Time machine on different Volumes

Hey there,
maybe it is just me but is it only possible to choose one Volume as a Time machine Backup destination for all the connected users? I used to setup different volumes as a Time Machine backup destination so that every user had his/her own partition to use. So that not one person would wind up using the whole hdd. Let's say I want to backup 20 people. How do I setup Time Machine in Server app to backup 5 people to Volume 1 let's say and the next 5 to Volume 2 etc. Or even better. Can't I just use mulitple partition as a possible Time Machine backup destination as I used to in SL Server.
Thanks for the help

Hi!
I have a similar problem. Everything worked fine in Snow Leopard Server, and the configuration (using several shared TM volumes) survived the Lion Server upgrade. Now, when I want add another TM share, I noticed I couldn't.
Still hoping to find a solution in Lion Server, than 'downgrade' (upgrade) to SL Server 10.6.
I sincerely hope that a Apple product manager reads our concerns.

Similar Messages

I have not been able to back up for2 days. Time machine error message: /Volumes/Data/David's MacBook Air.sparsebundle" is already in use.

I have not been able to back up for2 days. Time machine error message: /Volumes/Data/David’s MacBook Air.sparsebundle” is already in use.
What now?
Macbook Air.
Was working fine for the past year until now.

See more like this on the right.. this is the most common error reported here since mountain lion came out..
Or read C12.. http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
Or just restart the whole network.. in right order from off.. modem.. router / TC.. clients 2min gap.

How to prevent Time Machine from ejecting volume?

I just set up a Buffalo Cloustor NAS (which is working very nicely, thank you) and one of its features is that it plays nice with Time Machine backups. I also recently took advantage of a MacUpdate promo on Back-In-Time. BIT works fine as long as the NAS backup volume is mounted but for some reason Time Machine ejects that volume when it's finished its backups. I've seen similar problems in threads of non-Lion version of OSX but they seemed to be troubles with USB or FW drives rather than an Ethernet NAS. I'd rather keep the NAS volume mounted so I can use this 3rd party app.
Here is a copy of the console messages filtered on "time machine" for the relevant time period:
3/24/12 7:11:03.180 PM
com.apple.backupd
Disk image /Volumes/cloudshare/Mini2009’s Mac mini.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
3/24/12 7:11:03.196 PM
com.apple.backupd
Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
3/24/12 7:12:37.276 PM
com.apple.backupd
Ejected Time Machine disk image.
3/24/12 7:12:37.678 PM
com.apple.backupd
Ejected Time Machine network volume.
Is there a way of telling Time Machine to not eject when finished? I'm comfortable writing stuff using Terminal if that's what it takes.
Thanks!
-Tod

BordeauxQuill wrote:
If it is useful to anyone else, these are Western Digital My Passport Studio 640GB drives.
Yup, you're the 3rd or 4th to report it with various models of WDs (one fellow had 3 of them!), and a few weeks ago someone had some Iomegas, I think, too.
This confusion may well also explain some weird stats in Get Info I noticed last week (such as the drive apparently having used more bytes than its capacity, as I recall).
Quite likely.
Thank you for your support. I shall come back and mark the thread resolved when I have reformatted the drive.
Cool. Also double-check the contents of the one you don't erase; you may find some extra stuff there.

Time machine cannot find volume, error-1. Where can I fine solution for this error? Have latest updates for Airport and TM, running Lion.

Time machine cannot find volume, error-1. Where can I fine solution for this error? Have latest updates for Airport Utility and TM, running Lion.

See #C17 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

Time Machine - "The backup volume could not be mounted" alert

This is a heads-up for anybody suffering from this error when performing Time Machine backups:
"The backup volume could not be mounted"
I had been using this facility fine for months until a few days ago when backing up mysteriously failed. The Apple support KB articles didn't help (eg, reset time machine drive setup, etc).
Apple Support didn't want to help me because they don't "support backups over networks" - sheesh! What happened to "Think Different!"??
Drag and drop your SPARSEBUNDLE file from your backup drive to the Disk Utility.
Perform a Verify Disk operation by clicking on the button.
A normal backup should be able to perform this procedure, but a corrupted one won't.
When trying to perform this on my backup, the Disk Utility would simply return to the original screen without performing anything a second after pressing the button.
In this case, I found deleting the old backup file and starting from scratch restored my computers ability to perform automated Time Machine backups.
I have concluded that the backup file became corrupted in some way - several previous posts have pointed to systems going into standby while backing up files as the cause of this.
Hopefully someone finds this useful one day.

