What are the stages of Time machine backup

I often leave my Time Machine to back up and am never really sure where it is in the process. For example, where does "Indexing backup" come in the process? Is it almost done when it's indexing?
I've seen many others have problems with this stage lasting a long time. What happens if I stop the backup during indexing? Are my files already backed up? Would I be able to restore from the un-indexed backup?
Thanks

If you see indexing for more than a few moments, and especially on a number of backups, there's likely a problem of some sort. Just what depends to some extent on what version of OSX your Mac is running.
If you cancel a backup before it completes normally, you cannot view or restore anything from it.
You can always tell if a backup has completed successfully, by clicking the TM icon in your menubar and/or going to System Preferences > Time Machine. If it shows a recent date & time for Latest Backup, that's when it was done.

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I have a 2013 macpro I upgraded to yosemite. Now I find time machine does not work, nor my old back up using a click free wireless back up. What is the status of time machine and yosemite?

What is the status of time machine not working with yosemite?
I upgraded mu mac pro to yosemite and since have found time machine does not work.
Also, my old backup via a clikfree wireless backup does not work any longer.
Is anyone working on this issue?
Is there anyway I can backup my information today and until time machine &
yosemite get fixed?

These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
In the top right corner of the Console window, there's a search box labeled Filter. Initially the words "String Matching" are shown in that box. Enter the word "Starting" (without the quotes.) You should now see log messages with the words "Starting * backup," where * represents any of the words "automatic," "manual," or "standard."
Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Note the timestamp of the last "Starting" message that corresponds to the beginning of an an abnormal backup. Now
CLEAR THE WORD "Starting" FROM THE TEXT FIELD
so that all messages are showing, and scroll back in the log to the time you noted. Select the messages timestamped from then until the end of the backup, or the end of the log if that's not clear. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
☞ If all you see are messages that contain the word "Starting," you didn't clear the text field.
☞ The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
☞ Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

What are the various ways to take backup on solaris 10

What are the various ways to take backup on solaris 10.
Kindly tell in detail
Thanks in advance

ufsdump - used for ufs backup. you can perform full (0), incremental and differential backups.
example1. ufsdump 0cfu /dev/rmt/0 /dev/rdsk/c0t3d0s0 - back-up root filesystem to tape device
example2. ufsdump 5fuv /dev/rmt/1 /dev/rdsk/c0t3d0s6 - back-up filesystem on partition 6 to tape device
tar - used to bundle set of files and directories. No hidden files will be backed-up
example - tar cvf /dev/rmt/0 / /usr /var /home - back-up / (root), /usr, /var and /home filesystems to tape device.
dd - convert and copy file
example 1. dd if=/dev/rmt/0h of=/dev/rmt/1h
example 2. tar cvf - . | compress | dd obs=1024k of=/dev/rmt/0 conv=sync
cpio - good for restoring image from one system to the other.
see man pages for in-depth details

Can I limit the amount of Time Machine backups?

Is it possible to limit the amount of Time Machine backups? I have a 2 tb drive to store back ups...it's nearly full. I'd like to use the drive for other things as well.
Hope this makes sense.

Ohhh, no way!!
Pondini died?????? I just talked to him a couple weeks ago it seems.

What Files are Saved during a Time Machine Backup??

Hi,
When I carry out a time machine backup, what files are saved?
I have just plugged in my external hard drive to carry out a back up and its 56GB!, my last TM backup was only 2 weeks ago and I haven't downloaded that much data!
Many Thanks
Chris

Sorry, that wasn't typed very well!!
The TM backup is 56GB
;o)

What's the point of Time Machine

After clearing up this 10.5.6 bug on Time Machine it got me wondering what the benefit of TM really is. I am a photographer dealing with large files but I never work on a single photo for more then one hour. My method of backing up is simple... download raw images from the CF card to the OS disk that I'll be working from as well as to two internal HD backup disks. As I work I put finished photos in a "finals" folder that is copied onto the backups as I go along. Indeed if the OS disk goes down while I'm working I have the raw files on two backups plus the finals folder as I may have backed up in that time frame. I understand TM will provide me with a fall back to previous edits of a single image but even so, this seems like a waste of a hard drive and perhaps more trouble than it's worth for the small effort to drag and drop occasionally. Perhaps TM is better for video work or am I missing something elemental here?

