Time Machine - strange increase in backup?

Hello,
I have a Macbook Pro 10.6.8 running Time Machine backups to a couple of externals - a Seagate and a WD. I swap them out (cabled) every week or two.
Yesterday I began to manually initiate a Time Machine backup just because I wanted to catch the drive up that I swapped to from a week prior. I just clicked the "Back up now" feature like normal.
It caught up as expected after several minutes.
However, I'm noticing that if I click "Back up now" even when I havene't even used the computer I keep getting several-meg files backing up. I tested this by, literally, not using the computer for five minutes - no programs downloading anything were open, I don't download mail via client (I surf to Gmail), no VPN or anything I can think of that might be pulling in files.
No matter what, though, if I click manual back up at any given time - even if the computer sat, untouched, I see it once again has 1, 4, or 10 meg files it's needing to take care of. This happened yesterday and now today.
No, I don't do torrents or file sharing, I don't have this pulling double duty by sending iPhone or iPad stuff to it, either.
My only thought is maybe it's automatic software updates trickling in over a few days but for some reason it seems out of character from what I normally see when I manually "Back up now." I manually checked the Apple-logo for software updates - nothing available. Normally, I could click "Back up now" and an hour or two later - nothing - it's complete. Not the case today... always a trickle of small, multi-megabyte files coming in needing to back up.
Any ideas?

I see that behavior often when I back up my Snow Leopard partition. It appears everything is getting backed up, so I don't worry about it. I don't know why it does that.

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Time Machine - strange behavior while deleting old backups

Not sure if this is the right place, because this is actually not on Time Capsule, but on a Time Machine on an external USB drive.
In any case, I searched the web for "time machine delete old backups" and found many discussions of various aspects of this task. My objective is to clean up a partition on a the external drive that I no longer use for active TM backups, but to retain a small set of backups in case I need to go back to them. The partition now has other uses and I need the space. My main TM backup is now on a separate Time Capsule.
So again my objective is not to remove all backups, but just most of them.
It appears that the well-discussed procedure is the following:
Go into Time Machine.
Select the Macintosh HD.
Go back to one of the oldest backups.
Click on the Gear > click Delete Backup.
This procedure will remove one Backup at a time, and it seems to take 5 - 10 minutes for each backup.
Here is what I noticed that was "strange":
You could delete a selected backup using the above procedure.
For the first selected backup so deleted, there is a confirmation dialog with a warning message that it is not undoable.
After clicking OK on the warning message, the display backs up to the "Present" backup, and the administrative password is requested.
After the administrative password is entered, the backup starts but control is passed back to the user interface, and another backup can be selected to be deleted.
However, after the second backup is selected and deleted, there is no warning dialog, and no request for the administrative password. At this point the user interface is busy and nothing more can be done until the backup delete is completed. Except that the Time Machine can be exited by first pressing Escape, then Cancel on the lower left of the screen.
If the time machine is exited, there is a Delete Backups progress dialog with a progress bar for each backup so far requested. If the second backup was requested, as in the steps above, there would be two backups.
I discovered by playing around that either you had to wait within Time Machine for the deletion to complete, or alternatively exit Time Machine. While I was not sure what was going on, I kept starting one backup, then exiting Time Machine and re-entering Time Machine and requesting another delete operation. Each time after entering Time Machine, the warning/admin password sequence occurred and I was able to exit. And then immediately re-enter Time Machine and request another backup. Only by exiting and re-entering could another delete request be made.
When out of Time Machine, I thus saw the Delete Backups dialog with any number of concurrent "Delete One Backup" progress bars.
Because of the nature of the hard links used to indicate backups, I was wondering if these multiple delete operations could possibly be hung in a deadly embrace, so I decided to only do one at a time. Some further study to see if the multiple delete operations were all able to complete would be needed to know if this would be a good way to "queue up" multiple delete requests.
Bottom line: seems like kind of an odd implementation. Would be really nice if you could select many (say 30) individual backups and delete them all at once, rather than taking 5 - 10 minutes each. Again, this is because I am trying to reclaim disk space, but not delete all the backups from a Time Machine backup set that is not in active use.
Also, the method of "queuing up" backup delete requests is kind of odd, but seems to work, with the proviso that I have not yet confirmed that doing more than one at a time actually works.

