Time machine suddenly says "none" for oldest and latest backups

I recently upgraded from OSX 10.6.8  to 10.8.3.  Was also away for several weeks, so lots to back up at once.  Says it's backing up, but hasn't registered any new backups since I've returned.

lauriedono wrote:
you referred me to suggests. I had  changed the disk I think in my efforts to check that it was still set up right- that would explain, as it said, that TM would say "none" , not recognizing prior backups. Hopefully it will once it backs up fully.
Yes.  When you select a new drive, or re-select the same one, it doesn't look for the dates until the next backup completes normally.  (On earlier versions, it would show a couple of dashes, but Apple "improved" it  .)

Similar Messages

  • TC oldest and latest backups are same date--won't backup current date

    My oldest and latest backups are the same date (21DEC10) --when I enter TC--the only backup I have is for 21DEC--help!

    UPDATE: After quite a few attempts, I concluded there is an issue in SL with TM backups to a password protected Airport Disk, so I reverted to using the Airport password.
    What was odd during all of this is that when I was using a disk password, I could mount the disk (and the sparse images) from both my iMac and my UMBP, and TM would work from the UMBP but not the iMac. This was despite my deleting the TM plist, restarting, disconnecting the disk from the Airport extreme.
    When I reverted back to using the Airport password, I did it from the iMac. TM then worked fine from there, but not the UMBP. It took a combination of restarts, selecting None as the TM disk, and I don't remember what else to get the UMBP backing up again.
    So, in my case at least, the Mac that changed the PW type worked fine, the other one either never worked or required hoops to work. Other than that, kind of lost, but I do have it working at least.

  • Why does my TC no longer tell me the date of my Oldest and Latest Backups?

    When I go to Time Machine Preferences, all I see next to "Oldest Backup" and "Latest Backup" is "---". For the first several months, I was told these dates. (It does tell me when the "Next Backup" will happen.)
    Why did my Time Capsule stop telling me this information?
    How do I make it tell me this information?

    I assume you've tried a reboot of your Mac and TC? This will force the Mac to consider the TC backup "untrustable" and do a full check of it against what's on your Mac.

  • Time Machine suddenly refuses to backup to non case-sensitive drive

    There is another thread on this which for some reason is marked as resolved, so I thought I'd post a new thread. Suddenly after months of no complaints I get the following error:
    *+Time Machine Error+*
    +A volume you are backing up is case-sensitive, but the backup volume is not.+
    +To Select a different backup volume, or to choose not to back up the case-sensitive volume, open the System Preferences and choose Time Machine.+
    The only thing I've changed is that yesterday I ran Software Update. Unfortunately I can't remember exactly what was updated, but I suspect Quicktime was one of them since I needed to reboot. So now I'm at 7.4.5 in Quicktime.
    Time Machine refuses to backup my drives now complaining about the case sensitive filesystem. The thing is, *NONE of my drives are case sensitive.* Looking at the Change Drive window in Time Machine, I see that most of the drives on my system say "reforat required" if I am to use them with Time Machine. All drives on my system are *Mac OS Extended (Journaled)*. The fact that some drives are not requiring a reformat and some are, even though they all are the same format is quite puzzling.
    I took a spare drive and allowed Time Machine to reformat it for it's use. It has now reformatted the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Case-Sensitive).
    Can anyone shed any light as to why TM would suddenly require my backup drive to be case sensitive when none of my drives are?
    This make no sense...
    -K

    Ok - Running Disk Utility Verify on both the system disk and the TM disk seems to have magically stopped this error. Note that Disk Utility didn't actually find or fix any problems with either disk. The problem just went away....
    It doesn't make any sense.
    -K

  • Unable to back up external hard drive via Time Machine.  Says no room but has back ups from two previous Mac notebooks on it.  Tried deleting them and now can't do anything.  Any ideas?

    Unable to back up external hard drive via Time Machine.  Says no room but has back ups from two previous Mac notebooks on it.  Tried deleting them and now can't do anything.  Any ideas?

