OS X :: What Does Time Machine Back Up?
Mar 14, 2010
If I do a time machine backup - does it back up everything on all accounts or just the one I'm currently logged in as?The reason I'm asking is, I just bought a (used) iMac with a 250GB drive, and I have ordered a 760GB WD green drive. Can I just back up using Time Machine and then restore via Time Machine? I have four accounts on here - I'd rather not have to go through the pains of reinstalling everything.
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Sep 8, 2009
I'm an idiot, pleased to meet you.I had 2 external drives connected to my Macbook Pro, both had time machine back ups on...I meant to delete one of these but deleted the wrong one, and dragged it into Trash. On realising my mistake I tried to drag it back out of Trash, as you would normally but after "preparing to copy" for four hours it told me the drive was full...It's a 500gb drive, and the Time Machine back up is the only thing on it, so presumably it's just trying to copy itself when the back up is still present on the drive, albeit in the Trash.
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Jan 30, 2009
Is it possible to back-up the contents of a NAS drive to a FireWire or USB2 drive using a Mac and Time Machine?
I know there are methods to get TM to back-up TO a NAS but if, for example, someone had their iTunes library on a NAS for access over a network- could TM be used to copy that drive for safe-keeping?
The path of the back-up would, basically, go like this:
NAS --> ROUTER --> IMAC & TIME MACHINE --> USB2/FW DRIVE
Sorry if this seems a simple one but searching for an answer just yields dozens of results for backing-up TO a NAS drive, not copying/saving the NAS itself.
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Feb 15, 2010
Recently, I've figured out that when backing up, time machine only backs up some files, but not the entire thing... I see that this is a way to keep the size of the back up on a low level, true, but isn't it a bad way to back up your files?! Shouldn't it be full backups of the entire library?!
Second question; when I will set up my new mac machine I will buy this summer, is the integration really that easy and files do not get lost?! I am a bit skeptical as a few months ago I integrated data from my old computer to my mac (without using time machine, just regular back ups, manually) and some files were not being imported, god knows why.
Stupid question; when integrating the old files from time machine to a new mac, do they integrate system preferences / applications too? Cause I really have done lots of cool tweaking and it would suck to do all that stuff again...
Also, can I select the files I want to import or does it automatically import all the files from time machine to the new mac? A problem is that there is lots of (cookies, temp files etc.) stored on every mac and now, the quetsion is, does time machine import all these old/makingsystemslower/* little files too?!
What about the problem of leopard > snow leopard recovery?!
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Sep 15, 2010
I am new here and i have to say desperate. I need to do a system restore from time machine but the mac doesn't see the time machine back ups. I have tried to repair disk and all was ok.
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Dec 29, 2010
I have 2 seagate external hdds. one has manual backups and my photos, mp3s etc from my pc. the other one is brand new empty. this is my 1st mac.. so I was wondering what to use to back up time machine? or the memeo (comes with seagate) or any other backup software? I want to use the harddrives in both pcs and macs. mac reads my ntfs hdd but can't write it (I know there are some apps that can make the mac write on ntfs.) also I wanna back up my windows xp under parallels.
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Feb 11, 2009
In the audio world, bit per bit is important. When TM makes back-ups, are they bit per bit of the original?
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Mar 9, 2009
I'm trying to do a back up in Time Machine. It's been going for like an hour and it still says "Preparing Backup."
I haven't changed my files around much and it really should only have a couple of kb worth of new data to back up.
My last successful backup was yesterday. It's done this a few times since then. I tried to stop the back up and restart it to no avail.
I also went into my backups folder and deleted the "in progress" backup then tried to backup again and it's still not working.
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Oct 29, 2009
I was told today by an Apple retail employee that Time Machine will not back up from anything other than an internal drive and I wanted to confirm whether this was the case. For example I have an iMac with a 750GB internal and I also have a 750GB external drive. I want to keep my iTunes Music and iPhoto libraries on the internal but keep all my movies on the external drive for space reasons. I want to then use a 2TB external drive to work with Time Machine. I was told that if I want to back up the 750 "Movies" drive that I will need to manually copy it because Time Machine will only back up the path of those files and that drive can't be included in the backup. To me this seems to go against what TM is about, since I then have to manually manage that part of the backup, adding new items, rather than getting the benefits of TM's incremental backup. Can anyone confirm or deny this. Second question is regarding TM for multiple machines. Can a 2TB drive be used as the TM drive for both an iMac and a MacBook or will the drive need to be partitioned?
