Applications :: Time Machine Compressing / Not Backing Up Files
Mar 30, 2009
I'm using Time Machine (for the first time) to back up my system (Mac Pro w/750Gb internal drive and a firewire 750Gb external backup). However, when looking at the contents of my external backup drive after Time Machine has finished, I notice there is sizeable difference between the amount of data on my internal and external drives. To confuse matters more, I repeated the backup 3 separate times on the same internal volume (357Gb worth of data) and each time Time Machine yielded a different size backup; ranging from 343Gb to 350Gb. Each time I have "erased" the external drive using Disk Utility prior to running Time Machine.
After digging around I found at least some of the difference lies within the Movies_IDVD Projects folder. I have only a few projects but it appears that Time Machine randomly chose a few of the larger ones to compress? Either that or it did not back them up all the way. These files were roughly 2-4Gb in size on my internal and only 200kb on the backup drive. Are there other files that Time Machine is either compressing or not backing up? Should I use Time Machine at all or should I copy the files I want backed up by dragging them to the external? I would like to be able to restore my system to its current state one day if/when my internal drive craps out (including all of my apps, etc.).
i've been working on an important word document, word quit unexpectedly, document gone. luckily there was a copy of it in the microsoft user data.
but, my first reaction was, oh that's ok time machine would have backed it up. i go into time machine and it's not there. so i save the microsoft user data recovered file to a new file name in a documents folder. quit word. restart. do a time machine backup. it completes. but when i open up time machine, this document (and another one from 5 days ago) are not in ANY of the backups. and if i keep backing up, time machine will backup, but these files are not in any of the dates/times in time machine.
I received my new 24" iMac a few days ago, and have spent the last few days setting it up and getting acquainted with the new features.
I purchased a MyBook Studio 1TB drive to use with Time Machine, as it sounded like a good way to keep everything backed up.
Everything seemed to be working well, until I started flicking through some of my folders in TM. I noticed that the files I had added an hour or so earlier hadn't backed up. I had just recently set an exclusion on a single folder, so decided to try removing it. TM then backed a few GB of files up.
I decided to add some test files to a folder, and run TM again. Again, it didn't back the new files up.
I have a Macbook with OS X 10.6.8 and a 500GB external hard drive, which still has 208.5GB available. For some reason, Time Machine has simply stopped backing up any new files (documents, music, movies--anything). No items are set to be excluded from backups in Time Machine options except for the external hard drive itself. Also, no error messages appear, Time Machine seems to run just fine, but when I enter Time Machine, or look through the files on the hard drive, new files just aren't there. I am not very tech savvy, so I was not able to understand some of the answers people gave to similar questions on here. I did go to Pondini's website and followed as many troubleshooting instructions as I could understand (for example I did manage to do a full reset of Time Machine) but nothing changed. Do I just need to erase the entire backup drive and sart all over? If so, what will prevent this from happening again later on?
So, I tried a search for this but didn't really find any details or threads.
I did a nice TM backup on a new MBP, came to about 40GB total, I excluded folders like my itunes library and desktop, where I store a bunch of installers and such.
after a week, I did it again, and it added about 1GB.
Then, after another week, just internet use, a BIT of email and such, I did another backup and it added 8GB to the total, to a total now of 49GB?
WHAT THE HECK was in the newest 8GB? Is that another new snapshot or something, since I CERTAINLY didn't add 8GB of stuff?
I have an external HD (a partition of which was marked as my Time Machine disc) that had a bad power supply. I placed the drive in a new enclosure and it's working fine - with one exception. I don't get any errors in Time Machine, and it appears to be backing up (according to counter-clockwise spinning icon at the top), but when I open Time Machine there aren't any recent timeframes to restore from. As much as I can tell, the last update is from late January, which is when the power supply went bad on my external HD.
My external HD seems to be just fine - I can see, open, use and save data, but for some reason when I open Time Machine there are no recent saved points. Time Machine used to overwrite the oldest restore points, so I'd always have about two weeks of restore points to choose from. Now I just have two weeks from January, and it makes me nervous that my data is being backed up.
The last time I connected my external drive that I use for time machine was in March. I just connected it and opened Time Machine. It only shows the last update it did. Its been connected for about 2 hours and it hasn't done anything. I can't find any start or backup now buttons.
So I have Time Machine syncing with an external drive and its been backing up perfectly without a problem for the last month. I have not plugged in the external drive in a week, but when I plugged it in to backup today, time machine will not back up to it. The computer sees that the drive is there and identifies at as the Time Machine drive but will not backup to it. The external drive is not full and there is no damage on it. Also, in the time machine system preferences window, the oldest, last, and next backup dates are all blank, they were filled before.
