Time machine slows computer

When TM does its hourly thing the computer slows dramatically for abut 5 minutes. Is it supposed to?
If this is correct, is there a way I can ask TM to forget the hourly back up and do a daily only?
Geoff

on an older and slower computer like yours (your profile indicates 1GHz iMac G4) this will happen, yes. I had this problem with my powerbook. Try [TimeMachineEditor|http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor> to change the backup intervals.

Similar Messages

I have my Time Machine on an external drive (not connected to Airport Extreme) and I have an external HD attached to airport extreme. Is it possible to have Time Machine backUp computer HD AND external HD connected to Airport Extreme. How?

I have my Time Machine on an external drive (not connected to Airport Extreme) and I have an external HD attached to airport extreme. Is it possible to have Time Machine backUp computer HD AND external HD connected to Airport Extreme. How?

Is it possible to have Time Machine backUp computer HD AND external HD connected to Airport Extreme.
Sorry, but no.
Time Machine will backup your Mac, but not the hard drive attached to the AirPort Extreme.
Time Machine will back up a hard drive only if it is attached directly to your Mac via USB or FireWire.

Trying to back up to external hard drive (iomega). Instructions say to erase hard drive. Won't entirely erase. Can't enter iomega in Time Machine. Computer is minimac, operating system is OSx 10.6.8.

Trying to back up to external hard drive (iomega). Instructions say to erase hard drive. Won't entirely erase. Can't enter iomega in Time Machine. Computer is minimac, operating system is OSx 10.6.8.

All you need to upgrade the iBook for Tiger is another 128 MBs of RAM. It has both Firewire and USB ports. You do want to upgrade it for what you plan to do. The problem you may continue to have, however, may be due to the fact that the age of the computer is such the disk controller does not support hard drive volumes larger than 128 GBs, which is probably the reason the drive won't mount.
The reason you get DU errors is likely because the drive was formatted using the Intel Tiger version of DU, while you were using the Jaguar version. That's a definite no-no.

TechTool Pro copying large "deleted" files when I Time Machine my computer

I have TechTool Pro 5 loaded on my MacBook Pro. I've noticed when I Time Machine the computer, about 4 gig is always (or seems to be) copied over to the time machine drive in files named "Trash Deletes". It puts them in my Application Support folder in my library.
Is this TechTool backing up my emptying the trash - if so, it sure is taking up a lot of space o the time machine drive? Hopefully, I'm wrong here. I use "Timetracker" to see what files are being backed up thru Time Machine.
Anyone else out there notice this?
Thanks,
Larry

Although I own an older version of TT Pro I do not have it installed. I do not remember exactly what they install that is running in the background. What you might do, if it isn't in the documentation, is download Easy Find - CNet Downloads or MacUpdate - and use it to search for "techtool" or "micromat" which should find the item or items. However, I'm almost sure you could disable it in TT Pro's control panel for what to install.

Time Machine slow, bogging down computer.

I am having problems with Time Machine backups taking forever and, at the same time, bogging down my computer to the point I cannot use it.
For example, a 70MB backup yesterday took almost 5 hours. a 500MB one today is on hour 5 and still going. I have it set to back up while I'm at work (it's my home computer) but when I get home and it's still going I cannot use my computer at all without cancelling the backup due to lag, spinning beachballs, and apps crashing.
The hard drive it's backing up to is a 1TB Iomega drive connected via USB with 500 gigs of free space currently. I've got a 2011 MacBook Pro running 10.8.5, 500gig hard drive with 70 gigs free. I have run backups with my normal apps running and with virtually all apps quit, including Finder and Dropbox, which doesn't seem to effect the time spent backing up. I do not have any virus scanners running. I've tried different USB cables in case it's a faulty cable. I have gone through Pondini's guide dozens of times, nothing's helped.
Do you guys have any more suggestions? I dream of the days long past where Time Machine would work in the background and I'd never notice it. Backing up is now an all-day ordeal with nothing else able to happen in the meantime. I'd like it to do it's hourly back-ups and get away from using TImeMachineEditor to only do daily back-ups, but I can't have my computer unusable every time it tries to back up.
Also, somewhat related; I tried to update my back-up drive to a 2TB Western Digital and to a 1.5TB partition on a 3TB Western Digital drive but was unable to get Time Machine to complete a back-up to either drive; it kept crashing and burning at various stages. I had followed Pondini's guide to the letter with formatting them yet never got anywhere. That's why I'm using my older, smaller drive; it's the only one I can successfully get to back up. Any thoughts on that?

