Intel Mac :: Transferring Previous Time Machine Backups To New?
Jun 10, 2012
Today I bought an iMac to replace my 2009 Mac Mini. Since the iMac had already been set up, I just transferred my data from Time Machine to it through Migration Assistant. A couple hours later I noticed that all my previous Time Machine backups from my Mac Mini didn't transfer over and that Time Machine had reset itself up.
Is there any way I can transfer over those previous backups from my Mac Mini to my new iMac? I know OS X Lion has a feature to do this, but both computers are running Snow Leopard. I am using a WD 2TB My Book for all my TM backups.
Info:
iMac (21.5-inch Mid 2010), Mac OS X (10.6.8)
After searching the internet for a couple of hours I've given up and I'll bother you all with a question.
I've been using Time Machine since around december when I got a 1TB external LaCie. I've partitioned 250gb of it to back up the 180gb OS X partition on my mbp (yes I know it's not a ton of space for backup). It's been working wonderfully for 6 months. Even saved me once, found a file I had accidentally deleted.
I've had absolutely no trouble until yesterday.
I plugged in my Time Machine drive after 3 or 4 days of running around with my mbp and doing some light work. A few minutes go by and Time Machine has calculated that 85gb (usually it's at most 1-2 gigs for a full day backup, no idea how it went up to 85) and that there are only 74gb available, so the backup fails.
That's odd, so I try again. Same thing. So I enter Time Machine and I find that only one backup date is available, June 10th. Apparently the last time it was plugged in. So I exit Time Machine and browse through the drive itself via Finder and find that, sure enough, there is only one backup folder in existence. It seems like Time Machine deleted all my previous backups in order to fit this massive 85gb 4 days backup.
So does this mean everything is really gone, and that's why it wants to backup 85gb (just over half of the used space on my drive)? I'm pretty confused as to why this would happen, and what it means.
Any other options other than wiping and starting over?
I have an external that I use with Time Machine, however I don't need incremental backups. Rather, what I would like is only one backup so that I can save space. In this backup, however, I would like specific things to change that change on my computer, as TM already does with its incremental backups. So basically I just want to condense the function of TM into one single backup that will update whenever I back up again. I realize this is not the primary function of TM, but is there any way to make this possible? Or is there any other software that would do this? I've heard of Silverkeeper and Retrospect, but never used them.
I switched from a Mac Mini to a Retina Display Macbook Pro. When I hooked up the external drive I've been using for Time Machine to the MBP, I went through the setup for Time Machine and it created a backup of the MBP. That is the only backup now showing when I enter Time Machine. How do I access the previous backups from the Mac Mini through Time Machine? If I open the external hard drive from the finder, I can see the backups on the drive.
Info: MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014), OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)
Yesterday, I got a disk read error when starting up Windows under Parallels Desktop. After some sleuthing, I found the offending file, and was about to restore from my Time Machine backup when I decided to make sure the disk wasn't going south. I booted off a second, backup, system drive that I keep just for this purpose, and ran aDrive Genius disk scan on the main system drive. All good, only 6 bad blocks on a 1T drive. I ran this overnight, as it takes an hour or two.
This morning, after seeing this result, I booted from the internal system drive, located the offending file again, and entered Time Machine to restore the data. What I found was that ALL of my Time Machine backup data had been deleted. The only data there was a backup from late last night, that WAS FOR THE SECONDARY DRIVE I HAD BOOTED FROM. Seemingly, Time Machine had quietly gone and killed all previous data, and started from scratch backing up my spare drive.
There was no warning, no notice, nothing. Over a years worth of backups were gone, and my Parallels installation is now shot, since I can't fix the read problem. I'm contacting Parallels to see if there is any other remedy. You can imagine how absolutely mad I am at this.
NOTE:
1) I did not touch the backup drive during the boot of the second drive, or the scan test. It was not re-formatted or touched in any way (other than by system software)
both my MacBook and my time machine backups just got destroyed by the water sprinkers coming on. All I have left is the data on my iPhone. I keep all my iPhoto, music, contacts, calandar, and bookmarks on my phone. How will I transfer them to my new computer (even if it is a paid program, I REALLY need to keep this data. Also, how will I keep my new computer from deleting everything on my phone, ESPECIALLY my text messages, when I sync it for the first time? Again, a paid program would be fine because I REALLY need to keep this data
I am unable to "Enter Time Machine" to view previous backups! Time Machine continues to make backups, and I can access other preferences and options but clicking on the Time machine icon in the dock or in the applications folders does nothing!! How do I remedy this - I have repaired permissions but am wondering do I need to reinstall Time Machine? If so how do I reinstall Time machine?
