Time Machine to recover data on a drive you have to...

Hi,
Quick question.
I was reading about recovering a drive that had been backuped using Time Machine, Time Machine won't make a drive bootable, so you have to go another way.
On point 5 of the link below it says "Insert your Mac OS X Install disk, and double-click the Install Mac OS X icon."
http://http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/15638.html
Does this mean your most recent OSX disk (in my case Snow Leopard), or the one that came with your Mac (Tiger)?

Hy !
It is meaned if your Mac is running.
Normally ... boot from the SL DVD and choose restore from a Time Machine backup from the utilities menu.
C.M.

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Use Time Machine for transferring data to new drive

2008 pre-unibody 17" 250GB MacBook Pro4,1 - 2GB RAM, 10.6.8, 2.5ghz
How can I use Time Machine to transfer data to hybrid 1TB Seagate SSD?

Hi V.K., was just reading your instructions for jumper25 about transferring all info to a new HD and had a question. I am in the same situation where i have bought a new 320Gb to replace the OEM 120Gb in my MBP. Everything is very straight forward from what you have posted but i only have the original Tiger 10.4.9 install DVD and I am running Leopard 10.5.5. Will I be able to use my Tiger install disk and then use my TM back up even though it Leopard? Or will I need a Leopard install disk to complete? Also is there another way around this problem if i can not use the Tiger disk such as mirroring the 120Gb disk on to my 320Gb?
Thanks in advance for your time and expertise.
P.

Time Machine and backing up external hard drives

Time machine will not back external hard drives I have connected to my Mac Pro. It works fine with the 3 hard drives mounted in the computer. Is this the way Time Machine is intended to work or am I doing something wrong? Thanks in advance for your assistance.

According to Disk Utility, GUID and AFP are both ok for a non-bootable drive with either CPU. The difference is when you want to make a volume bootable.
Since TM volumes are not bootable, it shouldn't matter UNLESS you have some other bootable system installed on the drive.
Right now, the drive on my Intel iMac is partitioned AFP and the one on the PPC powerbook is GUID. They both appear to be behaving themselves. The iMac has had one instance (since the last partition job) of a massive backup which occurred right after I changed the exclude list and the PPC has had no massive backups (other than the initial one). On that one, I built the exclude list BEFORE the initial backup.
- gws

Can i resume a Time Machine backup of an attached external drive (no system, just data) on a different laptop?

I am trying to find out if I can use a Time Machine (specifically on a 2013 Time Capsule) backup of an external drive (only data, no system) attached to a laptop, and then connect that same external drive to another laptop and resume the backup? Or is the Time Machine backup of an attached external drive a laptop "dependant" backup?
Additional info: The laptops in question are 15" MacBook Pro and a 17" MacBook Pro from 2011 running OSX 10.9 (Mavericks)

You are welcome.
I don't think there is a need to start a new discussion unless you want to.
You should have more than one backup of each computer. Hard drives do fail. Time Machine can alternate drives or have a Time Machine and a clone.
The concern arises because i was told that when a wireless Time Machine backup is interrupted the sparsebundle gets sort of "locked" or "damaged", and although the backups can be accessed, no further Time Machine backup is possible. One must that a brand new backup.
Apple support article. Don't let the title bother you. Look at Additional Information, which explains what happens when a backup gets interrupted. I also am including a link for troubleshooting. C3 explains what you can try if the backup is interrupted.
Time Machine First Backup Interrupted
Time Machine Troubleshooting

Time Machine not moving data to external hard drive.

Time Machine is excluding my external hard drive from backups. All formatting and connections seem to be correct. When I try Time Machine Preferences, my external hard drive icon appears on the "exclude" list in the options box.I can't highlight it to remove from list. So, Time Machine is not moving any data to the external drive except for a copy of the internal hard drive.
Thanks in advance,
Lenny

My guess is that your external drive uses formatting that Time Machine will not back up. Click on the drive in the finder and type Command "i" or File > Get Info to see how your drive is formatted. If it's not some flavor of MacOS Extended, Time Machine won't back up your external. If the drive is formatted correctly use the first Aid tab in Disk Utility to repair your external. Repeat the repair process until Disk Utility reports no errors.
If your drive uses FAT formatting and you need to use it to share files with a PC use some sort of PC software to back up the drive.

