OS X :: Time Machine Backing Up Whole Drive Every Time
May 7, 2009
I upgraded the hard drive in my MBP (4,1 Mar '08) this weekend from a stock 5400rpm 250Gb to a 7200rpm 320Gb WD Scorpio Black. I used Time Machine to restore the system onto the new drive - via a new 1Tb external drive which I first prepped for network use via my AEBS but hooked up via FW800 to do the first backup before upgrading the hard drive. Laptop is fine - everything pretty much seems as it was - but Time Machine isn't. Every backup appears to be of the full hard drive contents (have only excluded the Parallels folder)! My otherwise empty 1Tb drive now has nearly 300Gb of backups of a 140-150Gb disk!!
Here's the du stats from inside the /Volumes/Backup of../Backups.backupsdb/..MacBook Pro :
144080500 2009-05-03-000434
142168476 2009-05-03-090644
142754912 2009-05-03-093113
35032544 2009-05-07-025139.inProgress]
3rd May was when I did the hard drive update so it was already doing the full drive backup right away, I had originally thought it was something to do with swapping out the hard drive but that's not so. I haven't been able to complete a backup since as its also incredibly slow. Left the laptop plugged in overnight and it had only completed ~30Gb in about 5-6 hours - over FW800! The drive is OK - I can copy over large files and that goes super fast as you'd expect. Ideally I'd like to keep at least the first backup from before the drive upgrade. Should I (can I?) move this onto another drive then reformat and start again?
Can Time Machine backup flash drives? So every time I plug it in, it backs up anything that has changed.
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to save the backups onto the flash drive, which is what a lot of people seem to want to do, but rather to backup the contents of the flash drive onto my mac.
Currently I have an automator script on the flash drive which, when I run it, copies everything into an archive on my mac. But this isn't a very ideal solution, since it copies everything even if it hasn't changed.
It's not paranoia, it's just being a computer user long enough to see damaged drives. I'd like to backup my Time machine drive, but I can't. Neither using my backup software, Chronosync, nor simply manually, just drag and drop from the origin Tima machine to the destination (time machine backup). Time machine is a backup, so I'm doing a backup of a backup. I had my time machine drive failing once, so I want to have this extra protecion.
This is the error message I get when I want to drag and drop the "Backups.backupdb" folder, which is where all my Tima machine bbackups are:
"The backup can’t be copied because the backup volume doesn’t have ownership enabled." I'm the only user, in Admin level. When I get info from the folder it says "You can only read".
Can anyone tell me how to tell Time Machine how to find an external hard drive (that is attached to myiMac) that I'd like to back up? If recoginizes it in a window for selecting a drive to back up to, but I can't seem to find any window to tell it what drives I want backed up. It backs up the internal hard drive on the iMac.
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.
I am going to backup the main system drive though. I'm thinking shall I use Time Machine to back it up or use a 3rd party application to back it up and make it boot-able at the same time?
I have 2 macs in my house.. a macbook pro and a macbook air. I have an old dell desktop running windows 7 that has a terabyte external harddrive hoooked up to it. I want to be able to use it as a network time machine drive. Both laptops are running snow leopard. I was wondering is this possible and if so, how can I do it. Currently I am able to see the desktop and the external hardrive on my network from the macs, and I am able to drag and drop onto them, however I want to be able to use time machine.
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.
I was trying to set up my Time Machine to an external hard drive. I didn't continue because it asked to "initialize" the hard drive which I had a lot of important things on.
I have another external hard drive I'd like to use but, my Time Machine has this error code of -43. What is this and how can I use my Time Machine on another external hard drive?
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?
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.
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.
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 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
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.
Am a Mac n00b here so just wana ask if i were to change the hdd and if i were to use time machine to backup the old hdd to my new hdd, would the bootcamp partition and all the files in windows be backed up too?
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.
I have a MBP, and every few days I back it up using time machine. For some reason it's been scanning hundreds of thousands of files and than it backs up tons of GB's. Like today it tried to back up 30 GB's but the last time I backed it up was 4 days ago, and I doubt I changed THAT much stuff on my laptop. Is this normal? If not, what can I do to fix it.
On my macbook pro Time Machine has not backed up since March 18th.
If I got to system preferences I see
"Backing up: Zero KB of 70.80 GB"
It just sits there. Sometimes it gets as high as 442 bytes of 70.80 GB after hours of backup. Then I have have to move the notebook and start all over again.
