Time Machine on Mavericks making excessively large backups

I recently upgraded from Mavericks from Mountain Lion. Previously when TM would backup the files, the incremental file size of each backup would be anywhere between 50Mb to 1Gb depending on my activity during that part of the day. Over all, I would have a backup history spanning 1 or 2 months (always varied).
After upgrading to Mavericks, my backups are huge!! Averaging 7-10Gb EACH TIME!! Now my history only spans 2 days! My backup drive is small, about 500Gb so it doesn't take long to fill up with these excessively large backups.
As a test I waited until a back up had just completed, then, with out doing anything, I would immediately initiate a back up. Again, after it prepared the back up and it started, it said the backup size was 7Gb. Normally it would be less than a couple Mb, but 7Gb!!
I have several folders excluded (mostly folders for caches), so I can't imagine where all the sizes are coming from. I'm thinking that previously backed up files are not being properly marked as backed up and therefore are being backed up multiple times. Ideas?

I decided to take one more look at my current backups using one of the suggested programs, Time Tracker. Low and behold, I found that my Wiki Logs for the Sever was ranging in the 6 Gb territory! Once I excluded that, it dropped it down to a much more managable 1 Gb backup. I ran it manually 3 more times after than and it dropped to 600 Mb and now on the last one 178 Mb ... that was the problem. I wonder why it wasn't recognizing the Wiki logs properly. Doesn't really matter, I don't use Wiki for my server so I don't need to back up the logs! Problem fixed!

Similar Messages

Setting up my mac from time machine left me with a large backup file on my macbook

I just bought a new Macbook Air and decided to set things up from my latest time machine backup. I'm glad to have my settings back, but it also left me with 30 gigs worth of backups. This wouldn't be so bad, except that I only have 128 gigs of hard drive space, and I supposedly have only 30 gigs left. Is there any way I can safely remove these large files without losing everything again?

In Lion and Mountain Lion, Time Machine creates local snapshots on the internal hard disk > http://pondini.org/TM/30.html
You don't have to worry about snapshots, as they are deleted when your Mac's disk is full. Anyway, you can disable them or delete them by opening System Preferences > Time Machine and turning off Time Machine, but you don't need to do this

Time Machine will not complete a system backup and terminates with "Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume. This follows a problem when Time machne terminated when the volume was almost full.

On 11/1/2011, Time Machine (TM) terminated with an error message I did not record. I noted that the drive was full and decided to do a separate complete bootable system backup using Carbon Copy Clone (CCC), before clearing the TM volume and trying to start it over clean. Part way through the full system backup CCC put up a message that there was a Physical Problem "Library/Application Support/Techtool Protection/McIntosh HD/Directory Backup 2011-11-01-16-28-16". That was about the time that TM malfunctioned, so I assumed they were related. After starting CCC over a couple of times, and getting the same error message, I let it go through to completion of the backup, which took three or four hours. I then ran tests using Disk Utility and verified that there was nothing physically wrong with both the internal hard drive and the TM volume. I also erased and reformatted the TM volume. However, every time I started Time Machine, it would record a few GB and terminate with "Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume". I restarted the computer with no change in results. Note that prior to starting the CCC backup, I "Repaired Permissions", "zapped the PRAM" and "re-set the SMC", hoping to have a clean bootable system on the backup. I ran Techtool and no problems were found.
I'm running this on an Intel iMac under 10.5.8 and recording to a 500GB My Passport drive. My hard drive is only about half full at 246 GB. My assessment is that something happened at 16-28-16 on 11/1/2001 to screwup the Backup Directory in the file at "Library/Application Support/Techtool Protection/McIntosh HD/Directory Backup 2011-11-01-16-28-16". My question is, how do I fix it?
I had just completed writing everything above here, explaining the problems I had been encountering for the past 24 hours. I had the Time Machine window standing open on the desktop where I could see it, having recentlycleared it after the last termination. As I was proofing what I had written, I looked at the window and noted that the clock had started a new run for a full back up, since all prior efforts had failed and the TM volume was empty. As I watched and waited for it to fail again, as it had been doing at about 13 GB, it kept going and going until it just finished a complete backup, about 4.5 hours later, with my having done nothing. Now my question would have to be - what could possiibly have happened to make it perform this way? It will be interesting to see if it continue to operate normally, or if the problem will return, in a later backup run.

jcm21 wrote:
CCC put up a message that there was a Physical Problem "Library/Application Support/Techtool Protection/McIntosh HD/Directory Backup 2011-11-01-16-28-16"
You should not keep those files for long, and probably shouldn't back them up (if you need them at all -- since you do regular backups, I'm doubtful just how worthwhile that feature is).
"Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume".
One of Apple's maddeningly incomplete messages. Most likely, there's a problem with a file (quite possibly the one CCC didn't like). See #C3 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting for details and instructions on finding and fixing it.
If you continue running the Directory Protection app, be sure to exclude your Time Machine drive from it (as it will just take up lots of room, and won't help repair your backups if there's a problem); and exclude the folders it creates from being backed-up by Time Machine (as they'll create large backups, and you probably can't use the backed-up folders anyway), per #10 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions.

