all seem to contain the following files:
.disk_label                         749b
BaseSystem.chunklist       2KB
BaseSystem.dmg              454.6MB
boot.efi                              864KB
com.apple.Boot.plist          431b
kernelcache                       24.1MB
PlatformSupport.plist         2KB
SystemVersion.plist           478b
Of those files, the only file not dated Aug 11, Oct 6 or 12, 2011 is com.apple.Boot.plist which has a date that corresponds to when the backup was performed. These backups go all the way back to Jan 30, the last time I formatted the partition, but the user data backups only go back to the 27th and it hasn't been able to complete a backup since.
I thought Time Machine was supposed to only backup data that had changed since the last backup, and delete old revisions when space is running low, it seems that it is copying more than just the data that changed since the last backup and only deleting old revisions of user data, not system data. Is there a way to fix this permanently?

See C18 in the first linked article. Also, your backup drive should be 2-4 times your hard drive capacity.
Time Machine Troubleshooting
Time Machine Troubleshooting Problems

Time Machine not making restorable backups

I've been having a few problems with Time Machine - this began when I un-installed Boot Camp, having reluctantly had to invest in a full Windows PC - and discovered that both the utility and recovery system were unable to repartition the Hard Drive in my MBP back to full size. Currently, OSX effectively uses 380GB of a 500GB HD (less space taken by partitioning, recovery partition, etc...) I was particularly perturbed by the error thrown up by Disk Utility in OSX recovery that it was unable to dismount the HD for repartitioning, irrelevent the size I attempted to make the new OSX partition.
Having exausted options I was aware of then, I decided the safe option was to re-install OSX to the entire HD, restoring it from the Time Machine backup, but (checking that this was feasible before starting) I found that the last restorable backup Time Machine claimed to have was from 2011, about the time I moved from my previous MBP to this one. I reformatted the drive Time Machine was installed on, and setup the programme from scratch again to try and create a useable backup, but in spite of this it refuses to work properly - Time Machine claims to have backed up, but upon trying to use the backup the restore programme states it isn't there. For reference, I'm using a 1TB, FireWire 800 external HD for the backups.
At this point, I've run out of knowledge of how OSX works, and would really like some help getting things back on an even keel. Obviously, my major concern is that I'm not getting proper backups anymore, but I would also like to recover the space on my HD that's otherwise lost. Googling the problem led me to an issue which sometimes occurs that Time Machine can get flagged to ignore system files, but checking through Terminal it appears that that isn't the case (all it's set to ignore is my Steam folder, as that's all available online anyway.) Might anyone be able to help with this?
Many thanks in advance.

This simple procedure will clear your Time Machine settings, including exclusions. The backups won't be affected. If you have a long exclusion list that can't be recreated easily, you may prefer a more complicated procedure that preserves the exclusion list. In that case, ask for instructions. Otherwise, do as follows.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist
Right-click or control-click the highlighted line and select
Services ▹ Reveal
from the contextual menu.* A Finder window should open with a file selected. Copy the file to the Desktop. Then move it (the original, not the copy) to the Trash. You'll be prompted for your administrator password. Reboot and recreate your settings in the Time Machine preference pane. It will show that you have no backups. Don't worry; that's expected. Run a backup to test. The backup may take much longer than usual. If TM now performs as expected, delete the file you copied to the Desktop.
*If you don't see the contextual menu item, copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. In the Finder, select
Go ▹ Go to Folder...
from the menu bar, paste into the box that opens (command-V). You won't see what you pasted because a line break is included. Press return.

OS X 10.7 Time Machine not deleting old backups to make space

after upgrading to 10.7, Time Machine no longer deletes old (over a year old) backups to make space when needed. Drive now full. Cannot manually delete and Time Machine does not seem to have a function to perform a deletion.

See C18 in the first linked article. Also, your backup drive should be 2-4 times your hard drive capacity.
Time Machine Troubleshooting
Time Machine Troubleshooting Problems

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?)

Time machine keeps performing full backup to my new time capsule

After years of perfect time machine function to a local usb drive, I bought a time capsule and reconfigured time machine to backup there for my wife's macbook air and my macbook pro.
The macbook air time machine is running perfectly. However after a week or so the time machine on my macbook pro has repeatedly performed a full backup and lost all the backup history. I clearly cannot keep on like this and find it very worrying that this piece of technology, even if it loses connection for some reason, is not robust enough to recover the incremental backup?
Is this a weakness of time machine design? or is there something obvious I need to check?

try if this user tip helps.

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 deleting old backups...

I am on Mavericks 10.9.1 and get the following error:
"The backup disk needs48.93 GB for the backup but only 30.99 are available. Select a larger backup disk or make the backup smalled by excluding files."
I recently had to unplug my external HD which I use for time machine back-ups, this error started when I plugged it back in just a few days ago. I have exlcuded some files from the back up and still get the error. My internal HD has 475.62GB of data on it, and I am trying to back up to a 500GB external HD, the total size of my backup is roughly 465GB.
Seems like I should have enough space for a back-up and TM should delete the old back-ups. I have been through a search of the forum and online and have not found a solution. Has anyone ran into this?
Thanks for the help!

I believe I was told that If you had older backups like ML and your disk is getting full it will not delete these because you are now backing up a new OS (Mavericks). It only deletes older backups of the same OS you are now using.

Time Machine Not Recognizing Old Backups after getting hard drive replaced

Hello! I have a 13' Black Macbook pro which had a faulty hard drive so I had it replaced. Ever since then, all my old backups in Time Machine have been grayed out. I have no idea how to fix this and have tried almost everything on the web.
The only folder that allows me to "go back in time" is my Macintosh HD folder which I know I can access everything but it's a huge nuisance to not be able to click on a folder and go back in time in the same folder.
I just want things the way they used to be! Thanks for the help!

Hi, and welcome to the forums.
The problem is, you have a different HD. Even if it has the same name and contents as the old one, it's still a different HD, and Time Machine treats it as a different one.
There's no way to fool it into thinking it's not.
Technically, it has a different UUID (Universally Unique IDentifier); that's what OSX uses to keep track of drives, not their names.
As you do new backups, you'll be able to access them just as you did with the old drive.

Time Machine not performing automatic backups

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