Trouble searching in Time Machine

I'm having trouble searching for a file in Time Machine.
In Mac Help, it says:
In the Finder window that Time Machine opens over the star field, type in the search field in the upper-right corner.
There is no search field in the upper-right corner.
Then it says,
If you’re using Spotlight to search for an item and you can’t find it, try clicking the Time Machine icon in the Dock to start Time Machine directly from your Spotlight search. Spotlight continues searching for the item in your backups
When I do this, a strange thing happens: My frontmost Spotlight search results window, which previously showed 24 items, loses the search field and then shows "More than 10,000 items." I can't adjust the search term because there IS no search term field. It disappears.

You can turn Spotlight off entirely. This will affect your ability to search within most of Apple’s applications, such as Mail and Finder, as they rely upon Spotlight.
Open 'Terminal' in Utilities and copy the following:
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
Hit return key and supply admin password when asked
Hit return key again

Similar Messages

While searching in Time Machine, I'm seeing double of the files

While I do searches in time machine the finder shows two of every file it finds. It only does this for the month of December. Is it saving two of every file or is this just a glitch? I recently did an erase and install of Leopard and I think that could be a possible cause.

If you make an alias in OS X, it points to one item. In TM, it uses multiple pointers to the original. Get rid of one alias, and the rest still work. That's how it should be working.

How to search on Time Machine using Yosemite OS X?

Is searching on Time Machine different using Yosemite OS X?

Hi Bruce,
This article give an excellent explanation of how to search in Time Machine under Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite).
OS X Yosemite: Recover items using Time Machine and Spotlight
Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.
Best,
Brett L

Search in Time Machine not working

I am trying to access my Library in Time Machine. Ive done the "command" "shift" "g" then ~/library with no luck, seems like the search itself is not working at all. Im trying to retrieve a specific file from time machine..please help

While in Time Machine, press the key combination shift-command-C. The front window will show all mounted volumes. All snapshots should now be accessible. Select the one you want and navigate to the files you want to restore.

I am having trouble with my Time Machine on Snow Leopard

I am using 10.6.8 and have a 500Gb internal hard drive. No partitions. No external drives back up to my 1.5Tb (no partitions, entirely dedicated to Time Machine backup) hard drive. The error message appears as:
Time Machine Error
"This backup is too large for the backup disk.
The backup requires 456.65 GB but only 34.73 GB are available."
I have been reading different threads and have gone to Pondini's website but have not found the answer. I installed Time Machine Buddy and here is what it says for yesterday:
"Starting standard backup
Error -35 while resolving alias to backup target
Backup failed with error: 19"
And for today:
"Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
Backup content size: 456.9 GB excluded items size: 103.8 GB for volume Macintosh HD
Starting pre-backup thinning: 425.29 GB requested (including padding), 32.34 GB available
No expired backups exist - deleting oldest backups to make room
Error: backup disk is full - all 0 possible backups were removed, but space is still needed.
Backup Failed: unable to free 425.29 GB needed space
Backup failed with error: Not enough available disk space on the target volume.
Stopping backupd to allow ejection of backup destination disk!"
Those are the only 2 messages that it lists.
Any help to get me backing up again would be greatly appreciated!

First off, thank you so much to everyone who is trying to help! I really appreciate it!
I opened the "backups.backupdb" folder as you suggested "jeffreyfromtas" and found 2 folders:
dvlynn's iMac and
dvlynn's iMac 2.
The 1st folder seems to contain all the backups from the 1st time it backed up in Sept. 2010 until the last time it backed up without error in January of this year.
The 2nd folder contains one file titled "2014-01-03-175020.inProgress"
I purchased this time machine backup drive in 2010 after the origional drive on my iMac crashed and was replaced. When that happened my system was updated to Snow Leopard where it is now. The only major changes I have made are that I moved a lot of large video files off my main drive onto external hard drives to make more room on the iMac.
Other than that everything has stayed the same.
I'm asking it what size the 2 folders are but it's taking forever to answer and I venture to guess it will be 99.99% in the 1st folder and 0.01% in the second folder.
Let me know if that makes any sense.
And thanks again!

Having trouble setting up time machine.

I'm trying to set up time machine and I go to the program, click it on, and then I click "choose backup disk", but there is nothing there. Is there anything I am supposed to do beforehand to give Time Machine a backup disk to save in?
My next question isn't about time machine but it might be related. I have to reinstall windows on my mac. I had it before and somehow it caught a virus, so I had to erase and it went to ****....long story short, It broke, I fixed it. Now i have to repartition my drive though. I assume that I have to split it three ways, one for Mac, Windows, and Time Machine. My question is....I want to leave Mac with the most space of all 3, obviously....whats the minimum I can split it to to install Windows xp and get Time Machine working (unless I'm way off and time machine setup is a different way)?

