Two different users. One Time Machine Backup?

I have two user profiles on my iMac. I'm just wondering if Time Machine backs up both profiles when I'm logged into one or do I have back up each profile individually?
Thanks.

B.C
It will backup virtually the whole contents of your internal hard disk, so no worries. That's whether you are logged into a specific user account or not.
Cheers!
Message was edited by: Glenn Carter

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Restoring two macs from one time machine backup

A little while ago my mid 2010 MBP's HDD died on me. Whilst I was waiting to sort out my MBP, I restored from time machine to my mac mini so that I had a machine to work from. Then I fixed my MBP by installing new drives (SSD and HDD where the optical drive used to be), and using migration assitant to copy everything over from time machine (as the SSD boot drive was not big enough to do a simple restore). So now I technically have two machines the same, except my MBP is running Lion 10.7.5.
Only problem is when I try to update the MBP with Mavericks it tells me it cannot install on this machine. Is this because I restored the same original mac to two new machines? I cannnot open mac mail either on the MBP. There is about 55 GB of space on my boot drive, and my mac meets all the requirements for Mavericks (it was running it prior to the HDD dying, but because I installed dual drives it has complicated the restore process).
Cheers for any help offered!
Rich

Well I never did find a solution to this specific problem. So I simply went and bought a bigger SSD (the 480GB SSD M500), and did a restore to that drive from time machine, which worked perfectly. Now I shall just remove some of the more data hungry folders to my 1TB HDD installed in the optical drive bay. I shall no doubt be setting myself up for a more complicated restore procedure in the future, but hey ho, right now my machine is blisteringly fast!

Unable to recover Mavericks via Time Machine on iMac (2011). I have one Time Machine backup from this week On new Time Capsule. I already attempted safe boot and NPRAM reset. Hard drive and permissions verified as ok.

Some more history - I'm not too techie so added everything in I thought might be significant!
- Installed Mavericks on iMac in October 2013
- experienced regular low memory issues - used Memory Clean app as a workaround
- last week decided to upgrade installed memory from 4gb to 16gb. Faster loading but still running out of memory - just takes longer to do so.
- also last week purchased 2gb Time Capsule (to back up 660gb on 1TB drive)
- one successful Time Machine backup completed last weekend.
- I decided to try and clear some space, tidy my folders, old music files, delete duplicates etc (Not system files)
- then tried out 'time machine restore' just to test it out. Deleted files and folders recovered ok using Time Machine menu (the one that looks like outta space)
- yesterday, Avast Anti-Virus flagged virus detected (sorry, I didn't manage to capture details) and quarantined file, but I couldn't get any windows to respond so forced Mac to shutdown.
- attempted regular reboot , system hanging on white/ apple symbol screen.
- attempted Safe reboot - reboot stalls at mess 'BootCacheControl: unable to open /var/db/BootCache.playlist no such file or directory.
(I don't know if this is significant)
- attempt NPRAM reset, reboot hanging at Apple symbol still
- attempted reboot into Disk Utility. HD drive verified ok. Permissions checked and Safari permissions fixed (only)
- finally attempting restore from Time Machine Backup via Disk Utility. Stalls at 'select a backup source'. Menu is 'searching for Time Machine Backup....'
Nothing is listed, after a few mins machine just goes to sleep.
My Time Capsule and networks are all switched on. No idea what to try next!

Most of the problems like this that people report on this forum are due to bad "utilities" like Memory Clean and Avast.
Your Mac probably didn't have a virus. There has never been an OSX virus "in the wild". Third party antivirus software is of very dubious utility on Macs. Macs are not PCs. OSX has anti-malware protection built into it already.
Do you have any other third party "utilities" on your Mac, such as CleanMyMac or MacKeeper?
Is the RAM you installed the recommended type of RAM for your Mac?
Take a look at this page: Mac OS X: Gray screen appears during startup
But your OS may be damaged beyond repair, or beyond what disk utility is able to repair.
In that case you have a few options:
There is a small chance that a (reputable) third part utility like Techtool Pro 7 may be able to fix your OS.
Try to boot into single user mode (restart, hold down ⌘S until you see a black screen with white text) and repair your hard drive. Here's a reference with directions: Repair Your Hard Disk in Single User Mode | Everything Macintosh
bite the bullet, boot into the recovery partition or internet recovery, and erase your HD, reinstall Mavericks from scratch, and start over. Your documents are probably still on your Time Machine Backup. I wouldn't reinstall the documents via a migration- you don't want to reinstall bad system files along with your documents- but you could copy them one by one back to your internal HD. And most importantly- don't reinstall any third party "utilites" like Memory Clean or Avast (or any other third-party antivirus software, for that matter).