Carl,
CarlKramer wrote:
Excellent info, thanks. Two questions about the post.
How do I "flush" data of a backup HD to de-frag it?
Easy. Copy all the data to a second drive or volume, delete it from the first, then copy it back (or not). The most logical scenario is one where "live" data (that which is being edited or otherwise managed) is kept on one drive temporarily. When it reaches a state where the files will remain "static" in the future, those files are copied to the second drive/volume and deleted from the first. Since files will be written to the second "archival" drive sequentially, then never modified or moved again, fragmentation will always remain at essentially zero for that drive.
Fragmentation on the first drive will be eliminated when all data is removed from it. Alternatively, the volume can just be formatted (erased), but this isn't necessary.
Lets say I get a disk error and my boot system goes down. If I have been backing up the boot drive to an external with TM, what are the steps I would take to get total recovery?
A "Full Restore" is a function of the Leopard installer. Boot to the installation disk, then open the installer's "Utilities" menu. "Restore from a Time Machine Backup" is at the bottom of the menu. You are asked to connect the backup drive. When it is mounted, it is scanned for valid backups. A list appears, and you choose which backup you would like to restore (presumably the most recent, but you can choose any that exist). You then choose a destination for the installation. When it has been restored, the machine reboots to the restored installation ad you're back up & running.
Unlike a "normal" installation of OS X, restoring a backup is dependent only on the direct transfer speed from the backup drive. Where a bare installation of Leopard might take as long as 2 hours, a restoration of Leopard plus all applications and user data takes only minutes (in my case, 45).
You would normally be using this feature after having used Disk Utility (in the same menu) to erase the faulty startup drive. However, it can also be used, and quite handily, to move an installation from one drive or machine to another.
Scott
P.S. If fragmentation on a startup disk becomes and issue (rare with OS X, but it can happen with the types of file mentioned earlier), restoring from a Time Machine backup after an erasure can be an excellent solution! -s

Why are excluded folders in Time Machine Backups?

I have my top-level Virtual Machines folder excluded from Time Machine Backups. Yet, they are there, granted, only back to the top of this month, 4 days ago, but, there they are.
Why is this?

No, it has been in the exclusion list since June 2013 when I got the AirPort Time Capsule. (and even before that, when I got VirtualBox)

Does Migration Assistant use the most recent time machine backup?

About to transfer my old macbook pro harddrive to my new imac..and when im in migration assistant it allows me to select ALL applications (not individual ones unfortuantely) to transfer from my time machine backup...curious, does it transfer all apps I have ever had on all my backups? - there is probably 20 different backups. I have cleared a ton of useless apps off my MBP and did a fresh backup hoping those would be the only ones to get transfered?
Thanks

Only one version is transferred, the last saved one.

Can OS 10.7 limit the number of Time Machine backups

I'm using a 2TB Western Digital My Book Live to backup my 2011 MacBook Pro on a home network that's shared with Windows 7 machines. Can I limit the size of my Time Machine Backup to 500GB or limit the number of backups?

Falcon27453 wrote:
re: samberl's suggestion;
You can limit the size of the TM backup by using this automator script.
http://code.google.com/p/backmyfruitup/downloads/detail?name=CreateBackupVolume. zip
Has anyone else either used this suggestion... or can offier any input? Pardon the comment... but the mod worried me a wee bit.
No. Hacks worry me in general, and the deeper inside the OS they dig, the more I'd be worried. Here's why. It's not a matter of if they become a problem, it's when. The OS will continue to change. That's a given. As it does, they absolutely do not take into consideration accomodating hacks. In fact, there have been circumstances where they have gone far out of their way to make sure hacks do not work in future updates. Trusting your data backups to that scenario??? No thanks. And yes, the same continuous update situation is true of any software (it doesn't even have to be third-party, as we've seen many times), but software apps more in the mainstream continue to be updated, while hacks . . . .

What is the equation for Time Machine required space?

Once again Time Machine says it has run out of room to do my backup. I guess I just don't understand the equation for figuring this out.
These are my specs:
Disks being backed up - 2 drives
          Internal Drive - 640gb, 482gb in use
          External Drive - 500gb, 105gb in use
     587gb total data in use
Time Machine disk - 1TB, 715gb in use, 284gb available, asking for 303gb
TM wants space that is more than half of my total data in use. I have one (old) 2gb file, all others are 99mb and smaller, mostly much smaller.
Why isn't TM removing older backup files to make room for the latest? Why does it think it needs a block of 303gb when the new files it needs to back up are all in the sub 10mb range?
On the surface it seems like TM is using disk sizes to do it's caluclations instead of file size.
What is the equation it uses to figure this out? I am puzzled...