So one can't back up to a partition on the main disk with Time Machine?
The iMac comes from the factory with a single partition. If you want TM to backup to a second partition on the iMac internal drive, you will need to Partition the drive using OSX disk that came with the iMac (this erases every thing on the hard drive) and reinstall the OS from the DVD.
But, I do not recommend that approach. Backups are generally needed if your hard disk crashes. If you are backing up to a partition on the internal disk, you will lose your backup if/when the drive crashes.
The only reason to use TM on a partition on the internal drive is if you are doing a LOT of version sensitive work (meaning you made need to look at yesterday's work on the same project). But most applications can be set to do incremental change backups of individual projects making TM a ppor choice anyway.
Buy an external drive for the TM backup.
(jk)

ICloud notes deleted; trouble restoring using Time Machine.

All of my notes got deleted via iCloud on both my Mac and iPhone. I tried using Time Machine in the Mail app but for each note it says "Message not cached" and when I try to restore them my Notes folder remains blank. Any suggestions?

Time Machine backs up the file 'as it is'. Its just like copying and pasting the file to an External HD and then dragging it back, would keep the file exactly the same.
The best way to find out, is to try it! This is what I did. Even though there was no need. Get a random photo from the Internet, add it to iPhoto - make sure TM has backed up. (Does it every hour), then delete it and go to TM and restore.
I tried it with a whole album, and restored it. It just came back. Fantastic.
So in answer to your question - Yes TM will bring it back as it was.
The only problem is TM only backs up every hour. You cant do it yourself. (I dont think). So if you were to change a file, save it and then undo or delete it - All within an hour. TM wouldn't have backed up the changes.
Hope this helps.

Trouble restoring from Time Machine backup

Hi all,
I've reached the limits of my ingenuity trying to restore a troublesome Time Machine backup, so I'm here to ask for some guidance. To start at the beginning: I corrupted my Macbook Pro's internal hard drive somehow, possibly by jarring loose a RAM chip while the computer was asleep. I removed and reseated the RAM, reformatted the hard drive, and reinstalled OSX from the install DVD, all the way back to Snow Leopard, then re-upgraded to Mountain Lion. So far, so good.
The current problems began when I tried to restore my system from my Time Machine backup (store on a 500GB external hard drive, which was actually the original MBP hard drive which I replaced and chucked into a Transcend StoreJet enclosure). The restore proceeded for about half an hour, then failed with a SIGSEGV plus an "Error -36", data could not be read from "". This occurred during the OSX installation, where I decided to skip the restore at first, and also later when I invoked the Migration Assistant.
I began to copy the files manually, first using the Time Machine interface, and later with a straight "cp -r" on my home directory. Similar errors ensued: I got a popup error message saying that the data could not be read, and also that the Time Machine disk was removed improperly, data might be lost, etc. I ran a "Repair Disk" on the external drive, and with "cp" was able to copy about 1/3 of my data; however, after an hour, the copy operation crashed again with a "disk removed improperly" error. After two or three times removing and re-plugging in the external hard drive, the disk no longer mounted, and Disk Utility says that it cannot repair the disk.
Now, my real question is, I was able to plug the bare Time Machine hard drive into an Ubuntu desktop via SATA, and the disk mounts and I can browse the file system without error. So, can anybody help me understand (a) what exactly is wrong with the external hard drive that OSX can't deal with it, but Ubuntu can, and (b) how I might efficiently recover the files off of the external hard drive? Regarding (a), could the issue be related to the hard drive enclosure? Regarding (b), I can see all of my files in Ubuntu, but Ubuntu doesn't recognize the hard links, and so the actual files are organized randomly in thousands of Time Machine directories; sorting these would be a true nightmare!
Sorry for the novel, and thanks in advance for any help!