I have my data saved on an external hard drive (OS 10.7) as I sold my previous Mac and am thinking about buying a power pc iMac using Leopard - does anyone know whether this will be able to open and transfer my data to the older Mac?
I have an iMac running the latest version of Lion (10.7.4) and which I have upgraded to a one terabyte hard drive and full memory capability. I back up to a My Book 2 terabyte external hard drive using Time Machine. My iMac is often very sticky, though I've done most of the diagnostics I know of and preferences etc. are seemingly all OK and fcuk -fs gives a positive result! The Mac is often hard to wake from sleep and in particular seems to spend a lot of time backing up very-very slowly, with the result that it frustratingly seems to be backing up most of the time with the consequent effects on using other programs. Also the whole thing seems to grind to a halt after a hard days work with quite a few applications open. I'm wondering what can be causing this and what I can do to overcome this very frustrating and debilitating problem?
I thought I could use a 1TB External drive to back up my 320GB startup disk, and use the rest of the empty 680GB for storage. However, Time Machine started taking up 600GB of spaceon the External drive! I was like "What the heck!?" So I put unwanted Time Machine Backups in the trash and emptied it. Nothing, they're stuck there now.
I'm planning on wiping the disk clean and starting over, but for future reference is there a proper way to delete Time Machine Backups? Surely there must be; (I mean, who would have known Time Machine would take up MORE SPACE than the drive it's backing up in the first place?
I have an iMac and send all my Time Machine backups to an Iomega 250gb external hard drive. Now Time Machine says the drive is full and cannot complete the back up- how can I delete some old back ups to make room for the latest one? And once I have room- restrict it to back up only once a week? I really want to use the drive for the music and photos- but fear not having a complete backup before i update to Mt. Lion.
I recently replace the internal hard drive. After resoring from my Time Machine backup, I can no longer access backup files prior to the last backup. How do I gain access to the prior backup files?
My Time Machine was full and not allowing backups. While trying to open up space I did something and now it tells me that Time Machine backup disc cannot be found. What do I need to do?
I have an iMac 27" desktop. I also use 2 external HD (Seagate type, 3 GB each) each connected via USB 3.0. And lastly I have a 2TB Time Capsule that also serves as my wifi.
Originally I set up my Time Machine preferences to backup my iMac onto my Time Capsule, no problem, worked great. Left it like this for a long time...
then I decided I wanted to use Time Machine to back up my External HD #1 (where I moved all my video project files), onto External HD #2. This worked great, and I left these settings in place for a while.
then I decided it was time to back up my iMac again, so I went into my Time Machine preferences ended the current setup so that I could return to the original settings (backing up the iMac onto the Time Capsule).
...and so problem began.
My thinking was once I got a recent backup made with iMac to Time Capsule configuration then I would go into Time Machine preferences and re-establish the External HD #1 to HD #2 settings... thinking I could continue on this way manually, each week or so, and therefore have 2 different Time Machines each from 2 different sources.
Well, once I ended the set up of HD #1 to HD #2 I couldn't get Time Machine to successfully return to the original iMac to Time Capsule setup. At this point I called apple support; they were able to walk me through some steps to get the Time Machine backing up my iMac onto the Time Capsule, but it required me to delete the original time Machine backup of the iMac on the Time Capsule. Which led to reestablishing the backup (which in this case took almost 2 days to complete).
My Time Machine has been making the usual regular backups for a few months onto my Time Capsule. I just found that all the backups prior to about a week ago have vanished. It's not a disaster (I think) as I assume that the current backups reflect what's on my iMac (I haven't had to delete files from it yet).
Where did they go? Why did they go?
A possible connection: My TC is 500GB; my iMac 1TB. I recently put extra files for temporary use onto the iMac hard drive - Time Machine said (in effect) 'that's too much, try removing certain folders from the backup'. I excluded said folder and things seemed okay, but it would be at around the time I did that that my old backups have gone.
Just wondering if anyone has had a similar problem with the Time Machine. I bought a 500gb Time Capsule last July and it has been running perfectly until a few days agp. I noticed that all my backups were no where to be seen (when entering Time Machine on my MBP) and that it was doing a full backup.. The backup took the guts of 36 hours.
I've come home today to find that all backups are gone again and it is doing another full backup!!!Any ideas what is wrong here?
I plan to 'clean up' my Time Machine/Time capsule completely, whereby I want to make it impossible for third parties to recover all or part of these old backups.After I have accompished this I want to start from scratch backing up my Mac.