I'm having a problem with time machine repeatedly backing up my /~/Music/iTunes directory. Everytime I plug in my drive, I get a 192Gb backup which will loop continuously. I've confirmed that it's this directory using BackupLoupe and have reset time machine, repaired the disk with no errors, completely reformatted my time machine disk, and continue to have these issues. Console shows no real issue, backupd process simply requests a 192Gb backup and proceeds with it. While I cannot be sure, this appears to have started sometime after the 10.6.4 update.
I have searched this, but I am not sure which answer is the best for this. I would like erase my hard drive and restore OSX. I then want to restore my iTunes library with as little headache as possible. I do not want to use Time Machine. I just want to make sure my iTunes will retain all of my music and still sync with my iPhone properly.
It's weird, time machine use to work fine. I have 3 HDD connected to my computer, and one of the slaves is mac journal case sensitive. Backups have been fine for the last couple months. However recently, time machine will not back up exactly a chunk of 222gb of data. When time machine gets to that point, it just stops. No error message no nothing. And at the top, it says "waiting for backup." Nothing else. I reformatted the hard drive guid, mbr, case sensitive etc etc, nothing. I even swapped out the external hdd and same problem.
How do I troubleshoot this or find out what is causing the problem? Is there a particular format time machine doesn't want to backup? Is there a partition format type time machine doesnt like?
I know this is a Mac forum, but i need a little help finding a program and I thought I'd get the best results here. I'm looking for a program that is similar to OSX's Time Machine to backup my parent's PC. It is an HP and runs Windows XP and I have a Western Digital 750 GB USB external drive. Really, the main thing I want to backup is documents and music files. is there a program similar to Time Machine for Windows XP? Something I can set up to backup new files every few days or so?
I'm currently backing up my MB (2007) to an external USB drive using Time Machine.
I also have a 250gb external drive full of everything I need for work and my music collection. Basically I've realised that if this drive goes down I will probably not be able to do my job, and won't have anything fun to do the rest of the time either because all my stuff will be gone!
This data drive is used daily on Windows XP, 2000 and Vista machines so it's formatted in FAT or NTFS (can't remember which) that Time Machine won't back up from. So TM isn't an option.
Do any of you backup experts know if there's a piece of Mac software or a particular model of external drive that I can get to basically synchronise TWO external drives? I need to be able to back up my external data onto another external drive on a daily basis so I can sleep at night.
So I know in Leopard and probably any OS for Mac's you can compress your files, but is there any way to compress them even more? I had a file that was 321mb's and when I compressed it, it brought it down to 317mb's. Obviously that didn't do me any good. Does anyone have a program or another suggestion?
I have tons of pics and music....so does time machine really back up ALL of it and keep the same quality???? I cant seem to retrieve or look at the files individually when Im browsing thru the time machine backup hard drive.
I needed some extra HD space, so I deleted the 1.5TB hard drive I've been using as my TM backup and thought I'd partition it and re-run TM in the partition.
I erased the drive and created two partitions: 1TB and 500GB. I transferred 250GB of files to the 500GB partition and then set-up the 1TB partition to be used as the TM backup. I ran TM and it told me that it had backed up 264GB...the problem is that my internal HD has 478GB of data on it...so...something's not being backed up.
My only thought at this point is to erase the HD again, re-partition it, and run TM first...and then transfer the data to the other partition.
I have a Time Capsule as my Time Machine backup, which backs up my MBP and the external drive I use to hold all my files. The initial backup was roughly 400GB--325GB of which is iTunes related.
The initial backup--which I have done numerous times now--went fine. However, the next time I have the external drive connected, when Time Machine starts up to do its hourly incremental backup--it shows XXGB of 365GB ... so it is trying to re-backup my entire iTunes library. Anybody have this problem and find a solution?
I've been using time machine to back up to my WD hard drive but I am looking for a way that I can store photos and movies on my hard drive instead of leaving them on my laptop as well as backing up the whole laptop - when I back up with time machine if I then delete photos off my laptop can I simply pull them up from time machine at a later date and look at them from there?
Time Machine has been backing up insane amounts of data, and every time it's been backing up it's been going up, It's backing up at the moment and it's currently on 21GB. Not only that but when it finishes backing up it's been getting stuck on "Finishing Backup..." and the process coreservicesd has been using 90%+ of my CPU, causing my fans to go insane.
ihad my time machine in only wifi mode for like the last month or so, then I redicided to use the backing up feature and all kinds of weird things started happening.