OK, I have a partial solution. A kind fellow has written a virtual filesystem for Linux specifically to read Time Machine drives: https://github.com/abique/tmfs. Simply installing this utility allows me to browse the hard link structure of Time Machine without manually delving into the '.HFS+\ Private\ Directory\ Data^M' folders. I'm currently copying out all of the files onto a second external hard drive, and hopefully this will recovery my data. A bazillion thanks to abique!
Of course, this doesn't track down my hardware problem, but I think it's best to retire this external hard drive entirely. I think the problem is with the drive or the enclosure and not with my MBP, since I attempted to copy the data onto a different MBP and had the same errors.
Steps:
- Install TMFS, available in the Ubuntu Software Manager.
- Find the initial mount point of the Time Machine drive. For me, it was /media/<username>/<long string of random letters and numbers>.
- Re-mount the time machine drive using the virtual filesystem. I also had to make a folder corresponding to the new mount point by hand, for some reason:
> sudo mkdir /mnt/tm-root
> sudo tmfs /media/username/4be78be9-cc68-32b4-9683-72c2209d11be /mnt/tm-root -ouid=$(id -u),gid=$(id -g),allow_other
- The Time Machine partition is now browsable (read-only) at /mnt/tm-root in a terminal, instead of not recognizing the hard links.

Trouble setting up time machine

When I try to choose a location to back up I turned TM on and clicked on Choose backup disk. A window drops down but no disks are listed - not even my harddrive.
Any help is appreciated.
Mike

Time Machine will only show drives that are formatted as HFS+ and with a certain amount of free space (I think). In theory, Time Machine can backup to your System disk, but this would be a little pointless.
Make sure that the USB disk you are using is formatted as HFS+ in Disk Utility. If it's not, copy your existing files to another disk and use the 'Erase' option on the USB disk. You'll be able to copy the files back afterwards.
The touch hack should only be used as a last resort on a HFS+ formatted drive. Time Machine needs certain features of the filing system only supported by HFS+.

Trouble with my time machine and macbook pro

I had my macbook pro's screen repaired because the it kept going black. It was not the video card, but a faulty screen. I just got it home and plugged my time machine into the computer. Now I can't browse any of my old backups on the time machine. It acts as if they were never there. Nothing except for what was just added to the time machine today is there. I live 2 hours away from the closest Apple store and my Apple care plan ended. I work as staff for a business and they need me to be able to browse the backups. The time machine was working perfectly before I had the computer repaired. Is it possible that they changed something on my computer so it doesn't reconize my files? Is there a way that I can change it back or fix this problem myself?
I just called Apple store and they told me that there is basically no way that I will be able to get access to my old files because they changed out something in my computer when they repaired the screen. If you know of any other way that I can still have access to these files let me know! On a PC you can plug an external into any computer and access files. My files are still on my Time Machine. I just can't access them. Please help me.

wrong forum, and not sure what anyone can offer.
You want to find MacBook Pro support and repair services?
The place to start along with google is
http://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro
Before you send equipment in rescue the hard drive data or even the hard drive, replace if necessary (put in USB case).

Trouble setting up Time Machine with Time Capsule

I have just replaced my airport wifi system with a new 1TB Time Capsule on a home system using a DSL internet connection. I have been able to configure the wifi and it is working fine but Time Machine just gives me an error message saying 'The backup disk image could not be created'.
I have returned it to factory settings and reconfigured twice but still get the same message. It hasn't backed up at all.
I have run out of ideas so any help would be appreciated.
John

Hey there,
Have you given your computer's local network a name?
To do so, head to System Preferences --> Sharing
At the top of the sharing pane should be a text box. If the box is empty, then you need to give your Mac a name. Hope this helps.
B-rock

Having trouble restoring from Time Machine

I replaced my HD, on my iMac 2007 Intel 20"' model A1441. After formatting I tried to restore from Time Machine, but continue to receive error messages saying it can't restore the drive. I went over to disk utilities & restored from there, but it renames my hard drive to "time Machine Backup" so I have two backup disks. Is there a way to rename it? Because all the data transfers over. The whole thing is very frustrating! My system was running on OS 10.8.5.

That's not how you restore from Time Machine. If you followed the instructions linked below and it didn't work, erase the volume and install OS X. When you restart, follow the prompts to transfer your data from a snapshot.
OS X Yosemite: Recover your entire system

After changing my wifi password I am having trouble finding my time machine on my network, any help please?

I have just changed my wifi password for added security but cannot find my time machine on my network. In the status bar it says that the time machine is not configured (although it has been) and every time I try to find it using airport utlity it remains hidden. Any help would be appreciated as I have a recent back up on there.

