OS X V10.6 Snow Leopard :: Schedule Time Machine Backups?
Jun 21, 2012Can you schedule Time Machine backups?
Info:iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
Can you schedule Time Machine backups?
Info:iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
I'm looking for a program that will let me delete old Time Machine backups on a schedule. I am aware that TM will delete old backups once the drive is full. However, I don't want to let TM fill up my hard drive (having a ton of backups is not useful to me, and I use my hard drive to store movies as well), and I don't like having to manually delete backups when I want to add more files to my external hard drive. I've read many forum posts that recommend "just letting TM do its thing."
I'm just looking for a way to minimize the number of backups that are kept so I can keep plenty of open space on my hard drive for when I add to my movie collection. I'm already using TimeMachineEditor to back up less frequently, but what I would really like is a program that will automatically delete an old backup every time I add a new one. Ideally, I'd like to back up once a day and keep a week's worth of backups. So, once I have 7 backups on my hard drive, the next time my computer backs up the oldest of those 7 will automatically be deleted.
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
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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)
OS X: Cannot install on a volume used by Time Machine for backups
Info:
MacBookPro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
I am no longer able to Enter Time Machine. Therte are no changes in the software (or hardware). It continues to backup with no apparent problems.
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.1)
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)
2) No warning was given for the deletion
Info:
iMac (27-inch Mid 2010), Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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
Info:
Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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?
Info:
MacBook
Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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?
Info:
27' iMac i7 Quad-Core, Mac OS X (10.6.2)
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 was wondering if Time Machine keeps a backup of all my stored emails and the folders I created in Mail.Â
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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.
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.8)
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.
View 2 Replies View RelatedHow do I erase old backups o make more room on Time Machine?
View 4 Replies View RelatedIf you use a external harddrive, I assume you have to turn it on 24hrs a day? And when the mac sleeps does it still back up on schedule? Can I use a internal drive i.e. bay 2 or 3 etc?
View 6 Replies View Relatedi need to schedule a back up for time machine?
Info:iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
I just got a new external hard drive (500 gigs), and already backed up my mac once. Now it does it every hour. But I want it to back up like once a day, not 24 times a day. How do I change the back up schedule?
View 4 Replies View RelatedMy 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.
Tonight I followed the instructions someone had posted to this forum (and lots of other places online) to run the following in Terminal:
sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int 86400
Then I logged out and then logged back in again to reload.
This is supposed to change the Time Machine backup interval from 1 hour to once every 24 hours.
Maybe it does, but I noticed something weird: every time I load up Time Machine Preferences from the menu bar, the time to "Next Backup" changes by subtracting 1 hour or so from its previous value just a few minutes ago when I checked.
If I check again immediately, it is the same (e.g. Today, 9:20pm) but if I wait awhile and load it again, it changes to something like "Today, 8:20pm"
Not sure what's going on here and can anyone offer any comments if I even executed this command correctly in the first place?
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 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)
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)
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
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.
View 2 Replies View RelatedMy 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?
View 2 Replies View RelatedIs 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?
View 3 Replies View RelatedI'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?