I've backup my Macbook Air Using time machine before reformat it to have window partition.However, after installing OS Lion 10.7.4, how do I restore back all my application and data on my last backup from time machine?
i'v just lost important files when my new backup on an external HD using Time Machine deleted and wrote over a previous one ... informing me after (!) deleting (and why not before) . Is there any means for me to recover these files : mainly pics and music?
I filled up a 250gb My Book external drive using Time Machine. Replaced it with 500gb My Book and now can't read the old 250gb one when I reconnect it. My iMac doesn't recognize it. (I lost a large picture folder that is now only on the 250gb drive).
I bought a 500gb Time Capsule last July and it has been running perfectly until a few days agp. I noticed that all my backups were no where to be seen (when entering Time Machine on my MBP) and that it was doing a full backup.. The backup took the guts of 36 hours. I've come home today to find that all backups are gone again and it is doing another full backup.
My Time Machine has been making the usual regular backups for a few months onto my Time Capsule. I just found that all the backups prior to about a week ago have vanished. It's not a disaster (I think) as I assume that the current backups reflect what's on my iMac (I haven't had to delete files from it yet). Where did they go? Why did they go? A possible connection: My TC is 500GB; my iMac 1TB. I recently put extra files for temporary use onto the iMac hard drive - Time Machine said (in effect) 'that's too much, try removing certain folders from the backup'. I excluded said folder and things seemed okay, but it would be at around the time I did that that my old backups have gone. What do you guys think? Have I messed up and how do I avoid a repetition?
Is it suppose to back up your whole HDD everytime? I thought the first time it was suppose to then after just stuff that was added to the Mac since the last backup?
I have two computers using one Time Machine Disk. The physical disk is connected to my Mac Mini, and it's shared over the network to my MacBook Air. The picture below is the backup disk in case you didn't guess. The notebook is my MacBook Air. So the MacBook Air backs up just fine, but every time my Mac Mini tries to back up, it pops up with "Would you like to reuse the backup "*DIRECTORY TO MACBOOK AIR'S BACKUP*" with this computer?" also shown in the picture below. So I click "Create new backup" and it seems to backup in the Mac Mini's backup folder like it should... until next time. I just want it to back up normally, both of them, without asking me anything first. Until now, I've just disabled automatic backups for my Mac Mini and would backup whenever I felt needed.
I'm lost in trying to delete the backup directories created by Time Machine. I've moved disks around on my network and TIme Machine doesn't seem to remember that it's backed up a given system to a given disk previously, after moving the disk to a different server. So I'm content to start over and I went to /Volumes/Backupdisk/Backups.backupdb and tried 'sudo rm -rf *' to get rid of the existing backups in preparation to start over. It wouldn't let me remove them getting the error 'Operation not permitted'. I note that 'ls -l' shows a lot of rwxr-xr-x@ with the @ sign at the end and I'm assuming that this is a hard link, but I don't know. I'm also thinking this is why rm won't work - multiple hard links?
I really don't want to re-format the disk. BTW I am currently trying to use Time Machine to delete all the file but that is taking FOR EVER and I'm not sure its actually doing anything. Its been about 30 minutes and there's been not reported increase in disk space. Its like its still preparing to delete.
I started using Time Machine on Jan. 9th with an initial backup onto my LaCie Firewire drive (MBP 17inch SSD with three partitions). That backup was about 55GB. I am using the 'regular' settings on Time Machine - the LaCie Drive is the only item on the exclusion list (I guess Time Machine put it there itself). Since then TM does its thing every hour. When I enter TM I see all those backups. However, there's a big difference between the 'NOW' and all the backups, even the one just an hour ago. E.g., the download folder has now 47 items, whereas the backups all show 35 (the number of the initial backup). The Entourage database has also grown, but any backup shows the size of the initial backup.
I verified this by restoring a database and opening it in Entourage and sure enough the last message shows a date of Jan. 9th. TimeTracker shows many backups since the initial backup with 0 bytes or some smallish number of KB - only a few are in the MB range (total is around 150MB since Jan. 9th). Bottom line, TM does not really backup incrementally. Has anybody experienced this malfunction? What would be the solution to this problem? Any tweaks, settings to change? I'm using a Firewire 800>400 cable (9-pin to 6-pin, 24K gold-plated connectors) from SIIG - could this be the cause? But why would the initial backup work just fine plus all the others allegedly being performed?
Why isn't TM deleting my old back-ups to make room for the new ones? I have 25 GB space left in my TM partition and 35 GB is needed for a new back-up but it keeps telling me it is failing to do the back-up for lack of space.
