Time Machine shows Backup Delayed

My time capsule / time machine have been working perfectly
Totally hands off, hourly backups etc etc
Now I have the problem that every backup is delayed as the backup disk is not available
Once I select the backup disk manually the hourly backups resume as normal
When I re-start the problem is back.
So unless I remember to manually select the time machine disk I get no backups
This was working perfectly, before I restored some files from the time machine
Help

When did you start seeing this issue? Have you downloaded Mac OS X v10.6.8 and Mac OS X v10.6.8 Supplemental Update? If you plan to upgrade to OS X Lion, you will need Mac OS X v10.6.8 Supplemental Update but I must be honest with you:
Early adopters to OS X Lion, like myself, have found issues like the one you're having with Time Machine on OS X Lion. Backups are showing as "!" in the menu bar and error messages "Backup Delayed: Time Machine could not find backup disk" and Time Machine isn't keeping records of past backups. When I noticed this once installing OS X Lion at first run of using the new OS, I had to reformat and erase my external 500GB G-Drive Mobile FireWire 800 drive and the issue still hasn't been fixed.
If deleting the corrupt preference doesn't work, try submitting feedback on Apple's Support page for Time Machine by visiting the link provided:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/timemachine.html
The nice thing about the transition between OS X Snow Leopard and OS X Lion is the OS installs itself over Snow Leopard without you losing any of your files unless you find a way to do a "clean install".

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Time Machine says Backup Delayed After Upgrading to Lion

Time Machine says Backup Delayed After Upgrading to Lion on both my Macs. It backs up fine when ever I connect to the USB drive but now seems to want to back up hourly when before weekly was OK. When it does not compleye an hourly backup it reports a delayed backup - failure on both machines. How do it revert back to it reminding me to do weekly backups?

I'm having the same issue with Time Machine on OS X Lion!
According to this webpage: http://web.me.com/pondini/AppleTips/LionChanges.html
Backups (i.e., Time Machine, SD, CCC, etc.) will only save the current "Version" of files.
The above statement sounds like the issue @iJRB and myself are having after upgrading to Lion where Time Machine shows the following error message below within "System Preferences > Time Machine"
@iJRB: Is this the error message you are seeing?

Since installing Lion why does Time Machine shows backup was delayed?

Ever since we stalled Lion after we backup with Time Machine the display quickly changes to the alert symbol that backup was delayed how can I change this. I have backed up four times.

It's a 'new feature' .. check out this post here https://discussions.apple.com/message/16148789#16148789 .. if you don't agree with this new feature, please join us in raising it as a bug for Apple to fix.

Since Lion, time machine says 'backup delayed' all the time??

Why, even after I have just completed a back up using time machine, is there an exclamation point and it says 'backup delayed'. It never did this before I upgraded to Lion and it doesn't show me the 'oldest backup' in preferences anymore..just a dash mark..almost like it's not been saving my backups? Anyone else experiencing this? Is it keeping track of my backups?

For those interested..I reported the bug to Apple and this was their reply. It is a known bug..so we just have to wait for the fix:
This is a follow up to Bug ID# 9975887. After further investigation it has been determined that this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering. This issue has been filed in our bug database under the original Bug ID# 9411363. The original bug number being used to track this duplicate issue can be found in the State column, in this format: Duplicate/OrigBug#.
Thank you for submitting this bug report. We truly appreciate your assistance in helping us discover and isolate bugs.
Best Regards,
Developer Support
Apple Worldwide Developer Relations

Time Machine shows a backup this morning at 11:58 but I didn't have the external hard drive plugged in. How is this possible?

Time Machine shows a backup this morning at 11:58 but I didn't have the external hard drive plugged in. How is this possible?

Because the drive was disconnected Time Machine made a local snapshot on your Mac.

Time machine email backup showing incorrect emails

I have been using time machine to backup my emails. The great thing about time machine is that I could always go back in time and restore yesterdays emails after I had just deleted them by accident. Since I upgraded to Yosemite I notice that in time machine my yesterdays inbox not only contains yesterdays emails, but many more emails that I have moved or deleted already. My mailboxes are imap mailboxes, but all emails are also stored on my macbook air. Does anyone know how to get the old behaviour back, as before Yosemite? Or is this a confirmed bug? Any info will be much appreciated.