First off, thank you so much to everyone who is trying to help! I really appreciate it!
I opened the "backups.backupdb" folder as you suggested "jeffreyfromtas" and found 2 folders:
dvlynn's iMac and
dvlynn's iMac 2.
The 1st folder seems to contain all the backups from the 1st time it backed up in Sept. 2010 until the last time it backed up without error in January of this year.
The 2nd folder contains one file titled "2014-01-03-175020.inProgress"
I purchased this time machine backup drive in 2010 after the origional drive on my iMac crashed and was replaced. When that happened my system was updated to Snow Leopard where it is now. The only major changes I have made are that I moved a lot of large video files off my main drive onto external hard drives to make more room on the iMac.
Other than that everything has stayed the same.
I'm asking it what size the 2 folders are but it's taking forever to answer and I venture to guess it will be 99.99% in the 1st folder and 0.01% in the second folder.
Let me know if that makes any sense.
And thanks again!

HT1175 Trouble with using Time Machine for the first time.

I do not see the "Change Disk" option. Once I switch it to on, a window pops up that only has one option which is "set up another time capsule." I click that and it searches for something using airport utility with no results. What am I doing wrong/anyone know what the problem is?

Very fortunately I don't use Lion.. and I know it displays things differently... are you sure you are looking in the right place.. Have you opened the section for network.. or do it manually..
In finder (hopefully lion is similar) in top menu, go, go to server.. and type in AFP://TCIPADDRESS.
Obviously put in the actual IP address for my TCIPADDRESS.. or use the TCNAME.
Connecting by both ethernet and wireless is not helping btw.. use one or the other. Although for discovery it is fine actual file transfer gets messed up.. stick to wired for files..
If you still have issues.. press and hold reset for 10sec.. if the TC does not come alive.. I am not sure.. open the network preferences and check that you are getting IP address from it.. and then open a terminal and ping it..
Thus..
$ ping tcgen3
PING tcgen3.bigpond (192.168.2.65): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.2.65: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=2.678 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.65: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=0.810 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.65: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=7.193 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.65: icmp_seq=3 ttl=255 time=0.943 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.65: icmp_seq=4 ttl=255 time=0.931 ms
^C
--- tcgen3.bigpond ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.810/2.511/7.193/2.441 ms
Notice I use a short, no spaces pure alphanumeric name.. this is a big help.. and easier to type!!
You can also disconnect every other network connection.. make sure nothing is connected to the TC or computer.. they are all alone in the world. Restart both.

Time Machine can't search

I'm having a problem with Time Machine: it is backing up OK, and I can browse the backups, but the Spotlight search isn't working.
For example, if I start the Time Machine interface and enter something in the search box, it doesn't find any files.
I tried entering sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/Backup\ HD/Backups.backupdb to force it to reindex, but it did not fix it.
There does appear to be a Spotlight index in store for Backups.backupdb, but it seemed to rebuild it pretty fast.
I can't figure out if the problem is that Spotlight isn't actually indexing Backups.backupdb, or if it is indexed but Time Machine can't access it.
Note: The backup drive is in the Spotlight privacy tab.

Pondini wrote:
When you type a search argument in the search field in the Finder window, then use the arrows, the search should be repeated for each window you move to with the arrows.
Yes, that was what I was doing. And also testing by picking specific backup dates while there was a search argument entered. And searching from within the Finder, with a scope set to search the backup drive Backups.backupdb folder or some folder below.
I was able to get it mostly working, by:
1. Remove Time Machine drive from Spotlight exclusion.
2. Force Spotlight to reindex the Time Machine database via sudo mdutil -E "/Volumes/backup drive name/Backups.backupdb"
This time it took several hours to rebuild the index.
Now I can search within Time Machine to some degree, but I'm seeing anomalies. Some files it just can't find at all; meaning they aren't indexed, even by name. One example is a simple Word document in my Documents folder.
I'm suspecting that Spotlight is only indexing some instances of each document -- I think it is looking at the kTimeMachineOldestSnapshot and kTimeMachineNewestSnapshot. And the question is, what happens if the oldest snapshot rolls off? That is, if the snapshot that originally backed up a file no longer exists?
I'm also still having trouble with seaching Mail in Time Machine -- the search box is frozen so I can't enter a search term. I thought it might be fixed by reindexing, but unfortunately that is not the case.
Another thing I haven't figured out is if I can add the Time Machine back to the Spotlight exclusion. The Help and Apple website says that this is OK, it will keep indexing the Time Machine database but just not display results in a Spotlight search. What I'm seeing is mixed results: there is some evidence that it is indexing while excluded, but in other cases it is failing to index files that are created and backed up while the drive is excluded.

Trouble searching in Time Machine

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