MacBook Pro :: Viewing Folders From Time Machine On Different Macs
Sep 3, 2014
I have used my passport for mac as a time machine for my home computer and my work computer - both are macbook pro. I wanted to transfer documents from one computer to the other from the backups.backupdb, but when I get to the folders like "desktop", "documents", "downloads" etc. I get an error message saying "The folder “Desktop” can’t be opened because you don’t have permission to see its contents." and there´s a red "stop" icon on the folder.
In case I loose one computer, how I can access the data on another computer?
How do you use time machine for two macs? I have a My Passport for Mac where I backed up my MacBook Air. Now I want to back up my MacBook to the My Passport for Mac.
I'm still fairly new to the Mac world. I know I wouldn't want to take an Windows image of a hard drive from a dell laptop and restore it to an Hp desktop or any mis-matching like that due to hardware and driver differences. But I was wondering if it is OK to use my time machine backups of my Macbook Air and restore that to an iMac that is on its way. I am actually selling the Macbook Air once I have the iMac set up and running smooth. I could easily copy my documents, pictures, etc. And I could export my bookmarks and settings with Firefox, but I would prefer to not have reinstall all the apps I have, all the plugins in Firefox, and all the settings I have the way I like in OS X.
So I am looking for advice on the best method for migration to a different computer. Is Time Machine my best bet?
I am planning to use a 1TB network hard drive (NAS) to backup all three of our Macs. Will Time Machine from three different computers share this storage space, or do I need to partition the drive into three pieces so each computer has their own separate volume?
Like the title says is it possible to back up only a certain folder in time machine? I'm a producer and dj and instead of manually backing my files up every few months I'd like it to happen automatically but I don't care for any of the other programs or anything on my computer.
Im kinda new to macs and am about to start using time machine, im looking at getting a large (around 2TB) external drive and wondered if i could back up 2 macbooks to it (mine and my wife's) - i presume time machine is clever enough to distinguish between the 2 mac copies on the same drive??
We have two Macs. I use my Mac for work and Time Machine to keep a backup of my Mac every hour. Occasionally (every few months) I'll unplug the external hard-disk from my Mac and use Time Machine to backup my wife's Mac. Hence, two Macs, both using the same hard-drive to backup to. Recently there is only the space on the disk for Time Machine to keep backups of my Mac from the previous day.
Is there a way to delete backups of my wife's Mac to give my backups more space? Can I simply open the back up disk and delete a few of the backups of my wife's computer? or do I need to do something more complicated like partition the disk? or is there a way to tell Time Machine to keep more of my backups and less of my wife's?
Other than switching the backup hard drive between 2 Macs is there way the hard drive can be shared over the network for the purpose of using Time Machine? My external 1TB drive has two partitions. I'd use each one for a different computer. Right now I'm pulling the plug and switching it to the machine I want to back up. It would be nice if I did not have to do that.
I'd like to take one hard drive and back up 3 different Mac computers using Time Machine. The hard drive has the capacity greater than the 3 computers.
I would like to make my TM backup a bit slimmer and delete some folders but I'm not sure how TM works. Can I simply delete an entire TM folder of a given date e.g. 2009-08-29-190000 without affecting the others? Or are the backup made "incrementally" in which case the last backup needs all previous backups in order to be restored? I believe that the backups are independent but I just want to be sure.
Perhaps its just me being tired, as it seems there should be simple solutions to both of these problems, but I can't find them.
1) I got a new HD, and had it connected to my MacBook and MacBook Air one at a time to do an initial Time Machine backup. However, now I've connected it to my Time Capsule, and pointed them to the same partitions that they backed up to earlier - and they can't see the older backups. Is it possible to get them to see it and only start an incremental backup?
2) I'm also trying to mirror my iTunes library on the new hard drive, but all the methods I've tried so far (ie a couple of Automator actions and various apps) have either failed, or haven't worked properly (one has added several thousand '..DS_Store' files to the folder which aren't there even when I view hidden files!