Sherri39401- I am not running any sort of anti-virus.
Eric Root- I tried the reset of Time Machine. If anything it's worse; took 10 hours to do a 11 gig backup, then right after it was on hour 4 of a 28MB transfer and was only halfway through.
Etresoft- That is a nifty little program! Here's the report I ran this morning:
Hardware Information:
          MacBook Pro (15-inch, Early 2011)
          MacBook Pro - model: MacBookPro8,2
          1 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7 CPU: 4 cores
          8 GB RAM
Video Information:
          Intel HD Graphics 3000 - VRAM: 512 MB
          AMD Radeon HD 6750M - VRAM: 1024 MB
System Software:
          OS X 10.8.5 (12F45) - Uptime: 2 days 21:8:55
Disk Information:
          Hitachi HTS725050A9A362 disk0 : (500.11 GB)
                    disk0s1 (disk0s1) <not mounted>: 209.7 MB
                    Dominick (disk0s2) /: 499.25 GB (109.47 GB free)
                    Recovery HD (disk0s3) <not mounted>: 650 MB
          MATSHITADVD-R UJ-8A8
USB Information:
          Apple Inc. FaceTime HD Camera (Built-in)
          Iomega Iomega 1 TB
                    disk3s1 (disk3s1) <not mounted>: 209.7 MB
                    Shinako (disk3s2) /Volumes/Shinako: 999.86 GB (302.04 GB free)
          Apple Inc. Apple Internal Keyboard / Trackpad
          Apple Inc. BRCM2070 Hub
                    Apple Inc. Bluetooth USB Host Controller
          Western Digital My Book 1140 3 TB
                    disk2s1 (disk2s1) <not mounted>: 314.6 MB
                    SORUKA (disk2s2) /Volumes/SORUKA: 2 TB (422.46 GB free)
                    SORIKO (disk2s3) /Volumes/SORIKO: 999.98 GB (999.31 GB free)
          Apple Computer, Inc. IR Receiver
FireWire Information:
Thunderbolt Information:
          Apple Inc. thunderbolt_bus
Kernel Extensions:
          com.logmein.driver.LogMeInSoundDriver          (1.0.2)
          com.LivestreamProcaster.driver.ProcasterAudioRedirector          (2.0.0)
          com.Cycling74.driver.Soundflower          (1.5.1)
Problem System Launch Daemons:
          [failed] com.apple.wdhelper.plist
Problem System Launch Agents:
          [failed] com.apple.accountsd.plist
          [failed] com.apple.AirPlayUIAgent.plist
          [failed] com.apple.coreservices.appleid.authentication.plist
          [failed] com.apple.pbs.plist
          [failed] com.apple.printtool.agent.plist
          [failed] com.apple.rcd.plist
          [failed] com.apple.tccd.plist
Launch Daemons:
          [loaded] com.adobe.fpsaud.plist
          [loaded] com.adobe.SwitchBoard.plist
          [loaded] com.adobe.versioncueCS4.plist
          [loaded] com.daz3d.content_management_service.plist
          [loaded] com.ea.origin.ESHelper.plist
          [loaded] com.freemacsoft.appcleanerdaemon.plist
          [not loaded] com.logmein.logmeinblanker.plist
          [not loaded] com.logmein.logmeinserver.plist
          [loaded] com.timesoftware.timemachineeditor.backup-auto.plist
          [loaded] com.timesoftware.timemachineeditor.helper.plist
Launch Agents:
          [not loaded] com.adobe.AAM.Updater-1.0.plist
          [loaded] com.adobe.CS4ServiceManager.plist
          [failed] com.logmein.LMILaunchAgentFixer.plist
          [not loaded] com.logmein.logmeingui.plist
          [not loaded] com.logmein.logmeinguiagent.plist
          [not loaded] com.logmein.logmeinguiagentatlogin.plist
          [loaded] com.wacom.wacomtablet.plist
          [failed] net.culater.SIMBL.Agent.plist
User Launch Agents:
          [loaded] com.adobe.AAM.Updater-1.0.plist
          [loaded] com.adobe.ARM.202f4087f2bbde52e3ac2df389f53a4f123223c9cc56a8fd83a6f7ae.plist
          [loaded] com.facebook.videochat.Jessie.plist
          [loaded] com.google.keystone.agent.plist
          [loaded] com.iLike.Agent.plist
          [loaded] com.valvesoftware.steamclean.plist
User Login Items:
          Quicksilver
          Last.fm
          WeatherBug Alert
          UnhideLibrary
          Dropbox
          Mail
3rd Party Preference Panes:
          Adobe Version Cue CS4
          Flash Player
          Flip4Mac WMV
          Growl
          Java
          Perian
          WacomTablet
Internet Plug-ins:
          AdobePDFViewer.plugin
          AdobePDFViewerNPAPI.plugin
          AmazonMP3DownloaderPlugin1017287.plugin
          DirectorShockwave.plugin
          DivXBrowserPlugin.plugin
          Flash Player.plugin
          FlashPlayer-10.6.plugin
          Flip4Mac WMV Plugin.plugin
          iPhotoPhotocast.plugin
          JavaAppletPlugin.plugin
          LogMeIn.plugin
          LogMeInSafari32.plugin
          LogMeInSafari64.plugin
          QuickTime Plugin.plugin
          Silverlight.plugin
          Unity Web Player.plugin
          WacomNetscape.plugin
          WacomTabletPlugin.plugin
User Internet Plug-ins:
          Move-Media-Player.plugin
          npadaptiveplugin.plugin
          Picasa.plugin
Bad Fonts:
          None
Top Processes by CPU:
              18%          firefox
               5%          plugin-container
               4%          WindowServer
               3%          hidd
               2%          Transmission
               1%          Last.fm
               1%          EtreCheck
               1%          mds
               0%          Mail
               0%          SystemUIServer
Top Processes by Memory:
          464 MB firefox
          295 MB mds
          74 MB    Quicksilver
          57 MB    Mail
          57 MB    plugin-container
          57 MB    Transmission
          41 MB    Skype
          41 MB    Finder
          41 MB    WindowServer
          33 MB    Dropbox
Virtual Memory Statistics
          4.60 GB Free RAM
          859 MB Active RAM
          1.20 GB Inactive RAM
          1.35 GB Wired RAM
          22.20 GB           Page-ins
          17.74 GB           Page-outs