    As john noted, eventually that external is probably not going to be big enough, but it certainly is for now. The HD just needs enough capacity to cover the amount of data on your internal HD, not the internal HD's total capacity.
    Format/partition the external as follows and you should be set to go:
    1. Connect the external HD to the MBP.
    2. Open Disk Utility on the MBP.
    3. Select the external HD in the left pane.
    4. Click on the Erase tab.
    5. Choose the Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
    NOTE: if you want to zero the HD (which I always think is a good idea, but does take time), click on Security Options, click the button for Zero Out Data, click OK. The larger the HD, the longer this will take, in some cases several hours.
    6. Click on Erase and wait for the entire process to finish.
    7. Click the Partition tab.
    8. Click on Volume Scheme: and choose the number of partitions (just one in this situation).
    9. Click on the Options button (located underneath the Volume Scheme pane) and select GUID.
    10. Click Apply.
    11. Quit Disk Utility.
    Backup your internal to the external. What application are you using to backup with? I highly recommend both SuperDuper! and CarbonCopyCloner.

  • Time Machine wants 16 days to do an initial backup.  ps shows PRI = 33 with NI = 0.   But I can not get sudo renice to set PRI less than 15.  And renice sets NI directly with strange behavior for PRI. Any suggestions?

    Time Machine said it would take 16 days to do an initial backup, and indeed, after many days it is less than a quarter done.   (The problem started when I put in a new bank disk for Time Machine to write to for its backup file.)
    Activity Monitor shows that the process name is   backups   with Process ID   6060.
    Then putting this PID in Terminal UNIX command ps gave:
    EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ ps -l -p 6060
      UID   PID  PPID        F CPU PRI NI       SZ    RSS ...
        0  6060     1  1004004   0  33  0  2556488  29040 ...
    Wow!  A priority of 33! 
    Don't know how that happened, but the way to fix that (I thought) is with renice. 
    But renice doesn't work.
    After a lot of playing with renice and ps, it looks as though renice can not make the priority better than (no less than) 15.
    And the parameter you put in, that according to the man page that is supposed to be priority, turns out to be "nice index", with priority changed by sometimes subtracting or sometimes adding either this number or twice this number - down to a limit of priority no less than 15.
    EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ ps -l -p 6060
      UID   PID  PPID        F CPU PRI NI       SZ    RSS ...
        0  6060     1  1004004   0  33  0  2556488  29040 ...
    EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ sudo renice 5 -p 6060
    EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ ps -l -p 6060
      UID   PID  PPID        F CPU PRI NI       SZ    RSS  ...
        0  6060     1  1004004   0  28  5  2555964  29028  ...
    EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ sudo renice -5 -p 6060
    EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ ps -l -p 6060
      UID   PID  PPID        F CPU PRI NI       SZ    RSS  ...
        0  6060     1  1004004   0  38 -5  2555964  29028  ...
    EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ sudo renice -15 -p 6060
    EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ ps -l -p 6060
      UID   PID  PPID        F CPU PRI NI       SZ    RSS  ...
        0  6060     1  1004004   0  48 -15  2555964  29028 ...
    EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ ps -l -p 6060
      UID   PID  PPID        F CPU PRI NI       SZ    RSS  ...
        0  6060     1  1004004   0  48 -15  2555964  29028 ...
    EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ sudo renice -n -5 -p 6060
    EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$ ps -l -p 6060
      UID   PID  PPID        F CPU PRI NI       SZ    RSS  ...
        0  6060     1  1004004   0  53 -20  2555964  29028 ...
    EdsMacPro-1:~ ed$
    This is with OSX 10.7.5 and Terminal 2.2.3 on an early 2009 Mac Pro with lots of memory.
    What am I dong wrong, and any suggestions for how to fix my Time Machine process?

    The backup file size is 1.67 TB.*
    That's across the internal bus of a 2009 quad-core Mac Pro - which is pretty fast.
    Copying an hour's worth of MPEG-2 HD takes about a minute.
    I do a fresh backup from scratch about once a year, and the last time it finished over night.
    This time the first Time Machine backup is only about 1/5 complete after many days, and Activity Monitor shows essentially no use of disk drives or of CPU.  And in the first note I pointed out what is gleaned by using Terminal to execute the UNIX ps command. The priority of the running Time Machine process looks incorrect to me. 
    I could be wrong, but I think the problem is process priority, not file size.
    I am unable to set priority to 0 or a negative number.  Can someone straighten me out on how to do that?
    [*The machine has four 1.5 TB disk drives in it plus lots of memory.  Two of the physical drives are configured as one 3 TB backup drive (RAID concatanated).]