Inside the V2 folder are subfolders representing your Mail accounts. The names refer to the email addresses you use.
From the Mail menu bar, select
File ▹ Import Mailboxes...
Import from the mailboxes in the restored folder. The imported messages will appear in a new mailbox. Move the ones you want to keep wherever you like and delete the rest.

Time Machine thinks backup disk is full but its not

I just purchased a new 1 Terabyte hard drive for backup. In the past I backed up both my internal Mac harddrive (250 Gb with 8gb free) and an external iOmega archive drive (DRIVE H 320Gb with 41Gb free) to a 500Gb Lacie drive. I purchased an iOmega 1 Terabyte drive (DRIVE G) because the Lacie drive was full. I went into Time Machine and changed the backup drive to the G one terabyte drive and did a full backup of my internal hard drive. When I did this I did not have the external H archive drive attached so Time Machine didn't back that up. I did it that way because I wanted to first backup the internal drive then do some work and then go backup the external archive drive over night. I plugged the H archive drive in, so it show up in the finder and then told Time Machine to Backup Now. It started the back up but right after doing the initial computations when it actually started backing up I got the standard error message that "the backup disk ran out of space unexpectedly..." I've double checked that the backup disk is set correctly in Time Machine to the 1Tb G drive and when I do a Get Info on the G drive it shows Capacity: 1TB, Available: 713.54 GB.
Is it possible something is wrong with the new drive? Can I test that?

Its funny how sometimes asking a question can prompt your thinking. As soon as I finished posting this I thought "of course Disk Utility". I ran a check disk and got the following error message:
Unused node is not erased (node = 107)
I did a restore which corrected the error. Turned Time Machine back on and its backing up the rest of my data now.

Does Time Machine fully backup iPhoto 09 photos, events, faces, etc.? Mtn Lion

I'm going to the Apple store this afternoon. I believe I'll end up reinstalling the system and need to be sure everything is backed up.
Problem is iPhoto 09 (yep, I have an OLD version). It's going nuts - making sounds like a fast, loud, constant drumbeat, flashing, won't let me do anything except force quit.
I backup to Time Machine /external drive automatically and it seems to be backing up iPhoto. I don't want to open the iPhoto program from Time Machine to check since I'm afraid it might be something in the computer that could screw it up. I have thousands of phtoos in iPhoto and don't want to lose them.
Since the external drive I'm using wth Time Machine shows a backup today including iPhoto, should I feel comfortable that iPhoto is backed up appropriately, or do I need to back it up in some other way?

Besides Time Machine, you could use a cloning program.
Clone - Carbon Copy Cloner
Clone - SuperDuper

Time Machine Oldest backups deleted without warning

I have about 350GB of data on my startup drive that is backed up by Time Machine onto another internal 1TB drive. My other internal and external drives are excluded.
I have just noticed that Time Machine shows my Oldest Backup to be 16th October 2008. When I go into the Options menu in Time Machine System Preferences it has 'Warn me when old backups are deleted' ticked. My backup drive has around 160GB free.
I have not been warned that Time Machine is deleting old backups. The ONLY warning it has given me is the occasional non-specific Time Machine error where it informs me that Time Machine was unable to complete the backup (not very useful) but when this happens it always carries on apparently successful on the next scheduled backup.
The only thing that I can think of to explain this situation is that on the 16th October I replaced one of my excluded hard drives with another. As soon as I had the opportunity I excluded the new drive from Time Machine - but as I used the Disk Utility restore feature, there was inevitably a short time when a new drive full of data was present and wasn't excluded (around 1TB of content on a 1.5TB drive).
If this drive replacement, and Time Machine suddenly thinking it needed to backup that new content caused it to suddenly delete old backups, then 1) why didn't it warn me, and 2) what is the correct protocol for excluding a drive that has just been restored (ie. cloned). Should I be turning Time Machine off before performing such a function?