Time Machine Slow & Backs Up Large Amounts of Data - The Fix

This is about Time Machine becoming very slow and taking hours to backup and trying to backup large amouts of data each time.
I spent a month on the phone with 2nd level Tech support and engineering - every other day.
I have 4 computers (one was a clients), all with different backup systems: Time Capsule over CAT 6 Gigabit Ethernet through a Thunderbolt monitor, internal eSata to external 6 TB RAID 5, Wireless to Time Capsule, Firewire 800 to External 2 TB RAID 1 dive.
With the install of 10.8.5 (the itermediate update to 10.9) I immedialety had Time Machine problems on all four computers. As I said, I spent a month talking with Apple. Also during this time I purchased 2 new MacBook Pro 13 Retinas. Installed Norton Internet Security 5 on them and they had the same problem. The new Retina's had 10.9 on them, so this is about 10.8.5 and 10.9.
After doing Data Capture on 3 of the computers for engineering (a new MBPro13R and my MacPro, and a MBPro 13 Mid-2012), engineering finally figured out what was happening.
Norton Internet Sucrity 5 for Mac is not longer compatible. As my 2nd level tech said: " Engineering told him, engineering needs to call Norton and figure out what they did to their program to cause this."
The fix is to completely remove Norton and all it's components (using the uninstall app inside the Symantec folder). Once you do that, Erase your backup drive, Restart everything, Re-connect your computer to your drive - then it immediately works perfectly.
Do Not Re-Install Norton.
I have now done this exact operation on 7 different machines. Time Machine works instantly. Time Machine is not the same program from 10.8 - it has been completely rebuilt, so I doesn't backup in the same way. But it works perfectly on all my computers now.
Don't forget the first backup will take hours since it is starting over clean and must do a complete backup the first time. After that it works fine.
I'm not going to put Norton back in my computers until I find that Norton has acknowledged this problem, or they come out with Norton Internet Security 6.
I reposted this here because on another post it was on the 20 page.
Hope this helps