I've been having a lot of trouble with Time Machine lately. I used to have a 300GB partition on a second drive dedicated to backups. Time machine is set up to backup just my user directory and the calculated backup size is 200gb. There are a couple of folders on my desktop that I also exclude. I've had it working this way for months now (before Snow Leopard came out). I started getting problems a few weeks ago. I formatted my Time Machine drive and got it to start a backup again, however, it kept running out of space without being able to complete the backup. I've been ignoring it since then because I knew I'd be getting some extra hard drives this week. After my new hard drive reshuffle, I now have a 500gb drive dedicated to Time Machine backups.
My backup size is still only 200gb but my initial backup would count up to 205gb/205gb or whatever it was and then keep going for hours with both the "done" and the "total amount" numbers gradually going up. It finally completed and I see that my 500gb drive only has about 30gb free or so. A bit of right clicking and get info clicking later and I soon find the root of the problem. The two large folders on my desktop that I've set to exclude have been backed up. I've tried killing the time machine settings file in the library and have rebuilt the exclusion list from scratch. I've also reformatted the backup drive several times. I've zeroed it once. Partitioned it into 16 partitions and wiped it again into one.
I did: "Enter Time Machine Preferences" ---->"Options"----->"Exclude These Items from Backups"----->"Excluded Folder FOO". Today I go into TM, and there is folder FOO, backed up! WTF? Why is TM not respecting my exclusion of FOO from the backups?
Did a fresh install of SL on my iMac. So far, so good.
Go to my Documents folder, enter time machine, choose the files in my Documents folder and click restore. Exits out back to my desktop, enter my password and it starts to copy over the files. But then suddenly stops. And only copies over a small number of files and empty folders. When trying to restore just the files in some of the folders I get an error that says I don't have permission to access these files. Don't have permission? Says who and why?
So I go in via finder to the backup, select all the files in my Documents, and manually drag them over to my Documents folder. Same thing happens.
The files are a couple hundred mb. But can't figure out why they don't all copy over. Weird thing is I didn't have this problem with files from other locations like restoring my iPhoto library.
I am having issues buring CDs in Finder. Went to the Apple Store this past weekend as I have AppleCare. The genius there couldn't figure out the problem and only recommended I do a "Archive and install" of 10.6. Reluctantly, I did that today. Now I have lost most of my customizations to Finder, getting weird errors with some of my apps that load on login, and the problem still persists.
Instead of wasting hours on end getting the system up-to-date and trying to figure out all the errors Im getting, I decided to restore using Time Machine. I was about to restore a backup from yesterday (most up-to-date), but hesitated as I have never done a "Full" restore from TM before. So I decided to do a bit of research. From what I have been reading, the destination volume will be wiped clean and replaced by the backup. Normally this would be ok, but I remembered I excluded some folders from my Time Machine backup to cut down on space (Applications folder and VMs for example). I'm worried that if I restore using the "Restore from Backup" utility, I will lose the content in those folders.
Can anyone confirm what exactly will happen if I do a "Full Restore"? Will I lose those "excluded" folders? If so, is there any way I can restore only the System Folder for my backup (that's really the only thing I need to restore). I am slightly panicked and ready to go back to the Apple Store and rip that Genius a new one.
(Yes I know he couldn't have know about my specific backup setup, but he said that a "Archive and Install" would fix the problem. He also said that I wouldn't run into any issues afterwards, which was also false. Also, I know I am over-reacting but I have a valid reason to be peeved ATM)
I excluded folders in options in the Time Machine system preferences and told me that the calculated backup is about 30 GB. Nevertheless, when the time machine starts is counts about 300GB. Therefore it is not excluding the marked folders.
I am using TM from another machine, (which has died) to restore folders onto a working system, some of the folders I need are in the User Library, but how do I display the User Library in TM?
Info: Mac Pro Dual 2.66 4G RAM MacBook Pro 15 ins 2.6G 4G RAM 80G Video iPod iPhone 3G, Mac OS X (10.6.7), Also running XP via Parallels
I set up time machine to back up my computers hard drive and additionally to back up another external drive that is attached. however, it only is backing up one folder in my other external drive and nothing else.