There is a Time Machine preferences file at
<your startup drive root>/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist
Note: This is be main Library folder, not the one in your user folder.
You might try moving that to the Desktop so that the system creates a new one.

Time Machine says "Backup volume could not be found"

Okay, I know what I did; now I need help in untangling an unintended consequence.
I surmise from the error message (and from some info from Time Machine Buddy widget) that the problem is the cookie doesn't match.
"Cookie file is not readable or does not exist at path: /Volumes/BigBackup/.000d9356b794
Volume at path /Volumes/BigBackup does not appear to be the correct backup volume for
this computer. (Cookies do not match)
Backup failed with error: 18"
I can guess why: I had some significant cosmetic damage to my G5 desktop a week or so back, and I moved all internal parts -- drives, RAM, even the added cards -- over from the "injured" G5 to an identical G5 that I had in reserve. Booted up and ran perfectly, no problems with identification from any outside sources and all software thinks it's still "home" and is running fine.
However, if the cookie left by Time Machine on the backup uses a device identifier for the computer beyond just the basic computer network name (a safe guess!) then I see how I've created a problem -- yes???
So, without destroying all of my previous backups or rendering them unreadable from this machine, HOW can I fool Time Machine, the G5, the cookie, and/or the backup volume into believing they've all been in love forever and ignoring the "oops, it's just a clone" problem? Can I doctor or hack the cookie or otherwise un-mess my mess? Thanks!

Steve Jolly wrote:
However, if the cookie left by Time Machine on the backup uses a device identifier for the computer beyond just the basic computer network name (a safe guess!) then I see how I've created a problem -- yes???
Yes. Time Machine knows it's a different Mac, via the address that's embedded in the hardware of the replacement Mac's logic board.
So, without destroying all of my previous backups or rendering them unreadable from this machine, HOW can I fool Time Machine, the G5, the cookie, and/or the backup volume into believing they've all been in love forever and ignoring the "oops, it's just a clone" problem? Can I doctor or hack the cookie or otherwise un-mess my mess? Thanks!
You might be able to use the procedure in #C8 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

Time Machine Error -- Backup Volume is Read Only

I suddenly started getting this error today when Time Machine runs. I use a 1 TB WD My Book as my Time Machine drive. When I select get info on the backup folder on the WD drive and check sharing and Permissions tab, it states directly under this label that "you can only "read" even though I am the administrator and it shows me as having read and write access in the table below the "you can only read" message.
Any thoughts?

See the following:
What to do if Time Machine reports you don't have permission
This was posted in the Apple Discussions by V.K. I have only modified it slightly to be more generic.
The problem seems to be that 10.5.6 changes permissions on a file so that even the root user doesn't have write peivileges. I have no idea why they did this. The workaround suggested in [an]other post will probably work, too, but i did something less drastic. Instead of deleting the file I changed permissions on it, and it worked just fine. An added benefit is that the permission change seems to stick, so you don't have to delete the file every time you change a drive.
[Open the Terminal application in your Utilities folder. At the prompt [enter] the following command:
sudo chmod 644 /volumes/"TM drive name"/.xxxxxxxxxxxx
The name of the file .xxxxxxxxxxxx is based on the MAC address of your computer and will be different for every computer. Put the name of the TM drive in the above and keep the quotes.
You'll have to enter your admin password (which you won't see) which is normal.
This was edited by Kappy just for cleanup.
Enable Finder to Show Invisible Files and Folders
Open the Terminal application in your Utilities folder. At the prompt enter or paste the following command line then press RETURN.
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
To turn off the display of invisible files and folders enter or paste the following command line and press RETURN.
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
Alternatively you can use one of the numerous third-party utilities such as TinkerTool or ShowHideInvisibleFiles - VersionTracker or MacUpdate.