Guitarfx wrote:
Time Machine has worked properly for me for several months. However, in the last week or two I have noticed some very strange behavior. Basically, Time Machine wants to backup virtually my entire system every few days or so.
How often do you let TM do backups? If it hasn't backed up for several days, it may indeed be doing a new, full, backup. Apple doesn't document this, but many folks believe it's about 10 days.
Download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget from: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/timemachinebuddy.html. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window.
It first shows the most recent backup. Navigate to one of the large backups, and examine the messages. If you see something there that seems suspicious, copy and post the messages here (be sure to get them all, as sometimes they overflow the small window).
I presume that for whatever reason, Time Machine believes my files are changing and therefore proceeds backing them all up. I can't really think of anything special I have done with my system in the last month which would cause this, but have tried formating my Time Capsule and starting over with a fresh backup--to no avail.
There are some applications that cause large backups, often because they use a single file, often a database, to store their data. Entourage is a common one: every time you send or receive a single message, the whole database is changed, and will be backed-up the next time. Apple mail, of course, stores messages individually to prevent this.
FileVault is similar, in an even bigger way: it converts your entire Home Folder into a single, encrypted disk image. So any change to anything in your Home Folder is treated as a change to the encrypted image. TM minimizes the impact, though, by only backing it up when you log out.
So consider this while examining the results from TimeTracker, as VA2020 recommended.

Time Machine slow to open

Although there are lots of threads about Timemachine being slow, my problem is slightly different. Timemachine appears to be backing up ok (though I've temporarily disabled backups now), but if I want to recover a file, it opens so slowly as to be almost useless.
When I click on Timemachine it seems as though there is no response. However, after a minute or two, I get a "Connecting to Timemachine" progress meter in Finder. After much longer, say 5 minutes, I get "Do you still want to connect to Timemachine, Backup Volume is now available".
After a few more minutes I'm in Time Machine, but all the controls (forward back arrows, right side bar etc) are frozen. After a very long time (not sure how long, as I gave up after 15 minutes and came back four hours later), the controls are now working, but oh so slowly. Clicking back through archives takes about 30 seconds to a minute for each movement. However, all the archives seem in place, and when I restore a file, though very slow to start (another minute or so with a progress meter) it actually uploads back to my machine quite quickly.
The Timemachine volume is 500GB and there are 53GB spare (>10%).
Okay - what have I done to fix this?
I've tried repairing the Time Machine volume with Disk Utility. I have three volumes on the one hard drive, Time Machine, a Super Dooper boot backup (I backup my docs in Timemachine and have a bootable backup without documents in Super Dooper) and another partition just spare. The two other volumes can be repaired and verified. When I repair the Time Machine volume I get the following:
"Verify and Repair volume “Time Machine 2”
Volume repair complete.Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.Error: Couldn’t unmount disk."
And sure enough, if I try manually unmounting the disk, after an interminable wait (>10mins) it fails. Not sure why this matters though? I want it mounted to use it, don't I? However, I infer from this that it's Time machine, not the Hard drive that is the issue, since the other volumes work.
I searched in Console for errrors associated with Timemachine speed problems (backing up). I found I had lots of these errors,
sandboxd: mdworker deny mach-lookup com.apple.ls.boxd
mdworker: Unable to talk to lsboxd
which I removed, as recommended, by doing a safe boot.
However, now in console I have lots of these errrors:
xx/xx/xxx xx:xx AM com.apple.launchd[1]: (com.apple.sleepservicesd[6326]) Exited: Killed: 9
In other discussions this seems to be associated with Screen and computer freezing, but mine is more glaciating than freezing, that is, it's frozen but it still works! Also, it appears to be only Time machine. However, the errors don't appear to correlate with opening or doing anything with Time machine - the errors are around all the time.
Any ideas?

Yes, I agree, the disk, though no longer inaccessible to disk utility repair, still seems to have some problems. It has now been shown to be slow across a range of actons, not just Timemachine. Timemachine has improved slightly in its response when retrieving files. It now takes 3 to 4 minutes to open and make files selectable, rather than the 7 to 10 before, and I'm not getting the progress meter and then "Do you still want to connect to Timemachine, Backup Volume is now available" message before this happens.
We've just bought a MBP, so I now need to get a backup solution for multiple machines, so I'll move to a Timecapsule or some other kind of shared backup.
Thanks again for your assistance.