bilbo_baggins wrote:
I have about 350GB of data on my startup drive that is backed up by Time Machine onto another internal 1TB drive. My other internal and external drives are excluded.
I have just noticed that Time Machine shows my Oldest Backup to be 16th October 2008. When I go into the Options menu in Time Machine System Preferences it has 'Warn me when old backups are deleted' ticked. My backup drive has around 160GB free.
I have not been warned that Time Machine is deleting old backups. The ONLY warning it has given me is the occasional non-specific Time Machine error where it informs me that Time Machine was unable to complete the backup (not very useful) but when this happens it always carries on apparently successful on the next scheduled backup.
The only thing that I can think of to explain this situation is that on the 16th October I replaced one of my excluded hard drives with another. As soon as I had the opportunity I excluded the new drive from Time Machine - but as I used the Disk Utility restore feature, there was inevitably a short time when a new drive full of data was present and wasn't excluded (around 1TB of content on a 1.5TB drive).
If this drive replacement, and Time Machine suddenly thinking it needed to backup that new content caused it to suddenly delete old backups, then 1) why didn't it warn me,
because TM is buggy. it's supposed to warn you in a situation like that but it often doesn't.
and 2) what is the correct protocol for excluding a drive that has just been restored (ie. cloned).
You can either turn off TM before restoring or exclude the drive before starting the cloning procedure. when a new drive is attached TM waits for 2 minutes and then tries to back it up. in that 2 minutes period you can add the drive to the exclusion list.
Should I be turning Time Machine off before performing such a function?

Time machine network backup really ***** (truly)

Ok I've said it..
Ok I've had enough..
Come on Guy's. Apple really has to take some flack here. No more excuses. You advertised timemachine backup to a network share would work easily. You advertise apple software works without a hitch (unlike MS windows)...but I've had nothing but hastles setting up time machine to backup to a mac server attached usb drive. I've BEEN a windows user before and I tell you this is just like going back to the dark side!
And another thing
No I'm not trying to use an airport extreme mount
No I'm not trying to use a NAS
No I'm not trying to back up a linux or PC volume
I'm being a good little customer. It's all using mac to mac. Yes, it's Leopard to Leopard...
Hastle one:
The drive mount. I've successfully done this for 3 networked macs. It took a while, was working a few days, but the mount is unreliable. If one of the macs goes down, time machine doesn't work anymore. I get the error "backup disc image could not be mounted". Apparently the problem is with the "sparseimage". One solution I've read is to delete the sparseimage then try again. Fine
Hastle two:
I can't work out how to delete the sparseimage! I get an error cannot do - "the item token is in use"
Apple needs to take a cold shower on time machine.
Where is the help on this? Where is the customer apologies? Where are the solutions?
Obviously there was not pre release testing. Wait a minute WE are the pre-release testing!
It is just plain unreliable as a backup solution for macs on a home ethernet network..even when all the gear is actually mac!
I give it a rating of 1 out of 10 on this.
Come on guys lift you game!
Message was edited by: sfsfsfs
Message was edited by: sfsfsfs

I have had nothing but problems with Time Machine. We are wasting our valuable time with a product that SIMPLY DOES NOT WORK. Apple needs to weigh in here. We are wasting our "TIME" on our "MACHINES" Now I see why Apple calls it TIME MACHINE!

Time Machine same backup size every time

Anyone have any idea why Time Machine would backup the same amount every time? Every hour mine backs up 1.8 GB, unless I've added more than that to my hd.
I only back up the internal drive on my macbook to a 500 GB Time Capsule via wifi (802.11n only, 5GHz). Not that I figured it would make a difference, but it still does it if backed up via ethernet.
I've also noticed that as soon as it completes the backup, it will backup all over again - and not because an hour has passed. I'm not sure if it does this every time (but I think i does), or if it does it more than twice when it happens.
Thanks in advance!