Time Machine to AFP volume is extremely slow after 10.5.2 update

I remember the time, after I have just installed the very first version of Leopard, when Time Machine was working with close to physical speed of my wireless network. Incremental backups would take less than a minute.
Comes 10.5.1. Time Machine became slower, but still tolerable: it might take up to 10 minutes to do an hourly backup.
Comes 10.5.2. Now Time Machine might take a couple of hours to do its "hourly" backup! 99% of the time it spends backing stuff up - when it shows the progress of the backup. So right now it says it's backing up 34.1 megabytes, and then it stopped at 1.4 megabytes, spent there about 15 minutes. Then it continued to about 9.5 megabytes, spend another 20 minutes there, without any progress, no CPU usage, very little network usage. Then it progressed to about 10.5 megabytes, and stuck again. Now it's at 15.2 megabytes, and been there for about 10 minutes already.
I use Airport Extreme base station with 802.11n at 5GHz, and the backup volume is on my Mac Mini, connected to AEBS via an ethernet cable, and during the phases when Time Machine gets stuck, I tested how the network works from my MacBook Pro, which I'm trying to backup to Mac Mini - constantly getting about 8-9 megabytes per second transfer rate, so clearly it's not that my wireless network is experiencing issues. Besides, the same problem persists even if I plug Ethernet cable directly into my MacBook Pro.
I've cleaned all caches, repaired permissions, repaired all volumes, rebuilt Spotlight indices on both my MacBook Pro and in the backup sparse bundle. The only thing it solved is insanely long "Preparing for backup" issue, but it DIDN'T solve the slow backup I have just described.
For comparison: rsync takes about a minute to do a full sync of my entire hard drive to the same AFP volume. Apple Backup 3.1.2 takes about as much. Time Machine - hours. I fail to even begin to imagine what in a world might they be doing there, spending this much time copying 34.1 megabytes of data over the network.
P.S. As I finish writing this, the backup progress is still at 15.2 magebytes. About 15 minutes now. A little over an hour now and not even half of the 34 megabytes is completed.
Message was edited by: Farlander
Message was edited by: Farlander

Is it slow wireless LAN behavior affecting Time Machine? Check out the third page of this thread, specificallly the post by John Albergo about "delay_ack."
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1394485&start=30&tstart=0
It helped me a lot.

Unable to prevent Time Machine backing up volume mounted from sparsebundle

I have a password-protected sparsebundle that contains my financial files, private data, etc, which I mount as a volume at startup. It's about 8GB. If I'm going to be away from my computer for a bit, I'll unmount the volume as an extra security measure.
I don't need or want Time Machine to back up the files INSIDE the volume, just the sparsebundle itself. If I needed to access a backup of a file inside the volume, I'd rather just pull up an earlier version of the sparsebundle, mount it, and find the file in there.
However, I've recently discovered that I can't exclude the mounted volume from Time Machine backups in the usual way - the volume name is greyed out when I go through the System Preferences/Time Machine pane, and won't let me select it to be excluded from backup.
So what's happening is that TM is backing up the contents of the volume, which is showing up as folders on the TM backup drive. Inside these folders is the complete listing (and actual data) of all the files in my secured volume!
Even if I UNmount the volume from my system, it's still possible to access the data via Time Machine.app (and via Finder, on the TM backup disk).
So, essentially, even though I've password protected the sparsebundle CONTAINING the data, all a person needs to get the data is to have access to my user account on my Mac, and they can get the data via the above methods.
Is there any way to allow TM to back up the sparsebundle itself, but not the listing of the contents (and data) of the mounted image?
It seems odd that I can exclude the volume contents from being indexed by Spotlight, but can't exclude them from being specifically backed up by Time Machine.
Thanks in advance for any assistance!

I have exactly the same issue. I cannot exclude the content of mounted disk images from my backup using the GUI (strangely on my other computer the content is not backuped).
I have manually edited with a text editor the preference file (Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist) today (I am using 10.6.3) and added in the SkipPaths section the mounting point of the disk image (typically /Volumes/NameofDisk ). So far so good. The corresponding folder appears in the backup but is empty.
Use at your own risk

Time Machine: The backup volume could not be found?