Heinz-G?uenter Arnold wrote:
since the upgrade to SL it seem that Time Machine has problems to completely remove old backups completely. The "removed" backups do not show up in Time Machine anymore, but the backup folders and part of their contents can still be seen in Finder.
Hi, and welcome to the forums.
That happens occasionally, in both Leopard and Snow Leopard, sometimes after something was deleted from the Finder, but also after an abnormal shutdown or improper disconnection of the TM disk.
Run a +*Repair Disk+* on it via Disk Utility, in your Applications/Utilities folder. If it finds errors, but can't fix them all, run it again (and again) until it either fixes them all, or can't fix any more.

Time Machine very slow when backup disk almost full

My Time Machine backups on a Time Capsule (first generation, 1 TB) have become extremely slow recently. The disk is almost full, but I don't think that should be a problem as Time Machine deletes the oldest backups by itself. It has been, so I don't think that in itself should cause a problem.
This becomes particularly annoying because whenever backups are going on, the system doesn't allow me to access the "Open" or "Save" dialogues - probably because it wants to check the Time Machine disk, but can't, or only can very slowly. Whenever I do this, the app in question just freezes.
Anyone else has this problem, and does anyone know a fix? I don't want to start a new backup if I can avoid it.

Florian M. wrote:
Thank you. Did that, and it seems to be working now - though it actually seemed to have got better even before I ran Disk Utility. Before, even rebooting didn't help.
Yes, if there's a problem inside he sparse bundle, rebooting (the Mac and/or TC) won't help.
Time Machine is a great technology, but it seems to have strange quirks sometimes
It does indeed!
Once again, thank you.
You're quite welcome, and thanks for the star!

Time Machine has stopped making backups

Time Machine has worked fine for me fore many months, the backup disk being a 1 TB external firewire drive.
But now Time Machine will not make a backup. I keep getting the same error message: "Time Machine Error. This backup is too large for the backup volume. The backup requires 88.7 GB but only 58.5 are available."
I thought Time Machine just deleted the oldest files on the drive to make the room it needs for continued backups. So why isn't it doing that now? How do I get it to go back to doing that?
Thanks for any help!
Tom

Tom Baker1 wrote:
My Time Machine backup disk is an external 1 TB firewire drive with only one partition, dedicated entirely to TM, and it backs up the two internal drives in my G5. One of these two internal drives has about 600 GB of data on it and the other about 400, so together they would be enough to fill the external Time Machine backup drive.
Yes, that's too small. Our "rule of thumb" is, TM needs 2-3 times the space of the data it's backing up. See #1 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
Now I have discovered that there is something wrong with the Time Machine backups as well. I decided to go into TM to see just how far back in time the backups go, but it will only allow me to go back as far as yesterday. It acts as though there are no backups older than yesterday afternoon.
That's probably correct; your TM disk is too small, and there's just not room for more. Here's the situation: A full backup has nearly filled the disk; something fairly large has been added or changed, and there just isn't room for it, in addition to the full backup.
The 88.7 GB it's requesting means it's trying to back up about 74 GB (it adds 20% for workspace, etc., on the TM disk).
This is getting stranger all the time. At this point should I just give up trying to fix the situation, erase the backup drive, and start all over again?
That probably won't help much, if at all. To confirm what's going on, Click here to download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window. Navigate to the last backup attempt, then copy and post all the messages for that run here.
You need to do one of the following:
Get a larger drive, at least 2 TB.
Get an additional drive; use one for TM backups of one of your internal HDs, the other for a different app to back-up the other internal HD.
Exclude a lot of stuff from Time Machine (at least 300 GB).
Use a different app, such as CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper, to back up your internals to separate partitions on the 1 TB drive. These will be exact copies only; no previous copies of things you've changed or deleted.

I am trying to get space on an external hard drive which has some old time machine back up files that I do not need but can not eliminate, even by going into the time machine, clicking on the backup file to be eliminated and using the drop down eliminate

I am trying to get space on an external hard drive which has some old time machine back up files that I do not need but can not eliminate, even by going into the time machine, clicking on the backup file to be eliminated and using the drop down menu with the gear box symbol to eliminate

I cannot find this 300GB "Backup" in the Finder, only in the Storage info when I check "About This Mac".
You are probably using Time Machine to backup your MacBook Pro, right? Then the additional 300 GB could be local Time Machine snapshots. Time Machine will write the hourly backups to the free space on your hard disk, if the backup drive is temporarily not connected. You do not see these local backups in the Finder, and MacOS will delete them, when you make a regular backup to Time Machine, or when you need the space for other data.
See Pondini's page for more explanation: What are Local Snapshots? http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
I have restarted my computer, but the information remains the same. How do I reclaim the use of the 300GB? Why is it showing up as "Backups" when it used to indicate "Photos"? Are my photos safe on the external drive?
You have tested the library on the external drive, and so your photos are save there.
The local TimeMachine snapshot probably now contains a backup of the moved library. Try, if connecting your Time Machine drive will reduce the size of your local Time Machine snapshots.