Upgraded to Mavericks, Enter Time Machine and cannot see any previous backup at all

MBP, upgrade from 10.6.8 to Mavericks.
After "Enter Time Machine", the time line on the right side of the screen does not show any previous backup at all.
In Finder, I can see the backup folder and the inside contents.
In Time Machine Preference, I did select the disk for backup again.
Any idea ? Thank you.

Thank you for your reply and the links.
I did this:
1) I have two ext. USB drives for the MBP time machine backup, did not occur to me to try the other one which is the very first disk, let's call it disk 1, I used for backup, the other one I started using after a year or so.
2) reboot with the disk 1 connected
3) do a "Backup Now", and I forgot the exact dialogs and what they say.
4) something like, "choose a disk for the backup", I chose disk 1
5) it knows I had two disk for backup and ask me if I want to use two disk for backup, click yes
6) the time machine pref. says something like initial backup (after new system installed?)
7) after it done, I can see the previous time machine back up and the time line goes back to where it was before.
8) connect the disk 2 and "Backup Now", it just went to backup right away, after it's done, I can see the prev. backups and the time line too.
Thanks again for your help.

Time Machine deletes all but latest two backups

Hello,
Today I was backing up my macbook, with about 38 GB of space left on my harddrive, and Time Machine deletes everything but the latest two backups (from Feb 2012 to May 2012).... I had things on there from 2009. TM preferences now says I have 27 GB of free space, after the latest backup. I didn't have anything big enough on my computer to be backed up that justified deleting years of data, over 200 GB, in order to compensate for the new data that had to be backed up. Is there any way to recover the files that were erased off of my external hard-drive that were deleted during Time Machine's semi-routine back up?
Thank you

Sebastian Kuhn wrote:
Is there no way to set up Time Machine such that it will ASK before destroying a (potentially valuable) "old" backup
That's how it worked at first, on Leopard. But many users either didn't understand it, or never got around to doing anything, so had no backups at all when disaster struck. It was fairly common, so Apple changed it with Snow Leopard.
Why does Apple assume that it is always the OLDEST backup (which will be hardest to retrieve) that people would be willing to loose?
That's usually correct. Time Machine is not a traditional archive-type app; if you need archives, make archives.
If you frequently need things from your backups, you may have a deeper problem. But most likely, you just need a larger backup drive.
That all applies to the vast majority of users -- they have a single internal HD with less than 1 TB of data, so a 2 TB backup drive is ok, 3 TB large enough for most everybody.
If that's not enough for your setup, you probably need a different strategy anyway. You may have some data that changes frequently and should be backed-up hourly by Time Machine, plus something like a large media drive that's best backed-up only once a day or so by a different app, such as one of the "cloning" products.
there should be the option to exclude different items when backing up to different disks. Is there?
No. Apparently Apple wants to keep it as simple as possible, with few options that may confuse some folks, so instead of making a decision, they do nothing (that's not just Time Machine, either). Remember, most of the folks using Time Machine have never used any backup app at all.
Apple's resisted all suggestions (and there have been many) for things like the ability to limit the size or age of backups, reduce the 10-day warning when no backup has been done, etc. Like it or not, that's Apple's approach to pretty much everything -- streamlined, simple, easy to use. Very successful for the majority.
Is there any workaround other than the cumbersome procedure of turning Time Machine off, and under "options" re-select the correct set of folders to exclude every time I move from one disk to another? Not exactly what I would call a user-friendly interface...
Best of course, is get a larger disk. Is your data worth the price of a 2 TB disk?
There are some elaborate workarounds involving automatically swapping destinations and exclusions, but they're very "iffy" as they do things that TM (and OSX) don't anticipate so don't react well to.
Effective with Lion, however, there's a new tmutil command that in theory would allow you to write an AppleScript to set a destination, add or remove exclusions and run a backup. Many things could go wrong, of course, but I know of no way to detect which destination is available.
Much safer, easier, and more reliable to get a larger drive (or better strategy).