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Jan 25, 2010
I own a uMBP late 09 running 10.6.2. Recently, i bought a Seagate FreeAgent Go 320Gb to use as back-up for both Mac and Windows. I partitioned it into equal HFS+ and FAT32, the former exclusively for Time Machine (which i will be using for the first time), and the latter for Windows.
Initial back-up via TM was successful, as i was able to store about 80Gb of data from my Macintosh partition into the ext drive. The problem is this : After several days of backing-up data, Time Machine displays the same set of files as the initial one. During this time, i have made various additions to my iTunes library as well as movie clips and other documents. These changes/additions did not reflect on the subsequent back-ups made by TM. The initial size of the back-up data stayed the same, pegged at 80Gb.
Am i doing something wrong here? The ext drive does not remain connected to my notebook always, and i only do force back-ups via the TM icon. Also, i have not encountered a single error/failed message when backing-up. On the options menu, i excluded only the Download folder. No other settings were altered.
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Mar 16, 2012
I have a MacBook Pro with a 500gb HDD (early 2011) and a Freedom 2tb external drive for Time Machine. Running latest Lion software
As you can it has space, but only the last few weeks of backup. I've had time machine running for about one year.
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Apr 23, 2012
I've been backing up my mac book pro using a WD passport drive and time machine but recently it stopped backing up and says "back up failed" when I try to back up. I can still access data on the drive but can't save to it anymore.
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.8), WD passport drive
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May 27, 2012
I know this is a common issue and I've read all the other posts and tried everything, but time machine still won't back up. I need help figuring out if there's anything I can do, or if I need a bigger back up disk. If so, how big?
I have deleted old backups, excluded unnecessary files, and cleaned out folders. It says 157.46GB available of 159.7GB; but when it backs up it says it requires 188.30GB but only 157.46GB are available.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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Jun 21, 2012
why won't my time machine back up? plenty of space. just keeps showing it's loading
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Oct 31, 2007
I have all my media stored on an external hard drive hooked up to my airport. Can Time Machine back up this drive and my iMac?
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May 29, 2008
Time Machine (external USB/SATA) on my 2-month old iMac had been working perfectly. I installed 10.5.3. Everything still works perfectly EXCEPT I get an occasional error with Time Machine's hourly backup saying it could not do the backup. I can do the backup manually and the subsequent automatic backup goes OK. It's happened twice since my installation of 10.5.3 last night. I did Repair of the external drive and no problems were found.
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Mar 3, 2009
im getting my 17" MBP next week. i got a question about time machine app.
do i have to leave the back up HD constantly on?
is it possible that i turn the external back up HD on lets say once a week, run the time machine and do a back up of all changes?
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Mar 4, 2009
Say my macbook pro crashes and I lose everything. However, I have been saving everything to an external drive using the Time Machine app. Can I use my external drive to get my computer to exactly the same state it was in before it crashed? By this I mean.
1) Desktop icons in the same places
2) System preferences all the same
3) Sticky notes all still exist and are laid out on the desktop just like previously before my hard drive crashed and I lost everything
4) My dock layout is exactly the same, same apps, same locations in the dock
I have been wondering this for quite some time. Because I know you can restore the essentials (i.e. Word documents, many different saved files) but what about little things like the above mentioned items?
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May 29, 2009
I have a new iMac that backs up regularly with Time Machine. I find that the Time Machine backups are for more data than my iMac hard drive changes. For example, yesterday it did three backups that I noticed. One was for about 300MB and the other for about 700MB and one for 2 MB. Right now it is doing a 1GB backup. The only changes I did to the iMac between yesterday and today were a few e-mail downloads (not more than 2MB) and a few pictures were imported (about 30MB).
Does anybody know why Time Machine is backing up so much data when nothing is changing on my Mac? My entire hard drive is about 62GB right now and it started at about 58GB. My Time Capsule hard drive that hosts the TM backups has used about 130GB of data. It had only used about 60GB of data after the initial backup about a month ago.