jlmcvay wrote:
Starting pre-backup thinning: 286.19 GB requested (including padding), 265.05 GB available
That's your main problem; wanting to back up about 238 GB (plus 20%). Curiously, that's a bit less than the previous messages.
See what's shown for Estimated size of full backup under the exclusions box in Time Machine Preferences > Options. According to the figures in your first post, it should be about 587 GB. If it's considerably larger, then there are two possibilities:
Something else is connected, and Time Machine is trying to back it up.
There's a directory problem on one of the disks being backed-up, so Time Machine thinks it's much larger. If so, try verifying your internal HD, and repairing the external, per #A4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
But if the estimate is reasonably close, then something very large has changed. See #D4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting for some of the common culprits. Unfortunately, there's no way to tell in advance what it is; you can only see that after a backup completes.
If nothing there helps, try excluding the external HD and trying again (per #10 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions) -- that should tell us whether the problem is on the internal or the external. Then we can try to narrow it down.
Seems like there is a problem with the Event store UUIDs for my internal drive.
Not a major one. That message means that Time Machine isn't sure that the previous backup was completed normally (which it obviously didn't). When that happens, Time Machine can't use the Event store, but has to do a "deep traversal" to compare everything on the drive to the backups to figure out what's changed and needs to be backed-up. That takes a while, of course, and means your backup will take considerably longer than usual.
I commonly have iPhoto open all the time. If TM cannot back up iPhoto while it open that would explain why it needs to backup a lot of data.
That's a possible explanation, but 238 GB is a lot of photos. How large is your entire iPhoto Library?
Time Machine can sometimes back the iPhoto Library up when iPhoto is open -- it seems to depend on just what you've been doing. So it's fairly unusual for it to be missed for very long. (It ought to send a message after a certain time, but it doesn't.)
If excluding the external HD doesn't turn up a clue, try excluding your Pictures folder.

What is encrypting on my time machine backup

i just bought a 1T lacie external hard drive
i chose to encrypt the the back up
not sure why..it just seemed to be the prudent thing to choose
it is still encrypting the data after 7 hrs
what's going on
can i change this
should i change this
why & what is it doing?
also can i change the schedule of backups the time machine does
i really do NOT need hourly ones!!!

The original backupnwith TimeMachine can be quite long and the encryption may have added more time to it. Once TimeMachine gets its initial backup it is much faster as it only addresses things that have changed. Hourly backups turn into daily backups and use less space than you might think. Let it run it's fine.
Best TimeMachine primer ever:
Pondini's Time Machine FAQ

What kinds of drives can Time Machine backup?

Please notice the absence of the word "to" in the subject. My question is not what kinds of drives Time Machine can write its backup to (a subject that is covered extensively everywhere on the web), but what kinds of drives it can backup, i.e. the data from which drives can be included in the backup.
My Mac mini is a little storage-capacity challenged, so I use an external USB drive for most of my work data. This drive is FAT32 formatted, because I need to access it from a Windows PC as well. I find that this drive (which I do not use to write the TM backup to - that's impossible because TM can not backup to FAT32 drives) is in TM's "Do not backup" list and I can't remove it from there. I suspect this has to do with the FAT32 formatting, but I do not understand why that is (again, it makes perfect sense that the drive TM writes its backup to has certain restrictions on the formatting because of the mechanism that TM uses to create its backups using hard links - to create a backup of certain data, I would expect all TM would need is read-access to that data, which clearly is not a problem for the Mac because I am happily using the FAT32 drive as storage).
So, my question, in a nutshell, on what type of drive does data need to be in order for TM to be able to create a backup of it? Is there a way to get TM to backup the data that resides on my FAT32 disk? Also, I plan to move the data on my FAT32 drive to a network drive. Is there a way to backup data that resides on a network drive with TM? What type of protocol (NFS?) would I need to use to access the data on the network drive? *Again, please, this is not the gazillionth question about where a TM backup can be written to, this is about what data can be backed up by TM.* Thanks in advance for any insight.

Why is that? Does it have to do with the fact that TM uses the same notification mechanism for changes on the filesystem that SpotLight does? I guess that if FAT32 won't work, with NFS or something similar I will certainly be out of luck?
That *****, I was looking forward to move the data from my FAT32 external drive to a network drive, reformat it and start using it as a second TM backup volume.
When I reformat the external drive from FAT32 to HFS+ will I then be able to back it up using TM? (I.e., it really is the formatting that is the problem, not the fact that the drive is external)? What about NTFS? (I really want to keep the data in a form accessible by Windows directly, in case I need to run Windows on the Mac).
Message was edited by: Eelke

Where are emails stored in time machine backups?