  • Replaced HD yesterday  Was able to restore from Time Machine Now, it won't back up to Time Machine.  I removed the TM and tried to add it- the error is "The disk image for "computername.sparsebundle" is in use.  Try ejecting the disk image - How do I do?

    Replaced HD yesterday  Was able to restore from Time Machine Now, it won't back up to Time Machine.  I removed the TM and tried to add it- the error is "The disk image for "computername.sparsebundle" is in use.  Try ejecting the disk image - How do I do?

    Hello jfilbey,
    Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.
    Power cycle the disk Time Machine is backing up to.
    For more information on this, take a look at:
    Time Machine: Troubleshooting backup issues
    http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3275?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
    Best of luck,
    Mario

  • Time Machine suddenly can't find network drive (WD MyBook)

    I have a Mac Mini running OS X 10.5, with a 2 TB external USB drive (Western Digital MyBook) which my family uses for Time machine backups. It has worked fine for months. Suddenly, about 3 weeks ago but unnoticed until today, my wife's MacBook (OS X Lion) stopped backing up, complaining that the backup volume could not be found. It says her last baclup was 20 days ago.
    "That's odd," I said, "I haven't been getting any errors..." and then I looked at Time Machine on my MacBook Pro (Lion), and discovered my last successful backup was 15 days ago.
    Both of us were getting "The backup volume is unavailable."
    Sure enough, I found myself unable to mount the two external USB drives on the Mini from my MacBook Pro. I could mount the internal hard drive, but couldn't see the external drives even when connecting as admin.
    So I rebooted the Mini, and now I can mount the drive via Finder, but Time Machine still can't fint the volume. If I click Setect Disk, all I get is "Set Up Other Time Capsule." No network drives appear at all. I rebooted my MacBook Pro, and now Time Machine has turned itself off, and I still can't see the Mini's external drives in Time Machine, although I can access them just fine in Finder.
    The Mini itself backs up to the Green Drive with no problem.
    I've run DU and clicked Repair Disk. No problems were found. Repair Permissions is greyed out.

    Apologies for the typos above. Also, it's apparently a MyBook Elite. So says the latest firmware updater from WD, which I ran to make sure my drive firmware was up to date.
    I'm also going to try upgrading the Mini to Lion. Will post the results.

  • Time Machine spends hours partially backing up and then fails with "Time Machine couldn't complete the backup due to a network problem."  Tried suggestions I've seen on the forum.