See if the following might give you some ideas as to why...
*_Incremental Backups Seem Too Large!_*
Open the Time Machine Prefs on the Mac in question. How much space does it report you have "Available"? When a backup is initiated how much space does it report you need?
Now, consider the following, it might give you some ideas:
Time Machine performs backups at the file level. If a single bit in a large file is changed, the WHOLE file is backed up again. This is a problem for programs that save data to monolithic virtual disk files that are modified frequently. These include Parallels, VMware Fusion, Aperture vaults, or the databases that Entourage and Thunderbird create. These should be excluded from backup using the Time Machine Preference Exclusion list. You will, however, need to backup these files manually to another external disk.
If you do a lot of movie editing, unless these files are excluded, expect Time Machine to treat revised versions of a single movie as entirely new files.
If you frequently download software or video files that you only expect to keep for a short time, consider excluding the folder these are stored in from Time Machine backups.
If you have recently created a new disk image or burned a DVD, Time Machine will target these files for backup unless they are deleted or excluded from backup.
*Events-Based Backups*
Time Machine does not compare file-for-file to see if changes have been made. If it had to rescan every file on your drive before each backup, it would not be able to perform backups as often as it does. Rather, it relies on a process called FSEvents. This is a system log that records changes that occur with all the directories on your Mac. Moving / copying / deleting / & saving files and folders creates events that are recorded in this log. At the beginning of each backup, Time Machine simply looks at this log to determine what has changed since the last backup. [http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14]
Installing new software, upgrading existing software, or updating Mac OS X system software can create major changes in the structure of your directories. Every one of these changes is recorded by the OS as an event. Time Machine will backup every file that has an event associated with it since the installation.
Files or folders that are simply moved or renamed are counted as NEW files or folders. If you rename any file or folder, Time Machine will back up the ENTIRE file or folder again no matter how big or small it is.
George Schreyer describes this behavior: “If you should want to do some massive rearrangement of your disk, Time Machine will interpret the rearranged files as new files and back them up again in their new locations. Just renaming a folder will cause this to happen. This is OK if you've got lots of room on your backup disk. Eventually, Time Machine will thin those backups and the space consumed will be recovered. However, if you really want recover the space in the backup volume immediately, you can. To do this, bring a Finder window to the front and then click the Time Machine icon on the dock. This will activate the Time Machine user interface. Navigate back in time to where the old stuff exists and select it. Then pull down the "action" menu (the gear thing) and select "delete all backups" and the older stuff vanishes.” (http://www.girr.org/mac_stuff/backups.html)
*TechTool Pro Directory Protection*
This disk utility feature creates backup copies of your system directories. Obviously these directories are changing all the time. So, depending on how it is configured, these backup files will be changing as well which is interpreted by Time Machine as new data to backup. Excluding the folder these backups are stored in will eliminate this effect.
*Backups WAY Too Large*
If an initial full backup or a subsequent incremental backup is tens or hundreds of Gigs larger than expected, check to see that all unwanted external hard disks are still excluded from Time Machine backups. Time Machine will attempt to backup any hard disk attached to your Mac, including secondary internal drives, that have not been added to Time Machines Exclusion list.
This includes the Time Machine backup drive ITSELF. Normally, Time Machine is set to exclude its’ own backup disk by default. But on rare occasions it can forget. When your backup begins, Time Machine mounts the backup on your desktop. (For Time Capsule/AirDisk users it appears as a white drive icon labeled something like “Backup of (your computer)”.) If, while it is mounted, it does not show up in the Time Machine Preferences “Do not back up” list, then Time Machine will attempt to back ITSELF up. If it is not listed while the drive is mounted, then you need to add it to the list.
*Recovering Backup Space*
If you have discovered that large unwanted files have been backed up, you can use the Time Machine “time travel” interface to recovered some of that space.
Launch Time Machine from the Dock icon.
Initially, you are presented with a window that represents “Today (Now)”. DO NOT make changes to file while you see “Today (Now)” at the bottom of the screen.
Click on the window just behind “Today (Now)”. This represents the last successful backup and should display the date and time of this backup at the bottom of the screen.
Now, navigate to where the unwanted file resides.
Highlight the file and click the Actions menu (Gear icon) from the toolbar.
Select “Delete all backups of <this file>”.
*FileVault / Boot Camp / iDisk Syncing*
Note: Leopard has changed the way it deals with FileVault disk images, so it is not necessary to exclude your Home folder if you have FileVault activated. Additionally, Time Machine ignores Boot Camp partitions as the manner in which they are formatted is incompatible. Finally, if you have your iDisk Synced to your desktop, it is not necessary to exclude the disk image file it creates as that has been changed to a sparsebundle as well in Leopard.
Let us know if this resolved your issue.
Cheers!