Time Machine Recovery (after data recovery)

Several months ago, Disk2 and Disk3 in my 2007 MacPro 1,1 (OSX 10.7.5) became unreadable by the computer. To make matters worse, the Time Machine external backup became equally as unreadable. All at the same time! Drive 1, with the operating system, seems to be unaffected. The two unreadable drives showed up as "media" in disk utility, but didn't show up in Disk Warrior or any other similar programs (partition repairing) using the "terminal." I sent the Time Machine drive (WD Mybook Essential 3Tb) to DataRecovery.com and they found no phyical issues with the drive. There was, however,"Data Corruption in the file tables and data area" (according to the evaluation report). This was corrected and the TM drive was supposedly completely recovered.
Upon receiving the external drive (now replaced by a newer 3Tb Mybook), I replaced disk2 and disk3 with new 1TB drives (formatted with a single partition) and tried to perform a restore for these two drives. No such luck.....The drive was readable by the computer but would not actually enter into "Time Machine." I examined the actual drive and found an inordinate amount of Unix executable files, especially when going into the individual backups. The drive does show that they recovered 870Gb of information, but nothing seems to be readable much less recoverable.
I'm wondering if there is a workaround for any of this or whether I should contact the data recovery people to resolve this. I appreciate any help on this as it's become expensive and a bit deflating.......I still hold out some hope, though. Thanks. The drives were most likely corrupted by a generator that kicks on once a week (automatic maintenance) and temporarily cuts power long enough to turn the computer off...I've since gotten a UPS.

A general look at backup files......

Time Machine formatted itself on my external drive despite pressing "Don't Use"

I have an external hard drive that has been in use on/off for years. I even had backups on it (not using Time Machine). I mounted this hard drive, it was taking a while to mount. A prompt came up to ask if I wanted to use this drive as a time machine backup. I said "Don't Use". It hanged. Meanwhile, I opened disk utility twice. Both I had to force quit. After a while I relaunched finder.
Assuming it would cancel the time machine prompt. Only when did the finder eventually relaunch that the drive mounted to see that all my files where gone and looking in Thermal under ls -a to see their we're spotlight and time machine files along with some oddly named thing. About 1GB Is in use on the drive(I had much more that a gig on it). It is a TB drive
Here is the output from the ls -a on the volume
._.com.apple.timemachine.donotpresent
.com.apple.timemachine.donotpresent
.Spotlight-V100
.fseventsd
.Trashes
USBCˆö?␀.␀€␀
._.Trashes
Anyway would a tool like this (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) help get back my files and format back to what I had previously? Or I am going in the wrong direction? What should I do?
Thanks. If you have any questions please reply below

Thank you Thomas,
I should have mentioned that the drive is formated as FAT32 and I ran verify disk on the drive and this error keep coming up until I stop the process :
"2013-02-16 12:06:23 +0000: / has entries after end of directory
2013-02-16 12:06:23 +0000: Truncate? no
2013-02-16 12:06:23 +0000: Extend? no"
Will the tools mentioned in you post work with FAT 32? I am looking at Data Rescue 3 becuase of the FileIQ functionality since I know I have obsure file formats on there
Does this help or it is irrelevant?

Hallo ,why is it that when I delete a photo ,which is backed up by time machine and western digital external hard drive , that I am able to restore the photo okay but not the titles and descriptions . I have a Macbook 4.1, mac osx 10.5.8 . Iphoto 7.1.5 ,

QUESTION.
Hallo , my question is ;whenever I delete a photo and restore it through Time machine and Western digital external hard drive , I am able to restore the photo but not the titles and descriptions . Western Digital inform me that it isn't their external hard drive problem and suggest that it is an Apple software problem ?
I am using a Macbook 4.1 , with Mac OSX 10.5.8 . I photo 7.1.5 , last modifie4d 01/05/2010 -universal . Should I be upgrading Iphoto ?
I hope that someone is able to help in this matter , as i have to restore 12000 photos !
Thanking you in anticipation.
Alan from Wigton

Hallo Kieth ,
I am not quite ready to restore the full iphoto library , as I have days of work re - imputting titles,descriptions and enhancement . I hope that your suggestion works , as I use my Macbook basically to work with digital photography. Through time , I will need to delete my library to recover more disc space and I would hate to have to spend more time re - imputting titles and descriptions all over again .
Thanks for your interest and advice.
regards - Alan

HT201250 How can I migrate a Time Machine backup from an external hard drive to a new TimeCapsuls?

I just got a 2TB Time Capsule. I want to migrate my time machine backups on an external hard drive to the new Time Capsule. I have about 430Gb of files to back up; I don't want to wait 7-8 days for the backup, unless I have to. I am using OS 10.7.5 (forget which cat that is). I have mounted the TC drive as 10.0.1.1; I tried to drag and drop from old to "data" on TC, but I get the error "The volume is the wrong format for a backup." Any ideas how I can move my old files to the new, and bypass creating a brand new backup file?
Thanks.

Rather than do that, which means starting over from scratch, losing all your edits, organisation and so on, why not simply use iPhoto Library Manager to revert the Library to the older version? Easier, less destructive.
The instructions on that are here
If you really want to start over: you can access the Originals folder simply by going to your Pictures Folder and finding the iPhoto Library there. Right (or Control-) Click on the icon and select 'Show Package Contents'. A finder window will open with the Library exposed.