    Time Machine spends hours partially backing up and then fails with "Time Machine couldn't complete the backup due to a network problem."  I've tried various suggestions I've seen on the forum but nothing has worked.  TIme Machine worked fine for the last two years and just suddenly started having this problem every time.  The only thing that was a little different is that the computer was off for a week while on vacation and then I added a large amount (20 GB) of photos. Now the requested backup size is 82GB, which is large, and process proceeds very slowly for 2-3 hours before failing with the message mentioned.  I have more than enough available backup storage space for it.  Before failing, Time Machine has backed up no more than 12GB or so of the backup.  It fails during different files each time.
    I've turned off the computer sleep feature, and I've checked that the NAS is set to never automatically power down. I normally backup over Wi-Fi, but I've also tried connecting to Ethernet and it still has the same problem.  It's odd because I also have a MacBook Pro that is still backing up fine to the same NAS using the MacBook's Time Machine. 
    I am using an iMac with OS X 10.6.8 and an Iomega StorCenter ix2-200 NAS.
    I have system logs that I can share if helpful.  The logged messages vary a bit from run to run, but here are some messages that I've been seeing:
    I always get this message near the beginning of the backup:
    Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Macintosh HD
    I've gotten this messsage a number of times:
    Bulk setting Spotlight attributes failed.
    One Day
    Stopping backupd to allow ejection of backup destination disk!
    Another day
    1/7/12 10:44:20 AM
    mDNSResponder[18]
    PenaltyTimeForServer: PenaltyTime negative -112916, (server penaltyTime -1132397006, timenow -1132284090) resetting the penalty
    1/7/12 10:46:37 AM
    kernel
    ASP_TCP Disconnect: triggering reconnect by bumping reconnTrigger from curr value 0 on so 0x1106be94
    1/7/12 10:46:37 AM
    kernel
    AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect started /Volumes/TimeMachine prevTrigger 0 currTrigger 1
    Another Day
    1/6/12 8:03:22 AM
    Google Chrome[164]
    Cannot find function pointer CMPluginInFactory for factory 3487BB5A-3E66-11D5-A64E-003065B300BC in CFBundle/CFPlugIn 0x16f99e20 </Users/smarmer/Library/Contextual Menu Items/Google Notifier Quick Add CM Plugin.plugin> (not loaded)
    1/6/12 8:04:02 AM
    com.apple.backupd[193]
    Copied 7.5 GB of 67.0 GB, 8866 of 8866 items
    1/6/12 8:06:58 AM
    /System/Library/CoreServices/CCacheServer.app/Contents/MacOS/CCacheServer[1013]
    No valid tickets, timing out
    1/6/12 8:29:44 AM
    mDNSResponder[19]
    PenaltyTimeForServer: PenaltyTime negative -148702, (server penaltyTime 2056822773, timenow 2056971475) resetting the penalty
    1/6/12 8:59:22 AM
    kernel
    ASP_TCP Disconnect: triggering reconnect by bumping reconnTrigger from curr value 0 on so 0xa5ac380
    1/6/12 8:59:22 AM
    kernel
    AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect started /Volumes/TimeMachine prevTrigger 0 currTrigger 1
    1/6/12 8:59:22 AM
    kernel
    AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect:  doing reconnect on /Volumes/TimeMachine
    1/6/12 8:59:22 AM
    kernel
    AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect:  soft mounted and hidden volume so do not notify KEA for /Volumes/TimeMachine
    1/6/12 8:59:22 AM
    kernel
    AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect:  Max reconnect time: 30 secs, Connect timeout: 15 secs for /Volumes/TimeMachine
    1/6/12 8:59:22 AM
    kernel
    AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect:  connect to the server /Volumes/TimeMachine
    1/6/12 8:59:22 AM
    kernel
    ASP_TCP asp_SetTCPQoS:  sock_settclassopt got error 57
    Another day
    1/5/12 3:48:55 PM
    mdworker[2128]
    CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): Old-style plist parser: missing semicolon in dictionary.
    1/5/12 4:24:54 PM
    mDNSResponder[19]
    PenaltyTimeForServer: PenaltyTime negative -42698, (server penaltyTime 1148718961, timenow 1148761659) resetting the penalty
    1/5/12 4:29:58 PM
    com.apple.backupd[2074]
    Copied 586.4 MB of 67.0 GB, 9891 of 9891 items
    1/5/12 4:39:00 PM
    kernel
    ASP_TCP Disconnect: triggering reconnect by bumping reconnTrigger from curr value 0 on so 0xa1c0380

    bokon0n wrote:
    1/11/12 8:53:30 AM
    com.apple.backupd[1169]
    Warning: Destination /Volumes/TimeMachine does not support TM Lock Stealing
    1/11/12 8:53:30 AM
    com.apple.backupd[1169]
    Warning: Destination /Volumes/TimeMachine does not support Server Reply Cache
    Those indicate that your NAS is not fully compatible with Snow Leopard. 
    1/11/12 8:53:35 AM
    kernel
    jnl: disk2s2: replay_journal: from: 67182592 to: 78680064 (joffset 0xa7b8000)
    1/11/12 8:53:39 AM
    kernel
    jnl: disk2s2: examining extra transactions starting @ 78680064 / 0x4b09000
    1/11/12 8:53:39 AM
    kernel
    jnl: disk2s2: Extra txn replay stopped @ 79056896 / 0x4b65000
    1/11/12 8:53:49 AM
    kernel
    jnl: disk2s2: journal replay done.
    1/11/12 8:53:49 AM
    fseventsd[41]
    event logs in /Volumes/Time Machine/.fseventsd out of sync with volume.  destroying old logs. (253512 14 253512)
    1/11/12 8:53:50 AM
    kernel
    hfs: Removed 1 orphaned / unlinked files and 0 directories
    That looks like a problem was found with the file system (data) on the TM disk.  I don't know the details, but OSX tried to recover it from the journal, and found extra data on the drive.    Likely a result of the incompatibility mentioned above.
    1/11/12 9:47:40 AM
    com.apple.backupd[1169]
    Bulk setting Spotlight attributes failed.
    That's a problem writing to the NAS drive.
    But the backup continued after all this.
    1/11/12 1:25:07 PM
    kernel
    ASP_TCP Disconnect: triggering reconnect by bumping reconnTrigger from curr value 0 on so 0x9d00b44
    Something caused a disconnect.  Can't tell from the log what it was.
    I doubt it's a problem with something in OSX being damaged or corrupted, but reinstalling OSX isn't a major hassle, so might be worth a try.
    To be incompatible with Snow Leopard, this NAS must be at least a couple of years old.  It may be beginning to fail.
    Contact the maker.  See if there's an update to make it compatible with Snow Leopard.  If so, that might fix it.
    If not, or if that doesn't fix it, see if they have any diagnostics that will shed any light.

