Time Machine: why doesn't it back up Applications?

I have nothing excluded in Time Machine Preferences.
My backup external drive failed about a year ago: I replaced it and backups continued.
Had to restore an application recently: found the applications folder in Time Machine was empty, however far back I went.
Does Time Machine know that I replaced the backup drive? If not, perhaps /applications has not been backed up since nothing has changed since I replaced the drive - ? But I have been told that the backup information is stored on the backup drive, so Time Machine should know that the drive was replaced and do a full backup as the first one - ?
If that is the problem, how do I force Time Machine to do a full backup?

the last iPhone update said that it "significantly reduced" the back-up time for the iPhone, and for a while it did. I've noticed it get steadily longer and longer to where now i am having the same issue you are, it taking forever to backup even if it's just a standard sync. It's possible that the different applications that are on the phone, especially if they take a lot of memory and/or use a lot of the phone's RAM may cause the backup to take a lot longer than intended, but that's just my guess.

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Deleting files on time machine - why doesn't the storage capacity refresh??

Quick question,
After I permanently delete a file off time machine (something that has storage mass ~3 G), I am not seeing the storage capacity of the time capsule refresh with a higher number. In other words, before the file was deleted from all backups, the time capsule disk read 399 G available. After I permanently deleted the backups for this 3 G file, the available storage capacity was still 399 G. I checked to make sure the file was deleted from the back-up volumes and it was. Do I have to wait sometime before the time capsule updates the available storage capacity. Just curious.

remote TM backups are stored inside sparse bundles. if you open your TC in finder you'll see it. when you delete something from a sparse bundle it doesn't automatically compact and recover the free space. TM will use it up again in future backups. you can also manually compact the sparse bundle from terminal if you really want to.
the terminal command is
sudo hdiutil compact /path/to/sparsebundle
you have to put the correct unix path to the sparse bundle in the command and enter your admin password when prompted for it.

Why doesn't the "back" button work all the time in Safari?

Why doesn't the "back" button work all the time in Safari?

thanks for the reply. You prompted me to check and I realised it wasn't installed on my test laptop and opening in Microsoft Reader. I've installed it now and it works.
My next challenge is to prevent the mailto: command opening Microsoft Mail instead of Outlook, but I guess every user will have a different default.
Thank you

I'm running OS X 10.6.8-Why is Time Machine all of a sudden backing up 225GB of data after 2 years of perfect service? I have not added, deleted, or upgraded anything, Help!

I'm running OS X 10.6.8-Why is Time Machine all of a sudden backing up 250GB of data after 2 years of perfect service? I have not added, deleted, or upgraded anything.

USB 3.0 drives work on USB 2.0 but you do get 2.0 speed. They are cheaper because they are popular PC drives. If you get a new computer you'll get the bump to 3.0 speed.
I like the Seagate USB 3.0 Backup plus drives. They come formatted for PC but easy to format in Disk Utility. Seagate Backup Plus Right now the 1T is more than the 2 & 3T drives
This Western Digital drive has good reviews: WD My Book Hard Drive for Mac 2 TB $99.
Locally, Best Buy seems to have the best prices.
USB 3.0 is 10x faster than USB 2.0
Thunderbolt is 12 times faster than FireWire 800 and up to 20 times faster than USB 2.0.
Format new drives with Apple's Disk Utility rather than the software that come with the drive.
My plan was to rid a lot of the stuff I have on my computer (to a hard drive) anyhow once it had backed up.
I wound't necessarily backup those files to Time Machine. I would copy to the external drive then delete from computer. Only backup to Time Machine the data you would want to restore to your Mac if there was a problem. The backup will go much faster this way. Time Machine backup is slower than just copying data in my experience.

Time Machine Just Doesn't Work Anymore

I was a happy Time Machine (with Time Capsule) user for months. But it just doesn't work anymore. It takes longer than an hour to do every hourly backup so it is backing up 24 hours a day. It finds hundreds of thousands of files changed every hour and tries to back them up. Finders says only tens of files have been modified all of today. I have tried rebuilding my spotlight indexes, repairing my Time Capsule with Disk Utility and starting over with a brand new backup. But it just backs up hundreds of thousands of files every hour. So I am turning off Time capsule since it is clearly broken. If anyone has any suggestions at all I would welcome them.