Is there any way to create a time machine backup to an external hard drive with content already on it? I have a hard drive that i have used for pictures but when i try to run a backup it says i need to start from a blank drive. Can i get around it?

Is there any way to create a time machine backup to an external hard drive with content already on it? I have a hard drive that i have used for pictures but when i try to run a backup it says i need to start from a blank drive. Can i get around it?

It would be much better if you had separate drives for the pictures and Time Machine backups.....but, if you want to use the same drive for both purposes, temporarily move the folder with the pictures to another location for safe storage.
Run the Time Machine backup on the hard drive and verify that everything is working correctly. Time Machine will format the disk for you in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as part of the backup process.
Then move the folder with the pictures back to the hard drive with the Time Machine backups.
When you have tested to make sure that everything is working again, then and only then should you delete the folder with pictures from the temporary storage area.
Again....it would be much better to keep Time Machine backups on a drive just for that purpose, and other data on another drive for that purpose. This is clearly one of those times when the fact that you can do something does not mean to imply that you should do it.

Time machine, finder save to external hard drive problems

I have a new 2.26 GHz mini and I wanted to get bootcamp going and install windows xp. The instructions suggested to backup the hard drive and I thought this is a great time to try the time machine. I plugged in a external hard drive, opened time machine (Time machine said it needed 29 GB for full backup and the drive had 32 GB free), selected the drive, and let the "backup count down(I think it was a minute and a half)" run down to zero. Time machine started backing up the my main drive to the external drive no problem. It was running good (100MB in 5-10 seconds) for a little while when I noticed that it had reached 2.3 GB and was not going any higher. I let it stay like that for about 5 minutes thinking that maybe it would start going again. No luck. I shut down time machine and saw a finder window with the progress bar behind it saying 2.3 GB. I push the stop button and it said stopping, but it would not stop and disappear like it should. I relaunch the finder and the icons on the desktop disappeared and would not come back. I relaunched repeatedly but they would not come back. Since the bar at the top of the screen would not come back I had to hold in the power button to shut down the computer.
Upon restart everything seemed to work fine until I tried time machine again and it would not work. So I tried to manually backup the files to the external drive. When I copied some files the little finder window popped up and said, zero KB of 290 MB, and would not change. I left it running while opened a browser and did a search for an answer to my problems. After about a half an hour I went back and saw that some files had been transferred. When I looked in the Activity monitor, I saw it was saving the files very slowly. I went to the finder progress bar and when I hit the stop button, it would say stopping but it wouldn't. I would have to relaunch the finder to make it stop. Then I tried to copy the files to a shared drive on my network and the same thing happens.
Before using the time machine both these drives worked no problems. I went to the shared drive computer and used that machine to copy the files from the mini. All files transferred no problems. So now I'm trying to find out what is wrong with my mini. It seems that it has to do with the finder since it effects both the usb and ethernet hard drives. All other functions work as they should. I don't know if anyone has had this problem after using time machine but any help would be appreciated.
Also I tried deleting my com.apple.finder.plist and relaunch the finder. No change.
Scott

Batlo wrote:
(Time machine said it needed 29 GB for full backup and the drive had 32 GB free)
That's much too small for your backups. Time Machine usually 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).
I noticed that it had reached 2.3 GB and was not going any higher. I let it stay like that for about 5 minutes thinking that maybe it would start going again. No luck. I shut down time machine and saw a finder window with the progress bar behind it saying 2.3 GB.
That sounds like the drive is not formatted properly. See #C1 in the Start with the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
The other problems may have the same cause.
Most likely, it's set up for Windoze and not suitable for Time Machine. With only 32 GB free, you must have other data on the drive, so you probably can't erase it and reformat it for Time Machine.
Report back with your findings for the *Partition Map Scheme* and Format of the drive (per #C1), and we can figure out what to do next.

Can Time Machine back up a failed hard drive, and how long will it take to prepare?

1. The hard drive in my 2009 MBP has failed. My Time Machine external drive failed about three weeks ago, and I don't know if I'll be able to restore from it. Is it ever possible to backup a failed hard drive with Time Machine? The machine boots, it just comes up beach balls if I use any applications for very long.
2. I'm trying to back it up right now. I have Time Machine running to a new external drive. It has been stuck on "preparing backup" for about 20 minutes. Everyone says that preparing a first backup takes some time, but no one says if "some time" is 15 minutes or one hour or more. What is a typical length of time for preparing first backup? At what point should I walk away?
If it's not worth trying to back this drive up myself anymore, I'd love to just drop the thing off and get the hard drive replaced -- but if it's worth doing, I'll take the extra day to back up what I can.

