OS X :: Make Time Machine Backups On My External HD?
Jun 6, 2009
I used to be able to make Time Machine backups on my external HD and now I cant. Whenever I try it says my drive isnt big enough as my backup would take 500 gb yet my hard drive is only 250 gb.
I am finding time machine too slow and i am looking at super duper or carbon copy cloner has anyone used either of these programs ,are they better than time machine
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 keep getting the error saying that my backup will not fit in the backup volume, but shouldn't Time Machine automatically delete old backups to make room for new ones?
I just wanted to share my experience and hopefully answer any questions people may have about doing this:
I purchased a 1.5TB HDD and external enclosure to increase the backup size of my 500GB TC, and not wanting to start my backups from scratch I tried copying the sparsebundles to the new drive. To my surprise, I was able to switch my TM source disk to the new drive and the backups picked up where they left off! It proceeded to do an incremental backup, and after it was done I went into Time Machine and could see all the backups from the beginning! Now I can use my TC's internal as storage and keep the external for backups. Hope this helps anyone looking to increase the size of their backups without starting fresh...
I have a 1 TB external hard drive that I've been using as a time machine drive & also as a place to put random files i dont need on my computer and its starting to get very full. Most of whats on there is old backups from the past year & 1/2 that I have no use for anymore. is there a way to delete all of the backups that are on there right now without deleting the other files I've put on there. I have a bunch of projects and files on there that I cant put anywhere else and just format the drive. Basically, i need a way to delete all of my time machine backups off my external hd without deleting all my other files on there.
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'm looking for a good, reasonably priced, external disk to temporarily use for Time Machine backups. My 10.9.4 install is messed up and Time Machine no longer works with my ReadyNAS NV+ system. I want to use the disk to backup my MBP and reinstall the OS. suggest a proven external disk (2TB+) with a USB 2.0 (or Ethernet) interface?
Info: MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9), 2007 15" Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz
I have been using a 1 TB Iomega portable HD as my external HD for Time Machine backups of my early 2011 17" MacBook Pro with a 750GB Internal HD with only 190GB utilized. I just got a Time Machine message:
1) that backup couldn't be performed because of HD problem, and 2) to repair the HD with Disk Utility.
I ran DU Repair Disk and got the following Red Type messages interspersed between normal lines of DU activity reports:
"Invalid Sibling link"The volume Iomega_HDD could not be repaired."Error: Disk Utility can't repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files."
Can I recover the original and older time machine backups from my ext. HD in a procedure that would allow me to continue backing up with TM but restarting with the most recent recovered "uncorrupted" TM backup as the base, thus allowing me access to older backups?
Or is my ONLY alternative to start Time Machine afresh with a full backup today (on a new ext. HD!), and just deem all those valuable Time Machine backups as lost forever?
My time machine backups to an external drive stopped with a message that the backup could not be done because the drive could not be repaired and needed to be reformatted. Prior to reformatting I copied the TM backup file of 250GB to my desktop. My internal drive is 500GB and this only leaves me with 33GB of available space. I then reformatted the drive with the proper OS extended journaled and GUID partition. The external drive is 500GB. When I try to copy the backup file from the desktop to the reformatted drive the process begins normally with the message "preparing to copy files" but as the preparation process reaches 13,000,000 files it stops with the message "there is not enough sufficient space to copy files" even though it never even got to the actual file transfer. I have tried copying the backups in small batches to the new drive but I get an error message that backup files cannot be modified.
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 have a MacPro, OS X 10.5.7. I have TM configured to back up to an external 1 TB firewire drive. I use Adobe Lightroom for photography. it provides a checkbox to allow you to backup all photos as you import them from your camera card. Adobe recommends selecting an external drive for these backups. But for some reason, it does not allow me to select the external drive that TM uses.
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 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'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 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'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.
i got a new hard drive and i am trying to copy time machine backups. I am using disk utility and it is taking days......it tehre any other way to move them besides using disk utility restore function? i tried to drag and drop didnt work.
So I just replaced my drive with an SSD. I'll post a topic about that later, but for now I want to limit this discussion to the migration from drive to drive. I should have just gone with the cloning approach from the beginning, but I was curious to try out a time machine recovery. So before performing the upgrade, I made sure that my Time Machine Drive had the most recent backups of everything. I swapped the drives and installed Leopard from the install DVD. When it prompted me to recover from time machine, I started the recovery. Everything finished successfully. When I rebooted the computer, some thing seemed a bit weird. My mouse sensitivity was different and my "stack" was showing the icons, instead of the folder like it usually does. I realized that I was no longer on 10.5.6. I was on 10.5.0, obviously. So I performed all the software updates. I restarted and there were a few more software updates. Updated those too. Okay now surely, I was good to go.
I was able to make my "stack" back into a folder and I could fix my mouse sensitivity (I think the reason why it went wonky was due to the addition of the trackpad pref pane in 10.5.6 and the lack of it in 10.5.0). Safari booted up fine. Then I clicked on Firefox. The icon bounced once, but no app. Weird... I figured maybe there was some sort of permissions error. I deleted firefox and reinstalled it. Same issue... Then I tried to start up Entourage. I got an error about not having proper permissions. I googled the issue and it looks like other people have had errors with Time Machine backups and Entourage..................
I have just deleted some folders from Time Machine (by clicking on the gears and then clicking "delete all backups of ..... "), but I didn't get the hard drive space back on the Time Capsule.
I deleted about 50GB but Time Capsule reports having the same amount of space available as before the deletion.