Marcia,
Consider the following, it might give you some ideas:
Time Machine performs backups at the file level. If a single bit in a large file is changed, the WHOLE file is backed up again. This is a problem for programs that save data to monolithic virtual disk files that are modified frequently. These include Parallels, VMware Fusion, Aperture vaults, or the databases that Entourage and Thunderbird create. These should be excluded from backup using the Time Machine Preference Exclusion list. You will, however, need to backup these files manually to another external disk.
One poster observed regarding Photoshop: “If you find yourself working with large files, you may discover that TM is suddenly backing up your scratch disk's temp files. This is useless, find out how to exclude these (I'm not actually sure here). Alternatively, turn off TM whilst you work in Photoshop.” (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1209412)
If you do a lot of movie editing, unless these files are excluded, expect Time Machine to treat revised versions of a single movie as entirely new files.
If you frequently download software or video files that you only expect to keep for a short time, consider excluding the folder these are stored in from Time Machine backups.
If you have recently created a new disk image or burned a DVD, Time Machine will target these files for backup unless they are deleted or excluded from backup.
Installing new software, upgrading existing software, or updating Mac OS X system software can created major changes in the structure of your directories. Time Machine will backup every file that has changed since the installation.
Files or folders that are simply moved or renamed are counted as NEW files or folders. If you rename any file or folder, Time Machine will back up the ENTIRE file or folder again no matter how big or small it is.
George Schreyer describes this behavior: “If you should want to do some massive rearrangement of your disk, Time Machine will interpret the rearranged files as new files and back them up again in their new locations. Just renaming a folder will cause this to happen. This is OK if you've got lots of room on your backup disk. Eventually, Time Machine will thin those backups and the space consumed will be recovered. However, if you really want recover the space in the backup volume immediately, you can. To do this, bring a Finder window to the front and then click the Time Machine icon on the dock. This will activate the Time Machine user interface. Navigate back in time to where the old stuff exists and select it. Then pull down the "action" menu (the gear thing) and select "delete all backups" and the older stuff vanishes.” (http://www.girr.org/mac_stuff/backups.html)
*TechTool Pro Directory Protection*
This disk utility feature creates backup copies of your system directories. Obviously these directories are changing all the time. So, depending on how it is configured, these backup files will be changing as well which is interpreted by Time Machine as new data to backup. Excluding the folder these backups are stored in will eliminate this effect.
*Backups WAY Too Large*
If an initial full backup or subsequent incremental backup is tens or hundreds of Gigs larger than expected, check to see that all unwanted external hard disks are still excluded from Time Machine backups.
This includes the Time Machine backup drive ITSELF. Normally, Time Machine is set to exclude itself by default. But on rare occasions it can forget. When your backup begins, Time Machine mounts the backup on your desktop. (For Time Capsule users it appears as a white drive icon labeled something like “Backup of (your computer)”.) If, while it is mounted, it does not show up in the Time Machine Prefs “Do not back up” list, then Time Machine will attempt to back ITSELF up. If it is not listed while the drive is mounted, then you need to add it to the list.
*FileVault / Boot Camp / iDisk Syncing*
Note: Leopard has changed the way it deals with FileVault disk images, so it is not necessary to exclude your Home folder if you have FileVault activated. Additionally, Time Machine ignores Boot Camp partitions as the manner in which they are formatted is incompatible. Finally, if you have your iDisk Synced to your desktop, it is not necessary to exclude the disk image file it creates as that has been changed to a sparsebundle as well in Leopard.
Let us know if any of this helps.
Cheers!

I recovered my back up via a wired connection. now Time Machine does not recognise older back ups wirelessly and wants to do a first back up

I recovered a back up from my time machine via a wired connection after getting the 'white screen of death'. Now Time Machine does not recognise any back ups on the time machine when connected wirelessly and wants to do a first back up of the whole machine. How do I get my mac to recognise these older back ups? It connects to the wifi network the time machine creates fine, with the same name and password.

I recommend the following.
1. Reset the TC to factory.
Universal Factory Reset.. any model TC or AE.
Unplug your TC/AE from power or turn off at the power point.
Hold in reset. and power the TC/AE back on.. all without releasing reset and keep holding in for about 10sec. (this is often difficult without a 2nd person or a 3rd arm).
Release it when the status light flashes rapidly. If it doesn’t flash rapidly you have missed it and try again.
Note..
Be Gentle! Feel the switch click on. It has a positive feel.. add no more pressure after that.
TC/AE will reboot after a couple of minutes with default factory settings and will wipe out previous configurations of the router.
No files are deleted on the hard disk in a TC.. No reset of the TC deletes files.. to do that you use erase from the airport utility.
2. Rename the TC to SMB standard.
That means short names.. 2-20 characters but less than 10 is excellent. eg TCGenx (use number for x that is actual generation of the TC)
No spaces.
Pure alphanumeric. No apostrophe.
3. Ensure IPv6 is set to link-local..
Do the same thing for ethernet if that is used.
4. Manually mount the TC disk in Finder.
Use Go in the top menu.. connect to server.
Type in
AFP://TCname.local (where TCname is your new short name for the TC and local is default domain .. it helps using the domain I found).
You will then find the computer either can or cannot find the network resource.. if it fails something else is wrong with the actual network and you will need to fix that.
It will request the password if it is found.. password is public by default unless you changed it.. type in the password and check to keep it in your keychain.
5. Delete current TM setup and redo it with the newly named TC.
See A4 here. http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
If your backups cannot be found, try B6 again, now that you actually know that the disk has been properly discovered.