You might have better luck using a clone.
Clone - Carbon Copy Cloner (Often recommended as it has more features than some others)
Clone – Data Backup
Clone – Deja Vu
Clone - SuperDuper
Clone - Synk
Clone Software – 6 Applications Tested
Commonly Used Backup Methods

Using Time Machine to restore an *older* BackUp drive

Here's my situation - I have currently been backing up my 2 computers (A Macbook Pro and a Mac Pro tower) to two separate external bootable drives (not Time Machines). I then take the drives off site in case of theft or fire, and know that if I need to I can always restore from these bootable backups.
However, because of the time and effort of bringing them in from their offsite location, I only back up once every few weeks, sometimes a month or more. So I just purchased an internal drive (separate from my system drive) to use as a Time Machine drive, for both of my computers (only one partition). Since they will be backing up every day, I will retain much more recent material in case of drive failure.
My question is this - if I have a drive failure on my current internal system drive, and the internal Time Machine is intact, is it possible for me to take my external bootable backup (say 3 weeks older than Time Machine in how recently it was backed up), make a cone of that on a new internal system drive, and then use Time Machine to restore that drive to what is most current on Time Machine?
Does this question make sense? I'm essentially trying to use a combination of external bootable drives and Time Machine in order to have peace of mind, knowing that I will have a complete, bootable restore, but it will then be able to become as up to date as the last Time Machine backup.

Daniel Greeney wrote:
So I just purchased an internal drive (separate from my system drive) to use as a Time Machine drive, for both of my computers (only one partition). Since they will be backing up every day, I will retain much more recent material in case of drive failure.
Let Time Machine back up every hour, as it's designed. That will protect you best.
My question is this - if I have a drive failure on my current internal system drive, and the internal Time Machine is intact, is it possible for me to take my external bootable backup (say 3 weeks older than Time Machine in how recently it was backed up), make a cone of that on a new internal system drive, and then use Time Machine to restore that drive to what is most current on Time Machine?
Does this question make sense?
The question makes sense until you realize that Time Machine backups contain everything you need (unless you do something silly, like exclude your system files).
Once the new drive is installed and formatted, you can restore your entire system from the TM backups faster than you can copy the clone to the new internal HD. See #14 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum. Note that you use the Snow Leopard Install disc only for the Installer on it; you don't install OSX from it.

Inherit Time Machine History on Reformatted External Hard Drive?

A few days ago the external hard drive I use to store all my data got corrupted. This external drive is also the location of my home folder (I moved it off the primary disk to have more space). The main OS system disk is fine and I was able to login to the guest account, but couldn't log in to my primary account since the drive wasn't working properly.
From the guest account I ran disk utility on the external drive and it was unable to fix it and it required reformatting. I reformatted the drive and restored the data to it from the my Time Machine backup. I then was able to log back in to my primary account. As far as I can tell all my files are there. However now when I open Time Machine there is no history.
Based on other info I've found on these forums and others, by reformatting the drive (even with the same name), Time Machine treats this as a new drive and wants to start a new Time Machine history for it. I've learned about the inherit history commands that I can run but before I do that I had a couple questions:
1. If the history is still available, should I be able to see that when I manually browse the contents of the Time Machine drive? There is a folder with a "full sized" backup but I don't see any subfolders with incremental backups.
2. If the command fails to link history, is there an alternative to get it back - or should I just format the Time Machine drive and start a new full backup. It seems like everything restored ok, but I'm nervous about reformatting the backup.
3. Might there be a better configuration for my home folder storage for day to day use and backup purposes? With this issue, it was unsettling being effectively locked out of the machine since the home folder is on the external drive. Also it seemed doing a "system" restore could only restore the system drive and not the "complete system" including the external drive. It would be nice if I could just restore everything from Time Machine in one shot without having to shuffle things around, reformat manually etc.
I'm running Mavericks on a Mac Mini if that helps. My external drive is 2TB with about 1.25TB of data currently and my Time Machine disk is 1.5TB. System disk is 1TB.
Thanks!

Your best option is to start another backup on a new hard drive. You should do that anyway, as one backup is not enough to be safe. Put the old drive aside until you're sure you'll no longer need the data on it, then erase it and start over.

How do I tell Time Machine to add a new external drive to be backed up?

How do I tell Time Machine to add a new external drive to be backed up? I have an external drive with data I need to add to my overall back up with what's on my mac. I have a separate drive already active as the Time Machine backup disk. I can see how to EXCLUDE disks, but how do I ADD that new external drive to regular backups?
I have 10.8.5 system on my Mac laptop.

Remove the drive from the list of items set to be excluded. It needs to be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for this to be possible.
(110504)

Time Machine to recover data on a drive you have to...

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