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Jun 1, 2009
i recently downloaded an app called Time machine editor. It is supposed to have the ability to set the time machine back up intervals. So I sent it to back up once a day. Problem is that when I go into time machine, I see that it has multiple times of the day it backed up (when I only expected to see e.g. 8:am)
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Aug 20, 2009
I know this is going to sound crazy. I know it because I have searched all over the web trying to find an answer and I cannot seem to find anyone that has even had this problem.
Last night I decided to format my Macbook Pro and do a clean OS install. This laptop has very sensitive information for my freelance work so I am sure to backup with Time Machine and also with BackBlaze (thank God!). I completed a manual Time Machine backup just before I formatted and confirmed that all the necessary folders were on the external Time Machine drive. The latest folder there showed August 18th 2009 dating all the way back to the day Leopard released (the day I began using Time Machine).
I restarted the machine with the Leopard disk and chose Disk Utility to zero out my laptop's internal drive. Once it was done, I began the Leopard install. Once that was done, it asked me if I wanted to restore from a Time Machine backup. How handy! I didn't know that would be an option. Naturally I selected that I wanted to do that and then selected my machine (oddly it was the only one listed, more on this later) and it began to do it's thing. Said it would take about 2hrs so I went to bed.
This morning is when all hell broke loose. I sat down to the laptop to see that my dock had icons that I removed long ago and the Menu Bar had icons missing... I immediately got sick to my stomach. I checked a file I was working on just a couple days ago to make sure it was there... WASN'T THERE. I then pulled up the contents of the Time Machine drive and this is when I almost fell out of my chair... The last backup folder in the list was March 31 2009. I checked all over the disk... the spareimage was last modified March 31st.
I don't know what to do! I tried to explain everything in detail so you could understand that there is NO CHANCE that I could have done this. Luckily my files are backed up to Backblaze but my music and movies are not. I only back those up locally. And the hassle of downloading 60GB of data from Backblaze
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Nov 16, 2009
If I install a fresh copy of Snow Leopard will all my programs be reinstalled or just the data that is backed up with Time Machine?
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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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Jan 26, 2010
Alright, here's the situation. I have a 1TB external set up with 250gigs partitioned for backing up with time machine, and the rest just for storing files. My time machine partition was full so i decided to move the 5 oldest backups to the trash to make some more room. But when i went to delete trash it counted up to a couple million files and just sat there saying preparing to delete. It was never able to actually start deleting the files, it was just preparing to delete for a couple hours.
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Mar 22, 2012
I restored the new machine from the most recent back up of my old iMac which has worked great and looks just like my previous computer. However..when I enter Time Machine it only goes back as far as today and when I try to do a back up it says there is not enough room. I would have hoped that my new iMac would recognise the back up as it's own and reinstate it as normal..but this doesn't seem to be the case.
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Mar 22, 2012
i need to schedule a back up for time machine?
Info:iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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Mar 25, 2012
I am finding conflicting information on this one. I have a 2TB drive plugged into my Time Capsule. This drive houses my music collection. Will Time Machine backup this drive?
Info:
MacBookPro, Mac OS X (10.6.7), Early 2011 13"
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Apr 2, 2012
At work I back up my laptop to an external disk using time machine. I'd like have a second back up at home. When I back up to the disk at home Time Machine does not recognize the back up on the work disk and writes the whole drive instead of doing an incremental back up. Does this mean that Time Machine can only do incremental back ups to one disk?
Info:
MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.7.1)
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Apr 11, 2012
I momentarily pointed Time Machine to make back ups at the wrong partition on the external HDD attached to my Time Capsule, now I have pointed back to the correct partition, but it won't recognise the old back-ups. ie it says "Oldest Backup - None, Latest Backup - None". How can I pick up the old back ups?
Info:
MacBook
Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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Apr 29, 2012
Having just backed up to my external drive through time machine I re installed OS X Now I like the entire last Time machine back on my computer as the disk had to be erased for the install Is there a easy way to do this as opposed to file by file?
Info:
Mac Book Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.1)
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