More than one time machine backup..

Is it possible to make time machine backup to more than one location? I have a nice big 2TB drive at my office that I use for time machine and it works perfectly but I would also like to run a second time machine backup to a portable 1TB drive that I own so that I have a backup that I can carry around with me as well as the fixed backup I leave at my office.
When I last tried to backup to the portable drive it forgot all about the original backup so when I came to try and back that up again it wanted to run from scratch and ignored all of the files on the external drive.

Chanandl3r wrote:
I then ejected the big 2TB drive and re-connected the smaller 1TB portable drive. I opened TM and clicked on Backup Now
Did you change the destination via TM Preferences > Select Disk? If not, that may be the problem.
Can't I just plug in different disks when I want and the system recognise them and run the appropriate backup for me?
No; you must tell TM when you swap destinations.
Did the new backup complete? Are you sure TM was writing to the 1 TB drive? There are some circumstances where OSX will "forget" that an external drive has been disconnected, and create a folder in the /Volumes folder on your internal HD; then Time Machine (or other app) will write there, instead of to the external HD. See the blue box in Where did my Disk Space go? to check.

Can I switch users during time machine backup?

I have a laptop with multiple users.
I am trying to do a Time Machine back-up using a fire-wire connected western digital drive.
Either because I had not backed up in a few weeks, or had updated to 10.7.2, I am not sure, but when I connected the drive to do a backup Time Machine started doing a deep scan.
The preparing phase took several (over 5) hours before the backup would start, but it finally did begin backing up.
It is trying to back up 8 GB of files and is taking a very long time. It backed up 1.5 of 8 GB over the course of the entire day.
Then my kids came home from school and switched to their users.
Looking at the logs, it looks like the backup got canceled when we switched users.
After switching back to the admin user, I am back to the preparing phase again.
I thought you could log out, swtich users etc with Time Machine.
Can someone explain this behavior to me?
Thank you

I just wanted to update all after my experieces:
Time Machine was not the problem. The problem was a defective WD external firewire drive (WD Green drive) which has since been replaced under warantee. Thank you WD for your comiitment.
Whenever I used this drive, I could hear it chugging and chugging away during mount and whenever I was accessing the drive.
I finally checked the drive (WD My Book) with DISK WARRIOR and the thing was toast. Tons of unrepairable hardware errors.
Thankfully the drive was under warantee and after receiving a replacement from WD (no issues with RMA replacement process, kudos to WD) have had ZERO issues with time machine and the replacement drive.
Initial 1st time- time machine backup was ~ 5 hours. (~120 GB of info). (I added the drive to spotlight 'do not index' prefs prior to setting up time machine.)
-This was a HUGE time difference. My prior initial backup with the defective drive was 3 DAYS, yes, DAYS.
If you are having these kind of problems, check you drive with Disk Warrior (Disk Utitlty does not cut it). If Disk Warrior reports problems, it is a hassle, but replace the drive.
Good luck. Karma +1

