OS X V10.6 Snow Leopard :: Backups Not Available In Time Machine
May 18, 2012
The only way I can see my backups in Time Machine is by using the "option" key and selecting "browse other time macnine disks. However, there is only one Time Machine disk, only one backup appears in the list, there is only one backup directory on the Drobo where I put the backup and I can't find a backup directory anywhere else. HOw do I reset Time Machine so that it defaults to the "other" backup?Â
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.
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 6Â bad blocks on a 1T drive. I ran this overnight, as it takes an hour or two.Â
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.Â
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.Â
NOTE:Â
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)
In order to use Lion’s encrypted (Core Storage) external drive feature, I needed to reformat an external 1TB drive with Apple Partition Map, as that works only with GPT. The only partition was HFS+J formatted and was used as Time Machine Backup, which I wanted to preserve.Â
Act I:
I connected the drive to another iMac running 10.6 which happened to have enough space on the internal HD. I read this article http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5096 , which describes how to copy the BackupDB just by drag and drop. In hindsight, that was a bad idea, I should have created a disk image like suggested elsewhere, but if Apple itself suggests it, it can’t be so bad right?Â
So I just dragged the whole BackupDB to random folder on the iMac (after enabling ownership), and apparently it copied correctly the dir-hardlinks, as the resulting folder had the same size. Â
It seems that the Finder activates a special dir-hardlink aware copying mode when one does this. This is also confirmed by the fact that the Finder will refuse to copy the BackupDB together with other files, you have to drag and drop the BackupDB only.Â
Act II:
I reformatted the external drive as HFS+J with GPT and activated ownership.. But now, when I try to copy the BackupDB back, it continues to count indefinitely the number of files to copy! I speculate that the special dir-hardlink aware mode is not activated, but what can I do? How can I trigger it? Is there some hidden command line tool which handles this?Â
The lesson I’m drawing from this is: use the method described in the article only if you copy the backupDB from your old to your new drive.Â
My TM backups seem to be proceeding normally on my MBP (which is only sometimes connected to its Time Capsule), but spotlight takes about an hour to index my backup volume each time. Looking at my system.log, I notice that the TM backup volume number is increasing by one each time:Â
[code]...
and so on. Is it normal that the volume name increments each time like this? Could this be related to the long indexing time, which just started recently?
I would like to always have one external hard drive attached to my iMac for Time Machine backups, and another external hard drive off site - periodically swapping the two. The though is that if there is fire or theft, it won't help to have a hard drive onsite attached to the computer, because both the iMac and the hard drive could be lost. Is Time Machine smart enough to allow me to configure two drives, so that whenever I plug in one of the drives, it can figure out what needs to be backed up?
I have an external HD and have botched up all the time machine backups pretty badly. (deleting backups, adding things to the time machine disk not using a TM backup, etc).Â
I just want to delte everything and start over from scratch.Â
I ran a Time Machine backup of my MacBook Pro just like I do every night, and it completed successfully. This morning I noticed a msg saying my backup failed because there wasn't enough room on the disk (I leave my Time Machine disk plugged in all of the time when I'm home). When I enter Time Machine it doesn't show any of the old backups--it looks like it's never used the disk. When I browse the disk in Finder I see a backups folder.I really need to have access to my backups! I've tried restarting the computer, and control clicking Time Machine and selecting "Browse other Time Machine Disks" and nothing seems to help.
I decided to reinstall Leopard, Erase and Install. Everything runs much faster of course. I'm doing some restoring from my Time Machine HD. I don't want a complete restore, I'm just grabbing folders here and there from my TM HD and restoring it. I'm doing a backup now and so far it has deleted over 20GB of my backups and it doesn't seem to be stopping.
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 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 cannot seem to set up Time Machine using Time Capsule on my MacBook Pro. Evidently when I initially set up AirPort Extreme, I failed to select it as the backup disc.
Info:AirPort Extreme 802.11n (4th Gen), Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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.
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?