Time machine slow

Though the upgrade is very nice, the time machine backup seems extremely slow. It has been running now for over 48 hours and only 66/86 GB has been backed up. I am wondering if this might be a function of the wire (from the hard drive to the MacBook Pro) I am using: I am using the USB 2.0 port instead of the firewire 800 port. Might that have made a difference? And, I usually bring my laptop from work to home--its been sitting at work until the backup is finished. Would all be for naught if I disconnected to bring the computer home and then reconnected once I returned to work?

To add to the Slow Time Machine discussion:
I have a dual quad-core and three internal 750GB drives. I'm using the second drive as my Time Machine drive.
It took several hours to do the initial backup (as I expected) and it was about 93GB. I installed Leopard this past Thursday. I'm EST and it is just after 10am EST, but looking in Time Machine, these are what Time Machine shows as being available to me:
Today (now)
Today at 6:00 AM
Today at 12:11 AM
Yesterday at 8:07 PM
Yesterday at 3:18 PM
Yesterday at 9:35 AM
So much for hourly backups. And I know it isn't just that there were no changes made because the current Time Machine backup has been running since 7:35am (about 2-1/2 hours so far). Hard to do hourly backups when each backup takes about 5 hours. I'd hate to see this thing when I'm actually here and doing stuff.
What's the deal with it being so slow? I wasn't doing anything over the weekend (it is my work desktop) and I'm using an Apple-shipped internal 750GB hard drive.
"backupd" cpu usage varies, as expected, but Finder is using between 25% and 80% cpu at any given time. And I'm not doing anything except running iostat in a terminal window. (I'm typing this on a 10.4.10 MBP.)
I did "sudo ls -R <diskname> | wc -l" on my main OSX disk in the most recent completed Time Machine backup directory and it counted 1845424 lines. I have a particular gmail account being IMAP accessed via mail.app (fedora mailing list) and, since that is all I use that gmail account for, all of the email is in one label which corresponds to one folder at the IMAP layer. There's a pretty good amount of traffic on that list and currently I have just under 100,000 emails in that folder. Because there are new emails (and thus new files) in that IMAP folder on my Mac, TM must hard-link each individual pre-existing email file plus add the new ones. So, each time TM runs, it must hard-link almost 100 thousand files in that one directory alone.
It doesn't seem that TM is meant to handle high loads or high volumes of data like this, at least on the current HFS+. It is possible that the ZFS would handle it better but that's currently not an option.
Some may respond that I either shouldn't connect my mail.app to a gmail account set up as such, or that I shouldn't expect TM to handle something like this. But this is exactly the kind of setup that TM should be able to handle.
In the meantime, it looks like TM is going to be slow. (oh, look; it is about 10:38am and TM is now saying "finishing backup" after running for 3 hours. and I "quit" mail.app to give it a break.)

Time machine slow at everything (not only copying ...)

Hi,
Though i loved the concept, on a day to day basis, i find time machine almost unusable.
I am up to trash this thing and never retry it ... but may be its me who is stupid but not Time Machine ?
Whats happening:
* Time machine is definitely quite slow to back up
* But more than that, time machine is super slow to initialize a back up or close the job after a back up
It can some time stay 10' to look at what should be back up, and then 10 (or definitely more ...) minutes to close and clean the job (though the back up is finished). This even if it was even not a Mb to copy ! And you go no estimated time, you just wait ... arg ....
This is extremly frustrating, i have the impression my computer is constantly interrupted, this prevent me from using correctly the Net as network is totally dead ... just unsable !
Though my configuration is very standard:
* Standard 1 Tb time capsule
* Standard OSX.6 on a macbookpro
* Approximately 120 Gb of data but no specific use ....
This is vey deceptive. I think i'll go back to Carbon Copy cloner and wait for the apple engineers to put more effort into time machine ... except if someone raise my ignorance ? Anything i could do wrong ?

luro wrote:
Thank you. It might be this spotlight thing then (strange that spotlight would index TC in a standard default setup though).
No, many folks want to use it to find backup copies of things they've deleted.
I removed it and hopefully this will improve the situation.
Don't stop there. By all means exclude it from anti-virus, and try the other things, too.
Your description sounds like there may be more going on than that. Get the +TM Buddy+ (per #A1) and see if TM's having trouble deleting old backups. If so, the +*Repair Disk+* may be called for.