How do I access old folders from a different user on Time Machine

Hi
I migrated my old macbook to my new macbook pro with all the files and backed up to time machine.
I then restored my macbook pro using erase and install and started from scratch installing most apps from scratch and restoring some documents and apps from time machine from the old backup of the macbook pro (before erase and install).
I'm now having lots of issues with permissions. I can't save a lot of files in the folders they are already in - e.g. If I try to save a Logic song, it often won't let me save it in the folder it was in.
iWeb is refusing to save anything at all.
I can't seem to get my photos back into iPhoto.
My primary concern at the moment is getting access to documents in Time Machine that were on an old user of the MacBook Pro. My current user is set up from scratch I think (not too sure - I'm getting confused about which user was on which computer).
When I try to open a folder, it says "the folder cannot be accessed because you do not have permission to use its contents".
Any help around these problems would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Steve

okstevep wrote:
The reason I did the erase and install in the first place was because I had some kind of bug that was really slowing down my computer. An apple genius said that there were probably some issues with files that was causing this and the best way was to restore and start from scratch.
That's a last resort, but doesn't include a full restore. You have to reinstall all your 3rd-party apps from the original discs; re-enter all your preferences, configuration, and settings; and copy selected data files back. Not a quick or easy procedure, especially if you're not prepared in advance.
If I do a restore from back-up won't the problem come back?
Possibly, but it will get you back where you were, without the permissions problems, and without the confusion about which user account is which, so you can do something constructive.
Is there another way?
Depends. If you haven't done any backups since you erased, you could erase again, install a fresh copy of OSX, then use Setup Assistant to transfer everything else from your backups. Assuming you're running Snow Leopard (per your profile), see Using Setup Assistant on Snow Leopard or Leopard, especially the green box there.
Either way, you may still have to fix the original problem, but there are ways to do that short of the "nuclear" option. I hate to guess with nothing more than "some kind of bug that was really slowing down my computer," but one possibility is a partially-installed or partially-deleted app. Once you get back to where you were, see OSX Log Files, especially the Application Installation or Removal problems section in the blue box

Restoring user from Time Machine backup

Time Machine help
OK, i have a Time Machine issue that I have a feeling won't be an easy fix.
I had to completely wipe my powerbook clean and reinstall the other day (an archive and install wouldn't even work).
Unfortunately, I made the mistake of excluding system files when I created my TM backups. Now, at no part in the install process (nor by using the Migration utility later) can I get the OS to recognize my TM files.
Is my only option to drag and drop from the TM backups? Can this be done with entire users or the entire application folder, or is that going to screw things up? I suppose I could start over with everything, though I'd like to restore Mail to its previous state and I'd like to have my web browsers back as before, at a minimum.

Issue solved with visit to Genius Bar.
As I understand it here are the steps the Genius did. Attempt to create the account (system preferences->users) with the same information. It will say it already exists. Very carefully read the options. One will say use the existing account. BE CAREFUL because one option will wipe your data.
If you need to do this it might be worth the trip to the Genius Bar as you could wipe your data. One precaution I took was to bring a full copy of that user account onto my desktop (from the backup immediately before the wipe) in addition to the one in the user folder. Once we verified that the account was working I moved the desktop copy to the trash and again verified the account (just to be safe).
Hope this helps someone else.

Restore to different disk from Time Machine backup

Using Snow Leopard. I installed a larger hard disk in my Macbook Pro just over a week ago, and kept the old disk. Time Machine had worked before the update and continued to work after the update. So I did another week of work and created new documents, etc. hopefully all backed up.
Then the new larger hard disk crashed, so I had to revert to my old disk which still had the old data on it. The old disk was named xxx180 and the new disk large disk xxx500. The user name and account name were the same on both.
With the old disk now back, if I look into Time Machine, I can only see backups containing data from dates previous to the upgrade, but all of those files are already on my disk. The later dates are there in time machine, but they have no files.
I have tried migration assistant, but it says that I can't have 2 user accounts with the same name - I don't want to re-create the account, just restore a few files.
I have booted from the Snow Leopeard disk and gone into Disk Utility to 'restore from Time Machine', but it says that the large disk information is 475 GB and will not fit onto the old small disk. I know that I only added a few documents and that they shoud fit on the spare space on the old small disk. The difference is only a few days of important text documents.
Can I see the backup files on the Time Machine disk other than through the Time Machine application?

Time Machine - Troubleshooting E3. I can't see backups for a disk/partition that's no longer connected

HT201250 can I back up two different Macs using time machine to the same external hard drive?