Time machine always propose a new fresh backup

Hi all,
I am running an iMac 21.5" Late 2012, with an Intel Core i5 at 2,7 GHz, 8Gb RAM. I have recently (some months) moved from Mavericks to Yosemite (by the way, experimenting a general slow down is the system, I have brought my mac to an Apple Store and, after their checks, they told me that the computer i perfectly fine...) and since then I am having problems with Time Machine backups. After the first backup, time machine correctly performs following backups for a while and then (say, generally after a couple of days of seemingly correct functioning) asks me for a fresh backup as the verification of the actual backup seems to be not not reliable enough.
Technically, the message I get is the following:
Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you.
What I can't really understand is why is this happening so frequently... It is quite boring to have my machine backing-up a large amount of data (I have a 1TB HDD connected to an Airport Extreme, to which my mac connects via wi-fi) almost every two days...
Let me just add that I was NOT having such problems when running Mavericks on the very same iMac...
Is there any reported problem of this kind? What does it depend from? Is there any possible solution to this?
Any help would be very welcome!
Thanx, best regards
Stefano

Start with C13 in the 1st linked article.
Time Machine Troubleshooting
Time Machine Troubleshooting Problems

Time Machine ejecting internal hard drive during backup

I originally posted this in the Time Machine group. It was suggested I post to the Xserve group.
We have an XSERVE running 10.6.4 server. It has 2 internal 1TB drives. The plan is to use one as the main drive and the second as a Time Machine backup. This used to work in 10.5, but since about 10.6.2 or so, it has not worked correctly.
Time machine will come on, begin the backup, and then error off with a message that the drive has been ejected. I have erased the drive, but still no joy. I have partitioned the drive, still no joy. I have verified the drive repeatedly, and all is fine. I can copy files to and from the drive until the cows come home, and all works fine, which means I do not think it is the drive itself. Activate TM, however, and it will fail before the first backup is completed. The only way to get the drive back is to do a complete power down and then power up. Needless to say, that is not a good thing for a server that we rely on.
Any ideas?
10/14/10 10:41:27 AM com.apple.backupd1230 Backup content size: 542.8 GB excluded items size: 474.1 GB for volume Server HD 10/14/10 10:41:27 AM com.apple.backupd1230 No pre-backup thinning needed: 82.46 GB requested (including padding), 930.13 GB available 10/14/10 10:41:27 AM com.apple.backupd1230 Waiting for index to be ready (101) 10/14/10 10:41:27 AM mds70 (Normal) DiskStore: Creating index for /Volumes/backup/Backups.backupdb
10/14/10 10:47:38 AM kernel FusionMPT: Notification = 22 (SAS Discovery) for SCSI Domain = 0 10/14/10 10:47:38 AM kernel Discovery condition = 0x000f0001 10/14/10 10:47:38 AM kernel FusionMPT: Notification = 18 (SAS Phy Link Status) for SCSI Domain = 0 10/14/10 10:47:38 AM kernel SAS Phy Link Status: PhyNum = 0, old link rate = 8, new link rate = 0, SASAddress = 50080007002e8c04
10/14/10 10:48:10 AM kernel SCSIPressurePathManager: Timed out waiting for inactive/error path to become active, loops = 0 10/14/10 10:48:10 AM kernel  10/14/10 10:48:10 AM kernel disk0s2: media is not present.
10/14/10 10:48:10 AM com.apple.backupd1230 Stopping backupd because the backup volume was ejected!  10/14/10 10:48:10 AM com.apple.backupd1230 Error writing to backup log. NSFileHandleOperationException:* -NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:: Input/output error 10/14/10 10:48:10 AM com.apple.backupd1230 Error writing to backup log. NSFileHandleOperationException:* -NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:: Input/output error 10/14/10 10:48:10 AM com.apple.backupd1230 Error writing to backup log. NSFileHandleOperationException:* -NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:: Input/output error 10/14/10 10:48:10 AM com.apple.backupd1230 Copied 13416 files (4.0 GB) from volume Server HD. 10/14/10 10:48:10 AM com.apple.backupd1230 Error writing to backup log. NSFileHandleOperationException:* -NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:: Input/output error 10/14/10 10:48:10 AM servermgrd64 servermgr_backup: TimeMachinePostBackupHook called. 10/14/10 10:48:10 AM servermgrd64 servermgr_backup: TimeMachinePostBackupHook done. 10/14/10 10:48:11 AM kernel jnl: disk0s2: close: journal 0xffffff8012b15d20, is invalid. aborting outstanding transactions  