HT201250 I want to use Time Machine to back up my pictures because my hard drive is full but I'm wondering if once I back up the pictures then delete them will time machine delete them off the back up too?

I want to use Time Machine to back up my pictures because my hard drive is full but I'm wondering if once I back up the pictures then delete them will time machine delete them off the back up too?

Evetually yes.
If your pictures have been in the same location (same folder, same subfolder, ...) for more than a week, then copies if them will remain in your TM backups until it fills up. They are then vulnerable to being deleted.
If they've been there for less than a week, TM could delete them as early as a month from now. If they've been there for only a few hours, chances are TM will delete them tomorrow.
This is why TM is not the best tool to use to archive data that you will be deleting from your main hard drive. Copy them to a dedicated external drive, or burn DVDs.

I have Time Machine that I used to back up my old computer. It was running snow leopard. My MacBook died, so I got a new one which is running Lion. how can I restore the data from the time capsule to my new Mac?

I have Time Machine that I used to back up my old computer. It was running snow leopard. My MacBook died, so I got a new one which is running Lion. how can I restore the data from the time capsule to my new Mac?

In technical support, sometimes you have to make educated guesses. I'm sorry that you were offended.
iTunes does prompt when it is going to erase a device, and the message is clear.
She said in her message that she was able to successfully sync the old ipad. This indicated to me that itunes wiping the data was not an issue, because either it had been setup at the apple store (in which case it doesn't actually wipe the ipad despite saying it will*) (*based on a single case I saw), or because the itunes media folder was migrated.
Furthermore, my solution was to tell her how to backup her ipad (by either doing it manually, or as a last resort, by deleting the corrupt backup -- that she couldn't access anyway.)
I got that last part of the instructions from the "Taking Control of your iphone" book which I found samples of when I did a google search for "corrupted backup itunes".
She marked this as a solution, so it worked for her.

Time machine tells me last successful back up 19 August 2014. Have done restores and utility checks to no avail.

time machine tells me last successful back up 19 August 2014. Repeated attempts to correct have failed. any thoughts?
thanks, Diane

We need a bit more info.
You don't state that you are backing up to a Time Capsule but I am guessing that is the case.
1. I need to know, what TC??
A1xxx from the base please. They do go faulty as they age.
2. How is it connected into the network? Is it main router or bridged? Plugged into what router or modem?
3. How does the computer connect to it?
4. Is the computer running Lion as per your profile or is it Mavericks? This latest OS is problematic. Its network reliability is poor.
If you are running mavericks.. and using wireless then I recommend you plug the computer directly to the TC by ethernet.
You can turn off wireless and see if you can get TM to start.
Otherwise go through the Mavericks clean setup with the TC and see if that will get it going.
Airtport Utility can't find Airport Time Capsule on either of my 2009 Macs
The very simple version of this..
Mount the TC hard disk in Finder manually.
Type AFP://10.0.1.1 (or whatever IP is shown by the airport utility)
You will be asked for the disk password.. supply it and save it in the keychain.
Try TM.. if it still doesn't work, reset TM and try again.
A4 here. http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
Ensure that IPv6 is set to link-local only in both wireless and ethernet (if you use it).
No luck you will need to follow the clean setup instructions and start over from scratch.

Time Machine UI doesn't display previous backups

Hi!
My Time Machine is running to a mirror disk and backing up files regularly. I can see them in the finder when I go to the backup disk. But when I "Enter" time machine, it doesn't recognize and show the files. Just "Now" and some time ago before I switched out hard drives.
Background: This occurred when I swapped in new drives for the old ones and named them the same as the old ones were named. Basically, I upgraded from 1TB drives to 2TB drives and now have this issue.

Thanks, Pondini.
I don't see any drives in grey. They are in black but in the UI I see "Now" and Oct. 23rd with nothing in between even though Time Machine is backing up every hour and I can see the backups by navigating to the backup drive in the Finder. So Finder shows there are backups, Time Machine menu and sys prefs pane says it's backing up, but the app doesn't find and display the backups.
Ideas?