  • In Lion, Time Machine seems to be perpetually running - and running slowly

    Up through Snow Leopard, Time Machine did its incremental backup every hour quickly and stopped.
    Since upgrading to Lion back in July, Time Machine seems be be running almost all the time - and very very very slowly. There doesn't seem to be any exessive Spotlight indexing going on anymore. That was long ago. So I don't think that's it.
    Preparing for backup takes a long time. It take hours to eke through the backup itself, even if there weren't many changes, and finishing backup takes a long time.
    I would say each backup, no matter how small, takes more than three hours.
    At these forums there seems to be lots of discussion threads about this, and help pages linked to, but the suggested solutions seem to be a jumble, with some people saying they worked and many saying it didn't.
    I did do a disk repair on the Time Machine volume just in case. And there is nothing else on that drive except for Time Machine backups. The drive is directly connected to my iMac (3.06 GHz Dual Core Duo, 12 GB RAM). While not vital, I'd rather not reformat the drive and lost all my old backups, which go back over a year. If I knew for sure that was the solution I'd do it. But in the discussions here there are people who seem to have tried that and reported back that it didn't help.
    Right now it says it's backing up 3.5 MB of 132.9 MB - and taking forever to do it.
    I know that since the last backup I haven't changed anywhere near 132.9 MB of data. Unless Lion is making massive behind-the-scene changes.
    Something definitely seems to be wrong with Time Machine in Lion.
    Have there been any additional thoughts on this? Is Time Machine just buggy in Lion?
    Thanks,
    doug

    I feel ya, dawg, as they say. Right now I'm running a backup that has taken 43 minutes thus far. On an idle machine, it backed up 29.8 MB (17,949 files) followed by 19.5 MB (17,256 files). 12 min. for the first batch, 11 min., for the second. 13 min. of "Finishing backup" until it transitioned to "Cleaning up," which just completed after 12 min. Each backup typically goes 70–90 minutes. So backups are running for 65% – 80% of the time, if I leave TM running. I don't; instead, I turn on backups before going to bed, and turn them off on the first happy occasion when I notice that TM is idle.
    TM backups have been behaving this way for about 2 months. Before that they were as speedy as Snow Leopard, for a couple of weeks. Before that they were taking 3 hours with the dreaded "Waiting for index to be ready" messge repeating for on hour or more. I fixed this latter problem by "trying everything" from http://pondini.org/TM/D2.html (a fine resource but, as you say, all over the map as all of the suggestions are).
    TM in Lion is hosed. It's as simple as that.

  • Time Machine is not working for me

    There is no way that Time Machine is working right for me. Backups are taking a split second and are reporting crazy small amounts. Example, I have added to my Mac 1 gig of movies and 1 gig of images. I backed up today and Time Machine reported 28k of material being backed up and it took less than 1 second to start and finish the backup. None of these files are in areas that Time Machine has been told to not back up.
    How do I get Time Machine to work again? Please help me. TIA.