No, it is not always at the same point/file/bytes transferred. It will vary from a few GB (say 3GB) to quite a few GB (say 30GB). I would add amongst the things I have done was to:
Perform numerous Disk Utility Checks. Never any errors found.
Erased the backup drive on multiple occasions. Double checked the GUID and format.
Partitioned the drive and tried backing up to a new partition. (No joy there either)
Copied lots and lots of data from the root disk to said partitions to test them. All went fine.
It really is Time Machine that is causing the issue. I can use the drive all day long as long as TM does not run. When it does, I eventually get a failure message that the drive has been ejected.
While I have not tried making a partition on the home drive (I'd rather not, lots of data there, make users mad, and since TM is not working, I have no backups at present), I do limit the data that is being backed up to JUST that of the system. /Users is being excluded at the moment. So I doubt there is anything out of the ordinary in the system. And, yes, I did a disk check on the root disk and all is fine there too.

Time Machine Error. Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copy

I purchased my iMac 24" in February.
After I had set up the machine I configured an IceCube Firewire 300 GB (Seagate) Hard Drive as a backup volume and flicked the switch in Time Machine. All went as expected. I even restored my whole hard drive from the Time Machine volume about a month ago after I repartitioned the boot volume to set up Boot Camp. No problems.
About a week ago I purchased a 500GB WD HDD and set it up inside the IceCube enclosure (I remembered to make it the "Master" disk too!!). I partitioned it with Disk Utility with a GUID Mac OS X (Journaled) partition for my Leopard boot partition, and as MS-DOS FAT32 for my Boot Camp external partition. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy all the Windows files across from Boot Camp to the new FAT32 partition and set up Time Machine to make a backup of the Leopard boot partition.
After several hours Time Machine stopped with the error message above. ("Time Machine Error. Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup").
I have spent days formatting the new WD drive, repairing permissions on the boot drive, excluding large files and cache files from the backup in Time Machine to no avail. Every time I get the same message. I even set up another 200GB firewire drive to see if it was anything to do with the enclosure of WD HDD. Same result!!
I have searched these forums for any ideas, and have done wide searches with Google but nothing has worked.
I can not understand why my Mac worked perfectly with Time Machine before I installed the new Western Digital Hard Drive.
What have I missed?

I keep getting the Time Machine backup error too, like many others. Was fine until just the other day, now, nothing. Although my husband's backs up just fine. I assume it's the 10.5.3 bug everyone else has. I've tried reselecting the drive, running the disk utility, shutting everything on and off... help!
Here's the console log- anyone know what this means?
Jun 10 08:37:27 Tiffany-Dankos-computer-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1683]: Starting standard backup
Jun 10 08:37:27 Tiffany-Dankos-computer-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1683]: Network mountpoint /Volumes/Library not owned by backupd... remounting
Jun 10 08:37:27 Tiffany-Dankos-computer-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1683]: Network volume mounted at: /Volumes/Library-1
Jun 10 08:37:43 Tiffany-Dankos-computer-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1683]: Disk image /Volumes/Library-1/Tiffany Danko’s Computer (2)_001b63baf698.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Backup of Tiffany Danko’s Computer (2)
Jun 10 08:37:43 Tiffany-Dankos-computer-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1683]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Backup of Tiffany Danko’s Computer (2)/Backups.backupdb
Jun 10 08:37:48 Tiffany-Dankos-computer-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1683]: Failed to create progress log file at path:/Volumes/Backup of Tiffany Danko’s Computer (2)/Backups.backupdb/Tiffany Danko's computer (2)/2008-06-09-065427.inProgress/.Backup.234797868.792920.log.
Jun 10 08:37:48 Tiffany-Dankos-computer-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1683]: Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Macintosh HD
Jun 10 08:37:48 Tiffany-Dankos-computer-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1683]: Error: (-36) Creating directory 77B4FA27-3E65-4B81-897C-610DEE7BB187
Jun 10 08:37:48 Tiffany-Dankos-computer-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1683]: Failed to make snapshot.
Jun 10 08:37:53 Tiffany-Dankos-computer-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1683]: Backup failed with error: 2
Jun 10 08:37:58 Tiffany-Dankos-computer-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1683]: Ejected Time Machine disk image.
Jun 10 08:37:59 Tiffany-Dankos-computer-2 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1683]: Ejected Time Machine network volume.