I keep getting the message "The backup volume could not be found" when I try to back up my Macbook Pro using an external Lacie USB harddrive. I have tried reformatting the harddrive, and restartet the computer. The external harddrive works normal in Finder, I am able to write and read it, but Time Machine still get this error message. Can anyone help me here?
When I look in the console log, it sais: Volume at path /Volumes/MBP Backup does not appear to be the correct backup volume for this computer. (Cookies do not match)
Where can I delete this cookies?

There is a Time Machine preferences file at
<your startup drive root>/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist
Note: This is be main Library folder, not the one in your user folder.
You might try moving that to the Desktop so that the system creates a new one.

Time Machine Excluding External Volumes?

The following threads discuss backing up external volumes using Time Machine.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5316613?start=30&tstart=0
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16591548#16591548
https://discussions.apple.com/message/6785149?searchText=Time%20Machine%20Exclud ing%20External%20Volumes#6785149
So apparently TM can backup external volumes but I have not been able to do so.
I've been experimenting with TM to backup external drives. It will not backup my external drive, even when I remove it from the exclusion list. It automatically re-added it to the exclusion list even though I explicitly removed it from that list.
My test:
- I plugged in a 1 GB thumb drive and formatted it as Mac OS Extended (journaled).
- I put some new files on it with unique filenames for a test.
- I told TM to run backups (several ones in sequence).
- I opened the thumb-drive volume then entered TM. TM showed only the current state with no backups.
I opened Preferences > Time Machine > Options… It listed the thumb drive as excluded. So I removed the exclusion.
I unmounted the thumb drive, mounted it again and repeated the experiment. Same result. It appeared in the exclusion list again.
What gives? How do I tell TM to backup external volumes (or not to exclude doing so)?

Yep. Read that before posting.
Also found https://discussions.apple.com/message/20711519#20711519
where Linc Davis says
External drives are automatically added to the Time Machine exclusion list. To back them up, remove them from the list. Volumes on the backup drive itself are automatically excluded, and you can't change that.
There is no reason why you shouldn't back up multiple volumes in Time Machine.
I did remove it from the exclusions list but TM added it back. What now?

Time Machine showing different excluded directories in each account?

I have two accounts on my Mac Mini running the latest OS X 10.6. I have Time Machine backing up my files to a Time Capsule. When I opened up the Options for Time Machine in my account, I see this:
When I open the same dialog box in my other account, I see this instead:
Notice how the two lists are different. Some items appear in both windows (e.g. ~/Downloads in my account is the same thing as /Users/timur/Downloads from my wife's account). But other things appear only in one window.
Can anyone explain this? How am I supposed to know what's really being backed up?

The symbol ~ means the home folder of the logged-on user.
See the tan box in #10 of Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions for details.

How do I access time machine from different user account

Hi there.
Last week I had to take my comupter into the local Apple Store because I was having problems with Boot Camp. The genius at the store had to delete everything from my hard drive and reinstall it from my external hard drive. As part of the process she created a "Apple" user account. I now want to restore some files (unrelated to this Boot Camp story) from my time machine archive. However, all the files prior to this Apple Store encounter are red -- and it says I do not have permission to view them. When I click "get info" it says that the "Apple" account has the read/write access to them and the option to unlock them is greyed out. How can I get these files from the archive and get them onto my main user account where they belong? The "Apple" account does not have a password so I think I can easily log on as that account, but I don't know where to go from there.
PS The files in question are iTunes libraries.
Thanks for your help.

Ok, I fixed it. Here's what I did.
I logged into my computer under the Apple account. Then I went into Time Machine. I found my old files under Users-->"my main account". I was able to restore those files to Users-->Shared. Then I was able to log back into "my main account" and retrieve the files from the shared folder. It worked! Hope this helps someone else some time!

Hard Drive and Time Machine backup Different Sizes

I had a lot of difficulty getting Time Machine to work with my new Time Capsule. It seems to work now but I noticed that on the initial backup the size of the backup data on Time Capsule was roughly 148 GB and my hard drive size is roughly 159 GB. If I were to do a backup would I discover that some of my data is missing? Or is it normal? I have not excluded anything from the backup. Thanks.