Time Machine forcing computer to restart

I have just bought a new iMac and am trying to back up onto a external hard drive using time machine.
I have erased and partitioned the Hard Drive and then tried to back up onto it. When I do this it works until about 12gb of the 203gb are backed up and then a grey cast covers the screen with the message that the computer must be restarted. Before this started happening a few times a message just came up saying 'Unable to complete backup'
I am wondering if it may be a problem with my iMac hard drive because whenever I try to verify it this happens
*24/12/07 6:51:24 PM Disk Utility[270] Disk Utility started.*
*24/12/07 6:51:30 PM Disk Utility[270] Verifying volume “Macintosh HD”*
*24/12/07 6:51:30 PM Disk Utility[270] Starting verification tool:*
*24/12/07 6:52:54 PM Disk Utility[270]*
*24/12/07 6:52:54 PM Disk Utility[270] Performing live verification.*
*24/12/07 6:52:54 PM Disk Utility[270] Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.*
*24/12/07 6:52:54 PM Disk Utility[270] Checking Extents Overflow file.*
*24/12/07 6:52:54 PM Disk Utility[270] Checking Catalog file.*
*24/12/07 6:52:55 PM Disk Utility[270] Checking multi-linked files.*
*24/12/07 6:52:55 PM Disk Utility[270] Checking Catalog hierarchy.*
*24/12/07 6:52:55 PM Disk Utility[270] Checking Extended Attributes file.*
*24/12/07 6:52:55 PM Disk Utility[270] Checking volume bitmap.*
*24/12/07 6:52:55 PM Disk Utility[270] Checking volume information.*
*24/12/07 6:52:55 PM Disk Utility[270] Invalid volume file count*
*24/12/07 6:52:55 PM Disk Utility[270] (It should be 643457 instead of 643458)*
*24/12/07 6:52:55 PM Disk Utility[270] Invalid volume directory count*
*24/12/07 6:52:55 PM Disk Utility[270] (It should be 158153 instead of 158152)*
*24/12/07 6:52:55 PM Disk Utility[270] The volume Macintosh HD needs to be repaired.*
*24/12/07 6:52:55 PM Disk Utility[270] Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.*
*24/12/07 6:52:55 PM Disk Utility[270]*
*24/12/07 6:52:55 PM Disk Utility[270] Disk Utility stopped verifying “Macintosh HD” because the following error was encountered:*
*Filesystem verify or repair failed.*
Any suggestions on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated.
Dan
Message was edited by: dcoa

Your disk directory for your internal hard drive needs to be repaired. Boot from your Leopard install DVD by holding down the "c" key on startup until you see the spinning gear. Choose a language and pick Disk from the Utilities menu at the top of the screen. Select your internal drive in the left window and click on Repair and repeat until no errors are reported. Then repair permissions.
Check your hard drive to make sure that there is fifteen to twenty percent of the disk space that is free. Mac OS X needs that much free space to operate properly and a too full disk is one of the things that can cause disk directory errors.

Everytime I start time machine, my computer backs up +/- 250MB, then freezes. Tried it with 3 different external drives, all stop at about the same point (they all work fine on other macs). Any suggestions?