How does Time Machine handle alias files on the backup volume?

I have been trying to find some info on how Time Machine handles alias files on the backup volume, but can't find anything on that topic. Neither here in this discussion or at the Apple support pages.
My concern is if an alias file on the backup volume is backed up »as is«, or if it is resolved and the original file is backed up? The last would be most annoying as this will make the size of the backup much larger.
Even though I do not know of folders having been renamed (which will cause that folder and all its content to be backed up again) Time Machine often backs up a surprisingly large amount of data, so I suspect that alias files could be resolved.
Any info on this will be appreciated.

Alias files are NOT followed, AFAIK.
For more info on how TM works, see this ars technica review.
Good luck!
Message was edited by: joshz

HT201250 Is there any way to schedule backups on Time Machine? I hate it that backup happens every dang hour. I would like to have it back up at night.

Is there any way to schedule backups on Time Machine? I hate it that backup happens every dang hour. I would like to have it back up at night.

Richard Campbell2 wrote:
I hear you, I do. But the problem is that with my Mac, I have to stop and postpone whatever project I am working on while the backup occurs. It just slows down my computer.
Then something is wrong with your backups. Changing the interval will only deal with they symptoms, not the actual problem, and you won't be as well protected as with hourly backups.
If the backups are much larger than they ought to be, see #D4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
If the sizes are reasonable, but it seems to take too long, see #D2 there.

HT3275 My New Time Machine is saying 129 Days to BackUp!

I recently upgraded to Mountain Lion. The time machine disk was full after it's first backup, so I bought a new drive for Time Machine. First, I copied the BackUP's file to the new drive after reformatting correctly. When hooked up, it was just stuck in Preparing mode for a couple of days. So I ended that, thinking that can't be right. I decided to just just trash the old Backup's file and forget about the months of backups I kept. I reformatted the drive and then made it the main Time Machine back up starting from scratch. This things been running for 2 days and it's still saying 129 Days of time to back up. It's got like 5G of 620Gig backed up..
Anyway, this can't be right.. should back up overnight or even 1 day, correct? Why is it sooooooo slow, and only has 5G of the drive backed up after a full day?
Also, I bought a new iMac so that's coming in next week anyway.. but thought I'd get this backed up for now.

I need some clarification.
This discussion area is about Time Capsule..
When you say Time Machine disk was full do you mean Time Capsule?
But the prcess you describe of copying the backup from one disk to another is unlikely.. this is more likely an external drive.
How is this external drive plugged in? How is it formatted?
Please copy one very large file to it and get a peak transfer speed from Activity Monitor.. to make sure it is working ok.
If the internal drive of the computer is corrupt or low reading.. it can be extremely slow to copy files for TM.
Please run a verify of the main drive. To do it properly you should boot from original OS dvd so you can do full disk scan using disk utility.
See A5 here. http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
Fill in the details and then we have some hope of understanding the issue.

Time Capsule 4 gen. with iMac OS X Lion 3 Windows PC (XP OS, Vista OS, Seven OS) cable modem with TC as Wi-Fi. Time Machine on iMac found TC for backup easily. Have Wi-Fi access on PC XP with Airport utility but cannot create TC.

Installed today Time Capsule 4 gen. with iMac OS X Lion. I also have 3 Windows PC (XP OS, Vista OS, Seven OS). Internet Access is cable modem with TC as Wi-Fi. Time Machine on iMac found TC for backup easily. Have Wi-Fi access on PC XP with Airport utility but cannot create TC. Does the Airport utility under Windows is way to access backup capabilities with TC ?

The TC is really just an external networked hard disk plus router.. you can access the hard disk and place files on it from any computer. You can backup any computer to the TC but it will have to use a backup software in windows.. there are literally thousands available. The built in msbackup is horrible.. but you can download lots of different software and buy then online for not a lot. Macrium Reflect has a free disk image backup, and when you pay for it includes incremental. I think disk images are well worth it, as they recover much better.. and their is a proper method of recovery using a boot cd.
BTW the TC space is not endless. And it is designed to hold a large number of incremental backups.. so anything you do in backing up several machines will make the number of backups limited. Remember you can also use a usb hard disk plugged in as a Network accessible disk. But it has to be formatted HFS+ or Fat32.. the later being highly undesirable.