I have a MacBook Pro and a Intel Power Mac Tower. The Power Mac is backed up to a 4 TB external hard drive using Time Machine. Can I also back up the MacBook Pro to the same 4TB hard drive using its time machine without altering any of the Power Macs backed up files on the 4TB hard drive?
Ed

Yes, as long as the backup drive is large enough.

HT201250 can you have two macs on one time machine

I just bought my wife a macbook air and want to add her to the system on her own separate backup. when i turned hers on it said it could not complete due to unavailable space... i guess i have been hogging the 500g so what should i do? I want to have it working both machines independently

johnmacamania wrote:
when i do succesfully backup my wifes new macair will it keep our data separate without my having to select such a parameter?
Better to Partiton the TM drive (you won't lose your data), and use the 2nd partiton for the MBA

Help Incomplete Time Machine Backup and I can't set ownership options

Two days ago my iMac HD stopped working and I decided it was time to upgrade my machine so I purchased a new iMac with Mavericks installed. I seem to only have a partial Time Machine Backup located on my NAS drive, so I read various threads about how to manually retrieve files from the .inprogress file. I was able to browse the package contents and when I navigated to Macintosh HD the folder was greyed out and when I attempt to open the folder it looks empty. When I select get info the Macintosh HD folder shows almost 80GB and over 160,000 files inside. I tried copying the folder onto the desktop which failed and also onto an external drive formatted the same way as the NAS - Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Case Sensitive). Everytime I try it says something along the lines of me not having the ownership rights to copy the file over.
I tried going to the NAS drive and the mounted sparsefile and couldn't figure out how to get the ignore ownership on this volume option. When I go to Disk Utility it says Owners Enabled Yes, I can't figure out how to turn that off to let me copy the file over. I tried some recommendations about creating an Alias to Macintosh HD and also setting up Automator actions Get Selected Finder Items > Get Folder Contents > Open Finder Items > Copy Finder Items (to desktop or external drive) both of these failed.
I also don't understand why I can't view the files inside the greyed out Macintosh HD as get info shows many files inside. The sharing and permissions already says everyone can read. Is there anyway I can recover some of the files? It would be so great!
Thanks for helping me.

I solved the problem and I hope this solution can help others with incomplete Time Machine Backups.
1. I made sure hidden files were shown by pasting the following line into Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean true ; killall Finder
2. On NAS drive I have a folder called Time Machine Backup and inside that folder it lists the different users with Time Machine Backups. I double clicked the user with the incomplete time machine backup to mount it.
3. Once mounted there should be a folder called backups.backupdb > machine name > dateandtime.inprogress. I right click that .inprogress file and selected show package contents. This lead to another folder randomly named with numbers and text. Inside that folder you should see a greyed out Macintosh HD folder. The date of the greyed out Macintosh HD folder might read something like January 24th, 1984. This appears to be the date that the Macintosh 128k was first introduced. I read on another thread that the creation date of the folder is incorrectly set after a crash resulting in the greyed out folder.
4. Due to the NAS having ownership issues I was not able to drag either the greyed out Macintosh HD or the folder above it to an external drive or the desktop of my new computer. Automator didn't work either. Here is what did work: I trashed the folder with the greyed out Macintosh HD inside from the NAS and dragged it from the trash onto my desktop. The move took a few hours to complete and the files were now all successfully on the new computer.
5. Once on the desktop the Macintosh HD folder was still greyed out. The solution was to select in the finder: View > Show Path Bar, then search for any file you remember inside your backup. For example I searched the word download and files inside the greyed out Macintosh HD folder showed up. Left clicking the file confirmed the path, that it was from the greyed out Macintosh HD folder. Now you can simply right click one of the folders in the Path Bar and open in new tab if you have Mavericks. I still couldn't directly open the Macintosh HD folder in a new tab, but I could open any of the subfolders inside in a new tab, including the users which lets you access all the backup files. I tested in Mountain Lion that you can also choose Open in Enclosing Folder by right clicking the file that you searched for or right clicking the folder in the bottom of the Path Bar.
6. Once I was done organizing backup files, I turned off hidden files by pasting this line into Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean false ; killall Finder
This took me days to figure out how to make use of an .inprogress file and greyed out Macintosh HD folder.
Hope this helps!!!