I just upgraded to Maverick and am trying to use time machine to restore emails that have disappeared form the inbox. The directions are pretty straightforward except, I can't find where on the most receent backup the inbox and its messages are stored. I am feeling dense and frustrated by my inability to do something that should be easy.

Thank you Arthur & Barry for your advice.
The issue (which I did not explain clearly and perhaps am still fuzzy about) is the actual file location, I think. I have a backup from Sunday which appears in Time Machine. I will try Barry's directions to see if the emails so indeed appear when Mail is open.
Alternatively, Arthur's advice would mean finding the ~/Library/Mail/V2 folder on the backup disk. Is that correct?
Thanks again for your help

What should be excluded from Time machine backups?

I was looking at the Time Machine options and it is showing my external hard drive( Seagate) as being excluded from backups. Is that correct? If not, how do I correct. Seagate is grayed out & does not appear it can be changed. I recently added SuperDuper to my Mac, so not sure if that is the reason.
I appreciate any help to my question. Thanks!

For some guidance see:
11. What should I exclude, and what should I not exclude?
http://pondini.org/TM/11.html

Leopard doesn't mount the disk with time machine backup!

Hi friends. It's my first time in this forum, and I'm sorry by now for my poor english.
My problem: One week ago I had some problem with hard disk, but after a visit to an Apple center and after a replacement of my disk the problem was solved.
Now I want to restore all my file and my system preference from an external hard disk (USB LaCie 500GB) when have made a complete backup with time machine.
But Leopard doesn't mount the disk in finder or in Utility Disco. I see it only in System Profiler. I try with my old iBook with Tiger and it mount correctly the disk! It's amazing! Please Help me, I need my file on my iMac for work!
Thanks and merry Christmas!!!

Similar thing for me as well. I however haven't made a backup using Time Machine.
In preparation for Leopard, I reformatted my laptop's hard drive and installed Mac OS X 10.5.1 fresh. As soon as I plugged in my trusty 500GB external WD MyBook Pro (trying both Firewire 400 and 800 on my MacBook Pro 17"), I get the following alert:
"Disk Repair
The disk "500GB" was not repairable by this computer. It is being made available to you with limited functionality. you must back up your data and reformat the disk as soon as possible. OK"
Keep in mind, I run Disk Utility and "Repair Disk" and "Repair Permissions" religiously every week and have had no issues while running under Mac OS X 10.4.11. My other laptop running the 10.4.11 doesn't report any issues with the drive at all - only when I plug it into this one running 10.5.1.
Is there a firmware update for this drive? Is this Apple's issue? I have another LaCie Firewire drive and it works flawlessly even under 10.5.1.
Right now, I can't even use the drive as it's Read Only (due to the error).
In system logs:
Feb 9 19:02:59 Cam diskarbitrationd69: unable to repair /dev/disk4s3 (status code 0x00000008).
/dev/rdisk4s3: fsck_hfs run at Sat Feb 9 19:00:41 2008
/dev/rdisk4s3: ** /dev/rdisk4s3 (NO WRITE)
/dev/rdisk4s3: QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM DIRTY
/dev/rdisk4s3: fsck_hfs run at Sat Feb 9 19:00:41 2008
/dev/rdisk4s3: ** /dev/rdisk4s3
/dev/rdisk4s3: ** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
/dev/rdisk4s3: ** Checking Extents Overflow file.
/dev/rdisk4s3: ** Checking Catalog file.
/dev/rdisk4s3: Incorrect number of file hard links
/dev/rdisk4s3: ** Checking multi-linked files.
/dev/rdisk4s3: ** Checking Catalog hierarchy.
/dev/rdisk4s3: ** Checking Extended Attributes file.
/dev/rdisk4s3: ** Checking volume bitmap.
/dev/rdisk4s3: ** Checking volume information.
/dev/rdisk4s3: ** Repairing volume.
/dev/rdisk4s3: ** The volume 500GB could not be repaired.
The drive is reported to be "Ok" when running Disk Repair on other machines not running Leopard. As a test, I just "upgraded" my wife's laptop to Leopard and now I have the same issue on that machine.
Help.

What are the stages of Time machine backup

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