I have 2 auxillary disk drives for my MacBokk Pro. Time Machine uses one for backup and I use the other for storage, but I am unable to create a new folder or drag and drop files or folders to the aux drive.

I am unable to create a new folder on either of my auxillary disk drives. I can access the files and folders that were there when I transferred one of the drives from a PC. Time machine uses one for backup and I want to use the other to store photos which are large files. An help would be appreciated.

Thanks for the reply. If I reformat the drive will I be able to access the files on it from the MAC. I do not share the drive with a PC. The files were originally created on a PC which I no longer use. I do want to continue to access the files put there by the PC. I would like to not have to copy them over to the MAC hard drive just to use them. The second aux drive is new and works fine because it was formatted by the MAC. I can drag and drop files there and work with just as if they were on the internal drive.

Time Machine no longer recognizes backup file

Hi:
My Time Capsule was malfunctioning, and I lost my internet connection. I rebooted the Time Capsule, and had to reset the internet connection via the Time Capsule software that's part of System Preferences. When I got my internet connection back up and running, Time Machine can no longer connect to Time Capsule. When it tries to back up, I get this error message...
"The backup disk image “/Volumes/Aquaria-2/JHitch’s Computer_0017f2ce01da.sparsebundle” is already in use.
It's like Time Machine thinks that my backup file on my Time Capsule belongs to somebody else. How can I get Time Machine to go back to using my old backup file on my Time Machine?

I have had this exact problem occur when I logged off while Mail was in TM restore state. I guess the backup is locked somehow because it was cut off while in use. I wish I could help, but I am in the same boat and I will watch this post for help.

After having the logic board replaced, Time Machine will no longer backup my computer to the same backup files as before.

After having the logic board replaced due to bad NVidia chip, my Time Machine will no longer backup my computer to the current backup. Is there a way to reset something to get Time Machine to continue to use the same backup files as before for this laptop?

As far as TM is concerned you have a new computer, so it will make a new backup. If you don't have the space for both backups then erase your backup drive before backing up the computer.

I tried to install a new hard drive using Snow Leopard to back up with Time Machine. When I installed the new HD I installed Leopard (10.5) on it and tried to use time machine to restore the backup I had made using 10.6. Kernel panic screen occurred.

I backed up my system using 10.6 Snow Leopard's Time Machine to an external hard drive. I did this because I purchased a new internal hard drive to upgrade my 2007 White Macbook from 80GB to 320GB. When I installed the new hard drive, I installed 10.4 (Tiger) and then 10.5 (Leopard) and once Leopard was in I tried to use Time Machine to restore my backup from 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and received a kernal panic screen directly after the bootup.
The screen had code asking for 10.6, so does this mean that the computer is searching for Snow Leopard? If so, how can I do this? Will a bootable drive with Snow Leopard on it be able to solve the issue or will I somehow need to find a way to wipe out this new hard drive?
-Steve

Booting From Snow Leopard Installer Disc
1. Insert Snow Leopard Installer Disc into the optical drive.
2. Restart the computer.
3. Immediately after the chime press and hold down the "C" key.
4. Release the key when the spinning gear below the dark gray Apple logo appears.
5. Wait for installer to finish loading.
Drive Preparation and Installation
1. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Security button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
7. After formatting is complete quit DU and return to the installer. Install Snow Leopard.

I am using 10.9.1 on a 21.5" iMac. I am backing up using Time Machine. The hourly backups are over kill. How do get TM to backup daily?

I am using 10.9.1 on a 21.5" iMac. I am backing up using Time Machine. The hourly backups are over kill. How do get TM to backup daily, only?

See Pondini's TM FAQs, for details.

How to prevent time machine from deleting certain backup folders?