Time Machine -- can't access parts of backups

Prior to upgrading my MacBook Air to Yosemite, I made a Time Machine backup, removed temporary stuff I didn't think I'd need any more, and made a bootable clone of Mavericks using SuperDuper! The upgrade went fine, but after a while I realized one of the things I'd removed (Adobe Lightroom catalog, having transferred all the image files from the MacBook Air to my desktop machine) contained some information I needed. My attempts to restore it have run into an odd problem, and I'm hoping someone has some ideas that can help me.
I have the backup disk connected, and when I start up the Time Machine application it shows the expected backups in the "ruler" along the right-hand edge of the screen. However, for the most part, I cannot "go back in time" to find the files I want from before I deleted them. What I mean is that, for most locations I select from Finder's sidebar, the "backwards and forwards" buttons are grayed-out and inaccessible. For a few locations (Desktop, and the system Applications folder) the buttons work as expected and I can access any backup date I wish. For a few others (e.g. "All My Files") the "backwards" button is available but clicking it takes me to the very first backup stored (8 months old) and "forwards" takes me to "Today (Now)". None of the intervening backups are available for that location.
I've used the Terminal app to navigate down the directory hierarchy of the backups on the Time Machine volume. I can find the files I want there, so it's not like Time Machine had failed to back them up. However, it refuses to show them. I tried using the Terminal to copy the files back under my home directory, but the filesystem ACLs and extended attributes were causing problems (Lightroom thought it didn't have write permission). Deleting the ACSs and xattrs got Lightroom to run, but it's clearly confused (shows blank thumbnails, has exif data but not captions) so something's not right.
Wondering if this is a Yosemite issue, I rebooted the machine onto the Mavericks clone and tried running Time Machine there. I get the same results.
Someone at work suggested that leaving the Time Machine app running for an extended period of time might fix the problem. I've had it running for 7 hours now and while a few more locations started working, the ones I want aren't.
Anyone know what's going on and how to fix it?

Even weirder -- the problem I described above happens only with certain windows. WIth others, I can open the earlier backups.

Time Machine wants to do a full backup. How do I point it to my previous backups so it will do an incremental backup?

I lost my wireless connection to my backup drive for a short time. Now time machine wants to do a full backup. It doesn't know that I have previous backups. How do I point it to the previous backups so that time machine continues to do incremental backups rather than doing another full backup.

I did some more reading and I found that Time Machine would find the older backups once a new backup is completed. The backup ended up being a little larger than previous backups (2.65 GB vs typical incremental backups of several MB's) but when it completed, time machine updated the last backup time/date and the oldest backup time/date properly. So I guess, I don't have a problem.

HT201250 Time Machine and Mavericks

Time Machine under Mavericks won't allow me to add or change my Time Machine drive. I click the Select Drive button, and nothing happens. Any ideas?

Back up all data. Don't continue unless you're sure you can restore from a backup, even if you're unable to log in.
This procedure will unlock all your user files (not system files) and reset their ownership and access-control lists to the default. If you've set special values for those attributes on any of your files, they will be reverted. In that case, either stop here, or be prepared to recreate the settings if necessary. Do so only after verifying that those settings didn't cause the problem. If none of this is meaningful to you, you don't need to worry about it.
Step 1
If you have more than one user account, and the one in question is not an administrator account, then temporarily promote it to administrator status in the Users & Groups preference pane. To do that, unlock the preference pane using the credentials of an administrator, check the box marked Allow user to administer this computer, then reboot. You can demote the problem account back to standard status when this step has been completed.
Enter the following command in the Terminal window in the same way as before (triple-click, copy, and paste):
{ sudo chflags -R nouchg,nouappnd ~ $TMPDIR.. ; sudo chown -R $UID:staff ~ $_ ; sudo chmod -R u+rwX ~ $_ ; chmod -R -N ~ $_ ; } 2> /dev/null
This time you'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning to be careful. If you don’t have a login password, you’ll need to set one before you can run the command. If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator.
The command will take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear, then quit Terminal.
Step 2 (optional)
Take this step only if you have trouble with Step 1 or if it doesn't solve the problem.
Boot into Recovery. When the OS X Utilities screen appears, select
Utilities ▹ Terminal
from the menu bar. A Terminal window will open.
In the Terminal window, type this:
res
Press the tab key. The partial command you typed will automatically be completed to this:
resetpassword
Press return. A Reset Password window will open. You’re not going to reset a password.
Select your boot volume ("Macintosh HD," unless you gave it a different name) if not already selected.
Select your username from the menu labeled Select the user account if not already selected.
Under Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs, click the Reset button.
Select
 ▹ Restart
from the menu bar.

Time Machine on Mavericks making excessively large backups

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