OS X :: Time Machine Not Enough Space / Deleted All My Previous Backups
Jun 14, 2010
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?
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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)
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Dec 8, 2010
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.
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Dec 7, 2014
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)
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Apr 14, 2012
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)
2) No warning was given for the deletion
Info:
iMac (27-inch Mid 2010), Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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Feb 15, 2009
I noticed today that Time Machine was taking an awful long time to do a backup, but I didn't think much of it until an alert popped up that said it was 150GB short of space. There's no change I gone near 150GB of changes to anything today, since the last hourly backup.I looked at the Time Machine HD, and there is only one folder left inside the backup.backupdb/Mac Pro/ folder, and in Time Machine there is only 'Today' left in the time bar thing. So it seems months of valuable backups have just vanished for no good reason!Is there any way to find out what Time Machine is trying to backup, and why?And I assume there's not much hope of restoring my lost backups?
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Jun 2, 2009
I got home from work today to see a message about needing 232.79GB to backup but only having ~100GB.Firstly that makes no sense because I "only" have 200GB of files on my hard drive (although obviously the backup would need more), but more importantly there is no way they have all changed since yesterday.I opened the time machine backup and noticed it had deleted every single backup apart from one from last night.From late last night (don't know how far back it goes, console.app doesn't show much further back) until the time when I got home.Has anyone got any idea why it has done this, there is no reason for it that i can work out and now I'm a bit worried it is going to start screwing up backups in the future.
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Sep 22, 2009
I initially backed up to the Firewire drive (140GB at a rate of about 1.2GB per minute and all was well.In Snow Leopard i noticed that without any hacks it also has the option to backup to a network drive. I have a QNAP NAS and also an Airport Extreme Basestation. As the QNAP doesnt support HFS i thought i'll just plug my drive into the Basestation even though i heard it wasn't the fastest thing to use..Anyway, to cut a long story short, i open time machine, re-select my time machine drive as the location has changed from being firewire to being attached the Basestation and time machine then says ' analysing changed files' or whatever that similar message is, then it says copying 0.1MB of 143Gb .....i stop it, go and check the drive and it has deleted the whole lot and is trying to start again!? WTF??It didn't format the drive as other data is still on that disk. Kinda loses my confidence in it when it will happily delete 143GB without even asking me
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Feb 15, 2012
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?
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.2)
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Jul 20, 2010
I have my Mac on a TM backup on a 500gb HDD and its been backing up for about a month now. The maximum space is just about 500gb but time machine has brought it to 338gb with each backup taking 10-20gb. Is this normal? On my other Mac (an aluminum imac C2D), the backups take roughly 80gb of space and on my MBP im already up to 159gb worth of backups. Is there a way to minimize the size of backups?
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Aug 23, 2014
My entire iPhoto Library is gone, inaccessible, doesn't show up in finder. I tried to restore my last Time Machine back up but it says that I don't have enough space on my startup disk. In order to create space I deleted everything nonessential and moved all of my essential folders such as documents, photos, videos, everything, etc. to my external drive, then deleted them from my hard drive. I emptied the trash to make sure that everything was wiped.
I tried to do the Time Machine back up of my iPhoto Library again and is still says I don't have enough space. I looked at my storage under About this Mac, and it says that 120.35 GB of my current computer storage are photos, however, I don't have ANY photos on my hard drive at all. I don't know what to do because I can't delete applications and there is literally nothing else I can delete from my computer, so I don't understand how 135 GBs of storage is being used up.
Could there be somewhere my photos are hiding? I just don't understand why my library got deleted in the first place for that matter.
Info:
MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9)
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Sep 30, 2008
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.
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Nov 4, 2009
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?
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Jun 17, 2012
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.
Info:
iMac 27" i7, Mac OS X (10.6.6)
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Sep 4, 2014
I just switched from hdd to ssd and i want to resume my Timechine backups, but it says that I have incorrect date and time set in my mac.
Info:
MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)
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Jul 2, 2012
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?
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.2)
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May 23, 2012
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?
Info:MacBook Air
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Mar 14, 2012
I've bought a 1 TB iomega ego mac edition II external fire wire drive. Once connected it asked whether i want to create a password and whether i want my data encrypted, to which i answered yes. Then a time machine backup started and failed after backing up 5.25 GB out of 39 GB of my data with the following error: "The backup disk ran out of space unexpectedly. Time Machine will try to make more space available by removing expired backups during the next scheduled backup". When i look at time machine it shows there is 994.29 GB available on iomega ego drive. The drive then went into: "Encrypting Backup Disk" message and it takes forever.
Info:
MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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Dec 1, 2009
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?
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Feb 26, 2009
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).
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Jun 13, 2012
how i delete my previous back ups from my time machine ?
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Jan 27, 2009
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.
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Jun 28, 2009
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?
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Aug 12, 2010
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?
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May 28, 2010
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.
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Oct 31, 2007
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.
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Jan 16, 2010
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?
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Oct 20, 2010
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.
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Nov 11, 2010
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.
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Feb 4, 2009
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..................
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