The drives I have are Seagate 1TB GoFlex portable drives (one has UBS 3.0, the other USB 2.0), and a WesternDigital 1TB passport (USB 3.0). I originally tried to backup with Time Machine using the Seagate USB 3.0, and when that didnt work, Seagate suggested maybe since my operating system is a little older, that I try with a USB 2.0, so they sent me another NEW external hard drive, with the USB 2.0. Had the same issue. Frustrated and convinced that Seagate just sucked, I went and bought the 1TB WesternDigital passport (USB 3.0). Have the exact same issue again. Every drive was new, and formatted for mac. When I started time machine it started to back up my files, but froze after copying give or take 250 MB (usually 252.5MB, to be exact). I went and tried the drive on several other macs, and none of them presented any problems. I also tried dragging individual files, but it still freezes on pretty much anything bigger than +/- 100MB. Disk Utility says that all the drives are fine. Obviously this is a problem with my computer, and not the 3 brand new external drives. I thought about upgrading to OSX 10.6, but don't know if this'll help or not (plus, I'd really prefer to have all the files backed up on a drive before doing that, just in case). I dont know what else to do.. called apple, but I'm not about to pay them $50 to have them MAYBE give me a solution (done that twice now for previous unrelated issues, and each time they just told me to take it to a computer repair place.) Just seeing if anyone out there has a solution before I cave and take it back to the certified computer guys for them to figure it out.. Also, I live in Montana and theres no apple store anywhere close (not suprising), so taking it to an Apple Store is just not an option.
Side note: Seagate tech support is awesome; they tried everything to solve the problem, and they even bent their rules a little to send me a new drive, even though it wasn't a malfunction issue with their drive. Really helpful, friendly people, which is much more than I can say for Apple at this point...

this is what you need to do to exclude everything apart from desktop.
on time machine preferences, click on Options
click plus sign, on the new window, click macintosh HD
do a Control + A then deselect users then click okay
go to options again, plus sign, go to users, control +A then deselect your user account
go to options again, plus sign, go to your user account, control + A, deselect desktop
start the back up.

Time Machine: Old Computer / New Computer

I had been backing up my Mac Mini to an external drive using Time Machine for a couple of years. I just got a new iMac, connected the same drive to it, and am in the process of running a back up on it. Whne I open the external drive folder I see one file named 'Backups.backupdb' with the current date/time in the 'Date Modified' column.
I don't think I just overwrote my 2 years of back ups from the Mini (which WAS going to be my question) since there are 2 directories in that 'Backups.backupdb' directory - one with each computer name. The question becomes how to restore files from the old computer to the new. Do I have to now search for them directly on the external drive (i.e. not use Time Machine to restore)?
After 2 years of working with it Time Machine still has me a bit confused,

Use the Migration Assistant to import them.
(65416)

Time Machine and computer name change

I just recently reinstalled the operator system after a computer crash when i did so changed the computer name and now when i go into time machine to restore the settings it only shows up as one sparse disc image.
i have found that when i can mount it manually but the files are not usable and when i mount it with time machine the history does not appear.

Go to System Preferences - Sharing and change the computer name there. You can also, optionally, change the name of your hard drive to further clarify the origin of your backups. Click once on the "Macintosh HD" on your desktop, then click its name to allow you to edit it.
Matt

Time Machine Freezes Computer

My computer consistently locks up when Time Machine is running in background. At least I think it's Time Machine. Start using it as soon as I upgraded to Leopard. I am very tired of restarting everytime I return to my computer after being away an hour or two.

having similar issues, but seems like indexing is to blaim for the backup not completing:
i checked the particular file its been crashing over and really is a very simple text file.
bizarre that such a fundamental app like spotlight ( mds ) is failing over trivial data and messing up a backup. who cares whether a file can be indexed or not, i want it backed up...
7/17/08 11:41:04 AM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[279] Indexing a file failed. Returned -1134 for: /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/easy-install.pth, /Volumes/TimeMachine/Backups.backupdb/brutus/2008-07-16-175657.inProgress/FD070 BFF-FD08-414F-9D7E-FE55E4D5A837/OSX/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/easy-instal l.pth
7/17/08 11:41:04 AM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[279] Aborting backup because indexing a file failed.
7/17/08 11:41:04 AM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[279] Stopping backup.
7/17/08 11:41:04 AM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[279] Copied 310 files (48 KB) from volume OSX.
7/17/08 11:41:04 AM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[279] Copy stage failed with error:11

Time Machine & sleep computer settings

Is it OK to have time machine active and set my computer to sleep after 2 or 3 hours?
Will time machine work when the computer is not asleep, that is will it continue to back up when it is sleeping too?
Is it advisable to set my energy settings to never for computer sleep and just have my display sleeping in order to let TM backup hourly?
Thanks for the advice,
John

growe785 wrote:
Does the Time Machine App. have settings so I can program it to back up when I want it to?
Just on or off.
Does it have a manual option?
If you keep it off you can turn it back on and initiate a +Backup Now+ command.
There is a non-Apple editor:
[http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor]

Time machine slows computer

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