So, I have problem undrestanding time machine. Time machine has made a backup of my files in Nov 2012 and another backup from Jan 2013. There is some files in Nov 2012 that I want to keep them forever and never be deleted. So, they were backed up by Time machine (I have deleted those files from my computer so they're no lonegr excist in my compuetr). Althought they do excist on my time machine under the Nov 2012 folder, I am not able to modify them at all for example, I'm not allowed to copy them somehwere else. Since, I can not make another copy of them, I am worried if time machine delete my Nov 2012 in future and then they will be gone. Can someone please help me in modifying/ controling my folder so it won't be deleted in future?

You are using Time Machine incorrectly, your files will be deleted from Time Machine after you delete them from your Mac, the only variable is when.
Time Machine is a backup, not a storage system.
Restore them now and copy them to long term storage (another hard drive)

Time machine Deleted old computer backups

Hey,
I have been using a mac pro for about a year and a half now and as all computers get it has become slow and full of garbage. So i used my time machine back up and successfully backed up all my files. I put in the OS disk and wiped the computer clean and reinstalled the OS. I plugged the time machine back up in and began to copy over only the files that i wanted. A few days later I had not yet copied over all of the files that I needed, i was prompted me to set up this computer with a time machine back up. I began the process thinking that it would create the backups in a new file on the drive or append it to the current list of back up images. It stopped half way though saying there was not enough free disk space. on the 1 TB HD there was only 5 GB remaining. So I just canceled it and was going to finish copying over all of the files i wanted and they delete the old backups. However when I went to get my old backup files, they had all been deleted.
I was using this hard drive to store other media files as well as time machine backups. taking the HD into the local computer shop i was informed that that is a terrible thing to do and perhaps the reason that my backups have been lost. the tech said there was nothing to be done but reformat the drive and start again. I am hoping this is not the case. the drive still says there is only 5GB of free space however I can only fine 300GB of files on the drive. so i believe that the files are still there. Does anyone know a solution to this issue. There are many valuable things on this hard drive that i would hate to loose.
I have tried holding the option key and clicking on the icon to view other backups, but my original backups are not there.
Thanks in advance.

Before I make any reply, note that you are responding to a topic that has been inactive for more than two years, on a system two versions out of date. In the future, you would do better to start your own topic in an appropriate forum, specifying what system you're running and what hardware you're running it on, among other things.
this exact thing happened to me as well and I must say that I find it totally unacceptable...
Well, without more information, it's impossible to say what might have happened or how you can recover. You may find some answers on Pondini's excellent site:
http://pondini.org
However, it's important to understand that this may or may not have anything to do with Time Machine. Perhaps your backup drive is dying, perhaps its directory structure became badly corrupt, perhaps one of any number of other things could have happened. Because there is no such thing as storage that is completely stable, it's important to keep more than one backup, as noted previously on this topic.
Carbon Copy Cloner seems like a much better solution at this time.
Carbon Copy Cloner is an excellent solution. Is it better? No. It is simply different, and that makes it better in some aspects and worse in others than Time Machine. The best backup strategy will involve two different backup programs. I frequently recommend using both Time Machine and CCC. I use TM with a Time Capsule for one backup, which has certain advantages over CCC. I use CCC for a couple other backups, one of which is in a safe deposit box at all times, and that has some advantages over TM. Using both, with multiple backups, means that I'm extremely unlikely to lose much data, if any at all... unless a meteor hits and destroys both my home and my bank, in which case I've got bigger problems!
Anyway, with regard to recovery, take a look at Pondini's site. If that doesn't help, or you need assistance with something, start your own topic in the appropriate forum for your system and provide additional details that may help us better assist you.

Time Machine deleted my old backups and crapped out midstream

I had just gotten my failing hard drive replaced, and restored from Time Machine backup. So far so good.
So a week later, I wanted to upgrade to Mountain Lion, but figured I should be responsible and run Time Machine backup again before doing the upgrade just in case something goes wrong.
The Mac has a 4TB drive, which has 2TB free. The backup drive is a 4TB external drive, which has (or had) Time Machine backups going back two years or so. It still had over a TB of space left. I clicked on Backup Now and let it run overnight. I noticed it said "Deleting old backup to make room" or something like that, which I thought was normal.
I woke up in the morning to find that Time Machine had crapped out in the middle, and said that it couldn't complete. I realized that it had deleted all my old backups. It didn't need to do that, since the only files that had changed would have been less than a GB, and it had over a TB of space to work with.
It must have thought that everything on the drive had changed since the last backup, and it wanted to backup the entire drive. As such it tried deleting all my old backups! But it failed, and stopped in the middle.
Now I have a drive that still says there is only 1.2 TB of space on the drive, but I can't see the files! Even with Tinkertool, I can't see anything beyond the one most recent backup.
Can these files be recovered? I am totally ticked that there isn't some kind of confirmation like "Are you sure you want to delete X?"
I actually need to have some of these older backups, as they include files that had been deleted before the latest backup that I may need to retrieve. Any hard drive experts out there? Any terminal commands that can make these files accessible, even if I have to retrieve them manually?