Time Machine Slow Backup

I use Time Machine to backup to a G-Technologies 4TB external HD. The backup is extremely slow, many times saying it will take 69,000 days to back up. I have almost a TB to backup. The G-Technology HD will go off line. I'm not sure if this is a HD problem or Time Machine problem. My iMac is a IntelMac with 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB of Ram, OSX 10.8.2. Any thoughts?

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Enter the word "Starting" (without the quotes) in the String Matching text field. You should now see log messages with the words "Starting * backup," where * represents any of the words "automatic," "manual," or "standard." Note the timestamp of the last such message. Clear the text field and scroll back in the log to that time. Select the messages timestamped from then until the end of the backup, or the end of the log if that's not clear. Copy them (command-C) to the Clipboard. Paste (command-V) into a reply to this message.
If there are runs of repeated messages, post only one example of each. Don't post many repetitions of the same message.
When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Some personal information, such as the names of your files, may be included — anonymize before posting.

Time Machine "preparing backup" eternally upon wake from sleep

at a bit of a loss here...
iMac 24" (version which offered 7300GT as BTO option)
10.5.5 with all updates applied
LaCie 500 gig USB 2.0 drive directly attached.
Up until about two months ago, Time machine functioned fined. Then for some reason, the following started to happen. (no known reason, no software update related etc, that I know of)
scenario... Time Machine functions correctly EXCEPT when waking from sleep. If iMac wakes from sleep and attempts a backup immediately (e.g. more than one hour has passed), it gets stuck "preparing backup" forever. I've let it run overnight (actually as long as about 30 hours), it never stops. Finder and other programs become extremely non-responsive, machine is almost unusable. Literally, the only way out is to manually shut down external drive, with attendant warnings/errors.
What I've done:
1) deleted the time machine .plist file
2) erased, repartioned (as a single partition) external drive
3) started brand new time machine backup (takes about three hours)
At this point, time machine will backup up fine... I can force a successful backup, if I leave the machine running, at one hour it does a successful backup.
BUT, as soon as it goes to sleep, time machine is hosed.
The only workable method for using time machine is to turn the external drive and time machine off when not using it, and turn the whole shootin' match on to do what essentially becomes manual backups. These backup are fairly lengthy, as time machine also does lengthy "preparing backup", but they complete in about 30 minutes to one hour.
Given that time machine doesn't give mountable/cloneable backup, I'm probably going to go back to Carbon Copy Cloner. Still, I like the ease/regularity of Time Machine, and would use it if it works.
Any ideas?
thanks

It could be a number of things. There are lots of things that Time Machine does in order to "manage" backups -- apart from just copying data to the backup drive.
It has to manage the transition of hourly backups into daily backups and must also transition daily backups into weekly backups. Each time it does this it has to move a lot of data around. It also has to maintain indexes of everything so you can quickly find backups should you want to perform a restore.
I've also noticed that there are circumstances that can cause TM to question whether it can trust it's existing backup database... I've caught Time Machine saying that it needs to do a "deep traversal" of the backup (basically it wants to check and see what it really has) and this can take a very long time.
Still... 30 hours is an extremely long amount of time. I'm almost wondering if there's a problem with either your USB bus or your drive when they wake up such that you may be getting a huge number of retries on something that should have happened quickly.
I'd suggest you start the "Console" utility, select "All Messages" at the left, and then watch the messages being written to your log file. Not only does Time Machine log all of it's progress messages to the system.log (in more detail than you'd see in the Time Machine UI), but so do lots of other system processes. If you're getting USB bus problems the error messages would likely show up in the same log. I'm especially suspicious about non-TM related causes since you said you've already blown away your TM backups & preferences and started from scratch and you're still getting the problem.
Try re-creating your problem with the Console log messages being displayed and see if you can't see something in the log that would let you get a little closer to the root cause.
Regards,
Tim