I sorted out the problem on my end, and perhaps the same thing will you help Gadifer. In my Aperture preferences, Library Location was incorrect - for some reason there are two. In my case it should be ~/Pictures/Aperture Library.aplibrary, whereas it had become ~/Pictures/My Pictures/Aperture Library.aplibrary (I don't recall changing in manually, and wasn't aware that there were two). When I check them in Finder, I see that the former is several GB, and therefore my actual library, while the latter is only 538 KB.

Time Machine on different machines

Hi
My recent attempted upgrade of a Snow Leopard Macbook Pro to Mavericks failed and in order to keep working I restored a backup of the machine to a brand new (Macericks) Mac Air, and then unmounted the Time Machine drive from the new Air machine. All good so far (apart from the pain of the Mavericks attempted upgrade).
Next, after eventually finding Snow Leopard install disk, I restored the original Macbook Pro from the same Time Machine backup.
I'm about to try and upgrade this machine (the original Pro) to Mavericks again, I suspect it will work this time as there's no Boot Camp drive, which was there before.
Here's my question - if it does work, can I back up the Mac Air to the Time Machine drive and then pull those changes back into the Macbook Pro? How would I do that?
Many thanks for any help!
Regards
EB

In case it helps anyone else, this is what happened (executive summary: back up to time machine before attempting to upgrade, have your snow leopard/equivalent disk handy and be ready for problems if you have a bootcamp partition I think).
1. My Macbook Pro (MBP) machine was running Snow Leopard. I had installed a BootCamp partition for running windows on.
2. I backed up MBP to Time Machine
3. I downloaded Mavericks and attempted to upgrade
4. The installer told me it could not install on my main partition as I was running Time Machine there
5. I googled that error and found many others had had the same thing. I removed the BootCamp partition using Boot Camp Assistant. There was also a Time Machine related directory on the main partition which I deleted , I'm afraid my log of exactly the name got wiped in the ensuing mess.
6. I tried to upgrade again
7. The upgrade failed, again I don't now have the exact error message but it was no longer Time Machine related. On reboot the MBP again went straight into the attempted Mavericks install, there was no way to boot back into Snow Leopard as was.
8. I realized I needed my Snow Leopard disc and started looking for it.
9. I visit the Mac Store in central London. I buy a new Mac Air (MA) as the assistant tells me I can return it within two weeks.
10. On starting the MA I am asked if I want to load from Time Machine. I do this and within 30 mins the MA looks exactly like my MBP did. I work for the following week on MA.
11. Three or four days later. I find the Snow Leopard disk.
12. I insert the disk into MBP and boot while holding down the C key. Some minutes later the machine starts again in Snow Leopard. I restore from Time Machine. My old MBP is back. Eureka.
13. I download Mavericks. Again. This time the install runs fine.
14. I try and run Migration Assistant to copy my week's work from MA to MBP...
15. MA doesn't have an Ethernet port and I don't feel like going to the MacStore again to buy the USB ethernet adapter so I start Migration Assistant over Wifi
16. Migration Assistant tells me it will take 24 hours or so. It is 9am. I let it run.
17. That evening I come back in and Migration Assistant says it will take about three hours to complete.
18. The following morning Migration Assistant says it will take 56 minutes to complete.
19. That evening Migration Assistant still says it will take 56 minutes to complete. It's is still alive because if I unplug wifi it says it needs to reconnect, but it doesn't seem to make any progress past the 56 minutes (it does reconnect when wifi is re-enabled).
20. I kill Migration Assistant and copy my work over manually.
After all that a couple of unimportant progams no longer work under Mavericks. My Epson scanner no longer works and apparently drivers are not available yet. Oh yes and the old Snow Leopard Expose desktops are gone and replaced by a more complicated and less intuitive 'Mission Control' which I don't like.
Oh yes, and most importantly:
21. I return MA and am refunded my £1575.
I think this'll be my last mac and ubuntu next time.

Time machine on different Volumes

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