To clarify, this all happened under Snow Leopard as I had said. My profile lists Tiger, since I haven't cared to update my personal profile since using that OS, and in fact I still use Tiger among other versions. I manage a lot of users. And I never got to upgrade to Mountain Lion on this system, as explained in the post above. So I don't see the confusion.
I don't think the model of Mac makes a difference for this type of problem, but in case it does, the incident was on a 2010 Intel iMac with a 4TB hard drive and 8GB of RAM. I would have mentioned that if this was a problem with hardware specific to the model of Mac. But this is more of a universal issue.
But to stay on topic, I'm guessing my old backups are toast. But if anybody has any experience with recovering from Time Machine deleting their old backups, I would be happy to hear from them. In the meantime, I am going to try to do some old fashioned file recovery, and see what I can salvage.

HT201250 My Time Machine is not backing up and gives me this error report, 'The backup disk image "/Volumes/Data/Valarie'siMac.sparsbundle" is already in use. Time machine could not complete backup. Can anyone help me?

My Time Machine is not backing up and gives me this error report:
The backup disk image "/Volumes/Data/Valarie'siMac.sparsbundle" is already in use
Time Machine could not complete backup
Can anyone help me?

Look at the discussion on the following forum:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3882138?start=0&tstart=0
The responses given there may help.

Time machine does not recognize backups

I need to do a restore because after a logic board replacement my apps are not showing as registered, in other words they are all asking for serial numbers. I would like to see if I can use time machine to restore these apps. I don't want to do a full restore using the OS X install CD because it says it erases the contents of the volume. I'm assuming that means teh system and apps will be restored but I'll lose my files.
I can;t get time machine to recognize backups and I found this...
Symptoms
In the Mac OS X 10.5 Time Machine "time travel" window, past backups may not appear if your computer name includes certain characters.
Products Affected
Resolution
Check your computer name in Sharing preferences. Make sure the computer name only includes ASCII characters from following set and is not blank (no matter which Mac OS X language version you are using):
0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
so I changed my computer name accordingly but the backup folder in Backups.backupdb still has the old name with a character not allowed. Nothing I do to change priveleges allows me to rename the folder!
Advice needed! Thanks!

It is not a simple matter of the computer name. A simple rename of the backup doesn't do it. It my be necessary but its not the obstacle.
The MAC address of the old board is in the Extended Attributes (EAs -"invisible" metadata) for the old board backups and the MAC address of the new board is in its EAs. If they MAC address in the EA doesn't match the MAC address of the machine that Time Machine is trying to backup it won't do it and it will start a new backup. That certainly appears to be the situation you face.
You can see this by a simple check in terminal. Below is a sample I have two machines name Juvenal and Pliny. The xattr command with the -l option lists all the extended attributes of a file. For the backups of my systems it returns a value that is, in fact, the MAC address of that machine. If the MAC address of the target and source don't match Time Machine won't do the backup and will start a newbackup'
~ $xattr -l /Volumes/Backup\ of\ Juvenal/Backups.backupdb/Juvenal
com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress:
0000 30 30 3A 31 64 3A 34 66 3A 34 61 3A 66 31 3A 64 00:1d:4f:1a:f4:d6
0010 36 00
~ $xattr -l /Volumes/Backup\ of\ Pliny/Backups.backupdb/Pliny
com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress:
0000 30 30 3A 31 62 3A 36 33 3A 33 66 3A 66 64 3A 37 00:1b:63:3f:fd:76
0010 36 00
The actual path to your backups will depend on your configuration and whether or not the backup is on a locally attached drive or not. Mine - in the example above - are on a TC and the results occur after opening the sparse bundles.
The solution I pointed you do is trying to deal with this and change it so the MAC addresses match.
I agree this is a known problem and warrant an official fix which should not be complicated.

Time Machine - strange increase in backup?

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