At first, it just gave the message "Backing up" for hours, and it would just keep at that message. (I know that at some point it can take hours to actually start the backup but it�s not this case here) Then like yesterday it started backing up but I turned down the computer as I thought it would be normal that my time capsule would work normally.
I unplugged it, and hited the reset switch several times, and nothing happened. It would not work. Am not a computer technician, I spend most of my time making music.
I have a Time Capsule and Time Machine on MacBook regularly backs up between 1MB and 5GB of data every hour, depending on how much data I change/delete/add to my hard drive. Over the last few days, it has tried to backup 150GB, 90GB, and 220GB, despite the fact that I'm not doing anything other than surfing the web and checking my email. The total amount of used hard drive space on my Mac is 330GB, so I suspect that Time Machine is running into a bug when it calculates what needs to be backed up. Worse yet, I see that the amount of free space on my Time Capsule hard drive is shooting up, meaning that somewhere on the disk, backups are getting deleted and I'm not being notified, even though "Notify after old backups are deleted" is checked off in the Time Machine preference pane in System Preferences.
So my MBP has some funky display issues so I'm going to bring it to the Apple Store this weekend. Before I go I want to make sure everything is backed up on time machine incase they need to replace the whole unit or keep it for a few days to repair it. If they lost my data or had to give me a replacement one would I just be able to hook up my USB HDD and let Time Machine bring the new MBP back to it's old condition?
Would all of my program and settings be just as I left them? Bookmarks in Chrome?
Would all my iTunes purchases still exist as they do now?
Would I need to authorize iTunes again (using up another one of the five allowed.
I know this question was asked for a while, but I can't find the answer for 10.5.2. My point is, I wanted my iDisk to be backed up by Time Machine just as any other folder of my computer (by that, I mean backing up the local iDisk copy on the time machine HD, NOT backing up time machine on the iDisk). Until now, the only thing time machine did was copying the .sparsebundle of the iDisk any time a single file changed. Two drawbacks: a single change = 8Gb (for me) on time machine + restauration of a single 60k word file required to restore the entire disk image before extracting the right file.
This is why I stopped using iDisk. Now has someone by any chance a synced iDisk with 10.5.2 and tested backing up with time machine? I know some of you will answer iDisk is already a back up in itself. Sure, but there is no versioning every hour, plus I'd had synced issues that lead to losing on or two files (happened twice). This is why I won't use my iDisk until I can properly back it up/restore it in TM. BTW, I'm lazy to do the test myself, as re-activating the sync of my iDisk will take at least 2 hours to recreate the local copy on my MBP (hey Apple, remember you have EU customers?
Time machine won't back up immediately when I plug in my drive, even if it's been a few days since it backed up last. It starts on its own eventually, but sometimes (like today) it waits almost a half-hour, even though it hasn't been backed up since December 3rd.
I have noticed that my Time Machine-backups are quite big. 1+GB a day is not unheard of. How can I tell what data Time Machine is backing up, so I could determine where all that data is coming from? I don't download all that much stuff (no P2P for example), so I have no idea where it gets all that data to back up. Is there a tool I could use for this?
I just bought an external hard drive [LaCcie Grand 1TB]...and before using it says, the manual says create a back up in case you don't want you're information erased - cause, apparently, that what happens when you first apply a "partition" to you EHD. So, I decide to back up my data in my new EHD...with Time Machine, which I have never used before since I have had this MacBook Pro (2 years). Seems pretty straight forward. I turn on TM, start backing up. Everything seems to be going fine. I had ~75 GB on my main hard drive, and that seemed to have been backing up, until started reaching 75.1 GB...then 100.1 GB! So I stop it and I notice it has created a "inprogress" document in the EHD.
So I continue backing up, and still...it won't stop. It is like space(volume) keeps on expanding. So will TM just back up my whole hard drive? 250 GB? This how it looks like the third time I started the process [URL]. The "white" part just stays the same, while "17.76 GB of 17.76 GB" becomes "17.90 GB of 17.90 GB", "19.20 GB of 19.20 GB", "21.12 GB of 21.12 GB"...and so on. Is this normal? Should I keep it running till it stops? Am I doing the right thing by choosing my EHD as my back up disk? Even before "partitioning it"? Should I be safe if I transfer data manually to the EHD? before partitioning (is it optional)? Can I delete the "inprogress" document? I'm using a Mac OS X 10.5.8