    Agreed. This particular glitch doesn't affect a lot of users, apparenly, and Apple is aware of it and hopefully it will be fixed soon.
    I've learned over the years (mostly the hard way, of course ), never to trust my backups to a single app or piece of hardware: no app is perfect, and all hardware fails, sooner or later.
    Like many here, I keep both full Time Machine backups, plus a "bootable clone" on a separate external HD. I use CarbonCopyCloner, many use the similar SuperDuper. That gives me the best of both types of backups, plus of course a completely separate, independent backup.
    CCC is donationware; SD has a free version, but you need the paid one (about $30) to do updates instead of full replacements, or scheduling. Either is easily found via Google.
    And/or, see Kappy's post on Basic Backup, complete with links to the web sites of each product.
    ps: glad it's sorted out, and thanks for the star.
    Message was edited by: Pondini

  • Time Machine does not display Oldest or Latest Backup details

    I had previously posted this but had no luck (or replies)...
    Shortly after the most recent Time Capsule software update, I had an issue where Time Machine stopped working. I was getting a"Backup volume cannot be found" message.
    As per Apple's instructions to remedy this, "Time Capsule: Time Machine backups do not mount" (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1170), I re-named my Time Capsule to a shorter name.
    Shortly afterward, I noticed that details were missing for "Latest Backup" when I'd click the Time Machine icon in my menu bar. All that is displayed in this field is " -- ". I have also noticed that when I open the Time Machine Preferences window, the details are missing from the following fields: "Available", "Oldest Backup", & "Latest Backup". (However, when a backup is in progress, space details are shown in the "Available" field.)
    I expect the missing details have something to do with changing the name of the Time Capsule, but have no idea how to fix this... Please help.

    Installed Snow Leopard, and, for whatever reason the missing details are now there. Yay.

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

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

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

  • Time Machine Restore Finishes But Wont Boot And Not Enough Restored

    I have just had need to restore my MacBook from my Time Machine backup of yesterday.
    Basically I boot from the Leopard DVD, Select Restore and pick the date/time of the backup.
    Restore start and finishes OK (if a little short on time I noticed) but on first boot the MacBook crashes and displays a message saying the Mac needs powering off/on.
    After this the MacBook will not boot again and displays the same message.
    If I boot off the DVD and run disk utility I see only 40gb or so used on the disk when my machine is around 150gb.
    I have tried a number of restores going back a day each time and each restore produces the same result.
    Can someone please give me some suggestions as to how I might successfully restore from the backup.
    If I can't is it possible to reinstall Leopard fresh and then connect the Time Machine drive to the restored system and view the backup from there ?? If so how please.
    Many thanks in advance. I can feel a very sleepless night ahead of me.
    Kind Regards and Seasonal Greetings
    NIALL8-(

    Niall Mallyon wrote:
    I have browsed the time machine drive both from within finder and iPhoto and the backups appear very irratic.
    Have you done a +*Repair Disk+* on your TM drive, per #A5 in the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum?
    My confidence in Time Machine has taken a severe dent here so I am now going to be taking manual backups of all my data, itunes and photos on a regular basis as well as continuing to use the iPod for storage.
    Consider what many of us do: keep a completely separate, independent backup in the form of a "bootable clone" via CarbonCopyCloner (which I use) or SuperDuper, in addition to full TM backups. You might even want to get a portable external HD for this, so you can take it to a secure off-site location. (I learned long ago, usually the hard way, not to trust my backups 100% to any single app or hardware.) And there was a thread just a couple of weeks ago where a full restore had nearly completed when BAM! the TM drive failed!
    Just wish I could understand where things went wrong in the first place so I can ensure it doesn't happen again. I'll be sure to browse time machine regulalrly from now one to check things.
    From your description of what you see in your backups, it's hard to tell what might have caused this very unusual situation. Something may have gone wrong with one of the previous restores, or there is/was hardware problems with one of the drives, or some sort of OSX problem.

  • Time Machine stuck at "Looking for backup disk" after installing Windows 8 via Boot Camp

    I've been backing up via Time Machine to an external USB drive and it's been working fine. I recenty installed Windows 8 via Boot Camp and now TM gets stuck forever at "Looking for backup disk...".
    I've tried the following, to no avail:
    Using "Select Disk" in TM preferences to re-select the disk
    Deleting /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist
    Running system maintenance via Onyx
    Resetting PRAM
    Formatting the drive and setting it up for TM backups again
    The Boot Camp partition is on the same drive as OS X (on a 180GB Intel 330 series SSD). During the Windows installation I re-formatted the partition as NTFS.
    If I start OS X in Safe Boot mode, TM backups work. In Safe Boot mode, the NTFS partition isn't loaded so I suspect it has something to do with this. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

    I installed Paragon NTFS for Mac and it started working all of a sudden.

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