Is it possible to use more than one external hard drive for Time Machine backups?

I want to use two hard drives for Time Machine backups.
Bigger one keep at home and be sure it is safe.
Second one (very small pocket size) keep with me for travels.
I want to backup to both drives to be sure I can restore everywhere and to be sure if something bad happened with my small travel disk I can restore from home backup.
Is there any problem with listed schema? Is it normal for Time Machine to handle backups for different drivers and keep everything consistent and smooth?

I really need some help! I have been using an Iomega NAS 1TB HD for the past year. And I received an error message. I believe I have ran out of memory on this drive.
Then recently in the last couple of months I got a ReadyNAS Duo 2TB with 2TB RAID. Should I switch my back ups to this one and delete the other back up file or keep the old back up image file on the Iomega?
Can I transfer the old image back up to this new ReadyNAS? How do I do this?
I appreciate any help.

Two Mac computer in one Time Machine ? Possible?

Hi
Does anyone know that can I back up two computers in one Time Machine External HD? I have one Imac (PPC) and one MAcbook (intel). For both of them I'd like to make one Time machine HD. Does it work like that or do I need to back up two seperate TM HD for each of my computers?
Many thanks...

tur,
There are multiple options for backing up 2 machines to one external drive. Remember that Time Machine is smart enough to recognize different machines and stores the backups in different folders.
1: Connect your external drive to your main machine and then use Personal File Sharing to share that drive on your network. Keep in mind sharing the drive over the network will degrade network speed while Time Machine is working (Not such a big deal if you use a wired network).
2: (The option I use) Run Time Machine on the first computer, eject it the drive, and then plug it onto the second machine and run time machine on that computer.
I use option 2 because I have a machine I use as a media center and do not need regular backups of. I only back it up when I add files.
A third option I have not had any experience with is using Apple's new Time Capsule.
I hope this answers your question.

Time machine backups seem to be gone

I have been running time machine flawlessly for a while. However, on April 26, I created a new user account. I dragged a very large file (clone of a different computer and time machine backup of a different computer) to that user desktop. Those files were previously being excluded from backups. Apparently, wehn I moved them to the new user it tried to include them and I got a warning about the External Drive not being large enough for the backups. I sorted out excluding that user completely but now I can not access any backups prior to the new user being created. Are they lost forever? Did it delete the External Drive to try to make room for the backup? I would think that it would have to check the size before it even does any deleting and then if it knew the backup was too big it wouldn't delete and it would just abort the backup. Can anyone help? When I enter into time machine the last backup shown is April 26, when I browse the drive the oldest folder is April 26 and when I look at the time machine menu it says the oldest backup is April 26.
I am using an iMac with Snow Leopard installed.
Also, I tried looking at the logs in the console but I could not seem to go back far enough.

Are you going into Time Machine from the old user? If you enter Time Machine from the new user, you won't see any files created before that user existed.
You can manually go into your Time Machine volume from the Finder, just to verify that your backups are all there. Don't make any changes in the Finder. Even if Time Machine's "starfield" interface isn't functional, you could still restore files manually if you had to. If Time Machine is really confused, best option is usually to just erase the Time Machine drive and start a fresh one.

Does a Time Machine backup include the Apple_Boot Recovery HD?

I've done a Time Machine backup with the Apple_Boot Recover HD on my internal drive. (Mid 2011 MacBook Air - OS X version 10.7.2 - single user)
Two questions:
Did the Time Machine backup include the Apple_Boot Recovery HD?
If I subsequently need to restore the backup will Time Machine recreate the Apple_Boot Recovery HD on the internal drive?
Thanks in advance for your help,

If you run the command "diskutil list" in terminal, it will show if you have the rescue partition on your disk or not:-
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk2
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.2 GB   disk2s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot                         650.0 MB   disk2s3
if you see the "Apple_Boot 650.0 MB" then you have the rescue partition.
I have just restored my machine from a Time Machine backup, and the Apple_Boot partition has dissapeared.

Two different users. One Time Machine Backup?

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