After upgrade to mavericks: time machine keeps asking for my back up disk and won't open unless i plug in the disk. any solutions?

after upgrade to mavericks: time machine keeps asking for my back up disk and won't open unless i plug in the disk. any solutions?
before the upgrade, i could open time machine without the need for having the back up disk plugged in.

Ok. I got it to work, sort of....
As I mentioned before I tried the "disk password" and the "Time capsule Password" options to see if I can start the back up again or start a new backup. Neither worked. So I tried the firmware down grade, but like you said that did not work. I then decided to try the "Account password" option and I have never used this option before becasue it states that if there is data on the drive it would not be acessable after creating an account. Since I wiped out the disk that was nno problem. When I created the new account and choose the drive it asked for the user name and password. I entered the info for the new account I just created(FYI this has nothing to do with your login username and password), bingo! It worked!
Now I have two partitions on the TC disk. The old one and now the new account. I am guessing this is to be used if I have multiple computers, which I don't.
I any case, I am going to wipe out everything again and try again to do a backup the way I had it before.

How do I use Time Machine on my Mac to back up files stored on an AirDisk?

I have a Macbook Pro 17-inch, Mid 2009, with a 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. I use an external HDD connected directly to my Mac via FireWire 800 for Time Machine backups. I have an external HDD connected to my Airport Extreme (Gigabit) router that I use for file storage. My iTunes library and iPhoto library are both stored on this AirDisk. Can I use Time Machine on my Mac to back up the files that I store on my AirDisk? If so, then please describe how to do so. Thank you for your assistance.

Unmount and physcially disconnect the TimeMachine drive and reboot the computer without it being connected.
Reboot the comptuer with the disk inside the machine holding the option or c key down, select the disk to boot from.
Second screen in is the installer, under the Ulitites menu is Disk Utility.
Use Disk Utility to Erase with Security option Zero all Data if your planning to wipe the drive and install 10.6
Don't do the above if your simply reinstalling only OS X 10.6 to cure a problem with it.
How to reinstall just OS X or erase/install OS X
How to erase and install Snow Leopard 10.6

I upgraded my imac hard drive to a 2tb drive. how do i use time machine to get my computer back to normal?

i upgraded my imac hard drive to a 2tb drive. how do i use time machine to get my computer back to normal?

Thank you. I followed the faq#14 (using setup wizard from the osx install disk). Everything went just as planned until I woke up this morning and noticed there was no progress on the "transferring documents" meter. It stopped about 1/4 of the way. I can hear the computer working and the bar is somewhat animated like it is advancing but it's not.
Should I cancel and restart or should I wait it out? It already been about 13 hours since I started the process. Do you think it is my time machine or my iMac? Maybe the time machine file is corrupt or something.
Anyway, any help is appreciated. Thanks.

The memory on my MAC is full. It holds 4GB of RAM of which 79GB are photos. I would like to back up my photos to an external drive but just don not know how. I do not wish to use time machine. How do I back up my photo library, then delete the them t

The memory on my MAC is full. It holds 4GB of RAM of which 79GB are photos. I would like to back up my photos to an external drive but just do not know how. I do not wish to use time machine. How do I back up my photo library, then delete them from my MAC to free up that 79GB? Thank you.

Hi
Just to clarify a couple of points in your post.
RAM (memory) is different from hard drive space. You have 4GB of RAM, but that has no bearing on the amount of drive space you have, of which we know that 79GB are photos.
If those photos are in iPhoto, you should be able to move the entire iPhoto Library, from the Pictures folder, to your external hard drive. You can just drag and drop. Do not have iPhoto open while you're doing this. Once it's done, you can double-click on the moved iPhoto Library file to associate it with iPhoto, so that the app remembers where the library is for next time.
One more thing. When you move a file to a different location, and then delete the original, you don't have a backup. You still only have one copy. So if that external drive dies, you will lose all your photos. Time Machine is a very good way to prevent this from happening. You should dedicate a different drive for Time Machine backups.
Matt

HT3275 For the past several days, I have been getting this message during backups: Time Machine could not complete the back up. The backup disk image "Volumes/Data/iMac.sparsebundle" could not be accessed (error-1).

For the past several days, I have been getting this message during backups:
Time Machine could not complete the back up. The backup disk image "Volumes/Data/bhoppy2's iMac.sparsebundle" could not be accessed (error-1). When I click on the 'help' icon on the message, it reverts to a blank page, and I cannot find anything online regarding the term 'sparsebundle.' In addition, I cannot access previous backups any longer.
Help?

See C17 in Time Machine Troubleshooting by Time Machine guru Pondini:
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html

Time Machine: why doesn't it back up Applications?

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