Time Machine Error: Backup Disk Image Could Not Be Mounted

Time Machine was working just fine with Time Capsule for the first two days, then today I got the above error message.
The drive and the backup image both show up in Finder. I can even copy files from the Time Capsule to my hard drive.
I just can't get Time Machine to backup to the Time Capsule, even if I manually hit "Back up now".
Any ideas what I can do to fix this?

I may have fixed this ... I renamed my TC to a shorter name with no space and no apostrophe - just a few letters. That seems to have cleared it up - at least for now. Time will tell ...

Force Time Machine Full Backup

I wanted to update my Macbook Pro with a new Hard Disk, after preparing & installing the new HD and then chossing to restore from the Time Machine, i was surpised that the Time Machine showed me only some Backups(Full Backups), and the last full backup was 6 Months old, although i did a TM Backup just before installing the new HD, but apprently it is an incremntal backup, therfore it was not shown in the list.
So my question is how to force a TM Full Backup so that i can just restore it on the new HD. I know i can do it if i deleted all the old Backups, but i want to keep them, is it possible?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
          <key>sourcePaths</key>
          <array>
                    <string>/</string>
          </array>
          <key>standardExclusionPaths</key>
          <array>
                    <string>/.MobileBackups</string>
                    <string>/MobileBackups.trash</string>
                    <string>/.MobileBackups.trash</string>
                    <string>/.Spotlight-V100</string>
                    <string>/.TemporaryItems</string>
                    <string>/.Trashes</string>
                    <string>/.com.apple.backupd.mvlist.plist</string>
                    <string>/.fseventsd</string>
                    <string>/.hotfiles.btree</string>
                    <string>/Backups.backupdb</string>
                    <string>/Desktop DB</string>
                    <string>/Desktop DF</string>
                    <string>/Network/Servers</string>
                    <string>/Library/Updates</string>
                    <string>/Previous Systems</string>
                    <string>/Users/Shared/SC Info</string>
                    <string>/Users/Guest</string>
                    <string>/dev</string>
                    <string>/home</string>
                    <string>/net</string>
                    <string>/private/var/db/com.apple.backupd.backupVerification</string>
                    <string>/private/var/db/efw_cache</string>
                    <string>/private/var/db/Spotlight</string>
                    <string>/private/var/db/Spotlight-V100</string>
                    <string>/private/var/lib/postfix/greylist.db</string>
                    <string>/Volumes</string>
                    <string>/Network</string>
                    <string>/automount</string>
                    <string>/.vol</string>
                    <string>/tmp</string>
                    <string>/cores</string>
                    <string>/private/tmp</string>
                    <string>/private/Network</string>
                    <string>/private/tftpboot</string>
                    <string>/private/var/automount</string>
                    <string>/private/var/folders</string>
                    <string>/private/var/run</string>
                    <string>/private/var/tmp</string>
                    <string>/private/var/vm</string>
                    <string>/private/var/db/dhcpclient</string>
                    <string>/private/var/db/fseventsd</string>
                    <string>/Library/Caches</string>
                    <string>/Library/Logs</string>
                    <string>/System/Library/Caches</string>
                    <string>/System/Library/Extensions/Caches</string>
                    <string>/private/var/log</string>
                    <string>/private/var/spool/cups</string>
                    <string>/private/var/spool/fax</string>
                    <string>/private/var/spool/uucp</string>
          </array>
          <key>systemFilesExcluded</key>
          <false/>
          <key>userExclusionPaths</key>
          <array/>
</dict>
</plist>

Time Machine shows Backup Delayed

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