I am trying to copy some folder from my time machine back up onto my desktop but the operation can't be completed because you don't have permission to access certain files. And I have changed the privilege for my back up to read and write...but it's still not letting my copy the files. How come?
In my office we have 5 macs on our desktops (all different, this one's a Mac Pro, there's a G4, a couple of eMacs and an Intel iMac), all connected to a G4 server and sharing data on a network hard disk.
Everything works fine except that in the last couple of weeks a problem has arisen whereby when you click a folder on a network drive to view it in the finder, there is a pause before the contents are shown, of between 5-10 seconds.
This doesn't sound much and it doesn't happen every time you select a folder, but if you're browsing through a lot of files it gets very boring indeed.
I'm trying to do a favour for a friend. She has a 320Gb external WD hard drive which she used on her Macbook to backup with Time Machine. It is not partitioned and she keeps the "Backups.backupdb" folder with other personal folders she throws in there. Recently she sold her Macbook and all that was left was this hd. She now only has access to her work pc but it won't recognize her hd as she's apparently formatted it with option "Mac OSX Journaled". So she gave me her hd to backup and then format to FAT32.
I've been a Mac for a long time but have never used Time Machine, I simply copy my important files into an external hd as I feel it's cleaner and I've never really had HD problems with any Macs I owned. So basically I have no idea how this works. I managed to copy all of her personal folders into my hd as well as the one labeled "Latest" on the Backups.backupdb folder ("Latest" is actually an alias). But I can't seem to be able to copy the rest of the backup folders. I can copy them into my computer hard drive, but each folder (I'm talking about the ones labeled with dates, there are 35 of them) is around 70Gb. Now, of course that doesn't make any sense, as it would be impossible to have 35 folders of 70Gb each in a 320Gb hd. I can only assume they use aliases as well, but when I try to copy them individually or as a whole (enclosing folder) Finder says I have no space available for that (even though I have more than 320Gb available).
Now, in my mind it's completely idiotic to keep any folders other than the Latest one. She doesn't even own a Mac anymore. But she's freaking out that I'm going to lose her entire life (she's that kind of person). I don't want to open the Time Machine app because like I said I don't use it on my computer and these are not my files, so I do not in any way want to sync with this hard drive or backup to it. I'm on a 21" 500Gb iMac running 10.7.3.
For my back up strategy I use chronosync to backup my movies and music to my time capsule so I can access them from any device. I still use Time Machine, but I then exclude those same folders as I don't need them twice.
Will I still be able to restore my system from my TM backup? If I had to restore my system but didn't use the backup ie a clean install, could I access folders within the backup from the new install?
Info: MacBook (13-inch Aluminum Late 2008), Mac OS X (10.6.8)
Ok, I'm new to the Time Machine thing and so I backed up my iMac using Time Machine...when I go into Time Machine I only see duplicates of my desktop folder. Where are the other folders?
I have never set up Time Machine on my Macbook Pro.I have several Mailbox's or Folders inside my email system or Mac Mail.I wanted to clear some of the less used folders out and so I exported them to another folder on my desktop.Then I deleted the folders or Mailbox's from inside the Email system or Mac Mail.When I went to the folder on the desktop to see the exported emails, there was nothing you could read, it was all jibberish or crazy characters.What did I do wrong and how can I retrieve those important saved emails?
Info: Macbook Pro i7 2GHz 4GB 15", Mac OS X (10.6.6)
When I open a new folder and the same again, it shows 2 different folders in 2 different windows. Id like to see only 1 folder, previous folder would be replaced with the new folder. Im awared that there is an option to choose either you want the folder to be replaced or to show all folders in a new window. That setting isn't working for me for some reason. Anyone here with similar problem? What's the solution?
I have a new PC running Windows 7 RC, but I can't get it to find the shared folders on my Macs, nor can my Macs see the shared folders on the PC. Any ideas how to get at least one way working (preferably so that the Macs can see the PC).I'm running 10.5.7, and if I "Connect to Server" and dial in smb:// and the PCs IP address, I get a login window, but it won't let me log in. I have no password on the PC.
Also, I followed the advice in another post here, http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=635271), but it didn't make any difference.
