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12
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Last Post
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Dec 17, 2007 10:06 PM
by: David Feldman1
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Posts:
19
Registered:
Jun 3, 2006
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Time Machine is skipping a bunch of files
Posted:
Nov 20, 2007 3:08 PM
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Hi, I've been testing Time Machine (TM) for some time and it has generally been a good experience. I've found out by accident that TM was skipping a bunch of files - pdf and mp3 files.
Is there any way to envoke a deep traversal, to check through all files and make TM find the files it has missed?
The folders and files that are missing in the backup are not excluded through the TM preferences pane. The modification/ creation dates are correct. I've done disk repairs on both the main harddrive (+permission repair) and the TM-drive. There are no special permissions on the files.
Background
The files were skipped after I had some problems having TM preparing for hours and therefore cancelled it. I found out that TM had problems figuring out where the systemfiles was. TM came up with the error: "com.apple.backupd166: 2007-11-18 23:15:42.048 FindSystemFiles167:713 FSOpenIterator failed"
I refined the exclusion list and manually choose the directories I wanted excluded instead of relying on TM to "exclude all systemfiles automatically" (I excluded the main spaceconsumers: /usr, /Library, /System). Afterwards TM was able to perform the backup, but a bunch of files unfortunately went missing in the backup.
~ Jørgen
MacBook (late 2006)
Mac OS X (10.4.8)
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Posts:
19
Registered:
Jun 3, 2006
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TM is known to skip files
Posted:
Nov 23, 2007 1:52 PM
in response to: tietze
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It might help someone else to know that there are ways to compare the TM-backups from the terminal. It helps a lot to know whether TM actually does it's job. Apparrently it's not always the case:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071109024812437
MacBook (late 2006)
Mac OS X (10.4.8)
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Posts:
2,230
From:
NE of Emerald City, USA
Registered:
Jul 29, 2000
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Re: TM is known to skip files
Posted:
Nov 23, 2007 4:01 PM
in response to: tietze
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Helpful
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Be very careful with that Hint as the 'diff' command output could be wrong. Apple has developed some fancy footwork with hard links that I'm sure confuse the 'diff' command.
iPods, 1G/2G Shuffle, Black/White MacBook, Dual 2.5GHz PM G5
Mac OS X (10.5)
SwiftData 200,LightScribe,iSight,AEBS(GbE),iPhone,Burly5bay eSATAPortMultiplier
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Posts:
19
Registered:
Jun 3, 2006
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Re: TM is known to skip files
Posted:
Nov 24, 2007 1:21 AM
in response to: BarryXSharp
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Yep you're right - but it can point to potential differences in backups, allowing a focused investigation of potential issues.
The above stated problem is solved by trashing all from the backup-sets that differed and until present: but it's only a half solution - more like a workaround manually maintaining the "automatic" backup "solution".
Still it's unknown how TM repeatedly could miss the files. And I'm still interested in finding out how to activate TM's "deep traversal", so I don't have to modify and maintain the backup myself.
MacBook (late 2006)
Mac OS X (10.4.8)
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Posts:
80
From:
Paris
Registered:
Mar 13, 2005
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Re: Time Machine is skipping a bunch of files
Posted:
Nov 24, 2007 7:13 AM
in response to: tietze
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After checking with diff, i found some icons missing but more importantly, my itunes artwork local folder was not backuped
I don't know why
powerbook G4 17 1,33 Ghz; MacPro 2x2,66 dual core xeon
Mac OS X (10.4.8)
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Posts:
80
From:
Paris
Registered:
Mar 13, 2005
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Re: Time Machine is skipping a bunch of files
Posted:
Nov 24, 2007 9:01 AM
in response to: HugoMe
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After checking, i confirm previous post:
On my MacPro, Time Machine does not backup the "Local" folder, inside user/music/itunes/album artwork
(it does however backup the "download" folder which is also in the same folder)
In the "Local" folder are some artwork i have added manually.
I have checked: they are not included inside the song they relate to.
So the consequence is that if i had to backup after a hard disk crash, i would loose a great number of the art covers, which is ...bad
This is particularly strange, since the download folder (containing artwork from apple) is backupped
I hope it is fixed soon
powerbook G4 17 1,33 Ghz; MacPro 2x2,66 dual core xeon
Mac OS X (10.5.1)
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Posts:
80
From:
Paris
Registered:
Mar 13, 2005
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Re: Time Machine is skipping a bunch of files
Posted:
Nov 24, 2007 9:05 AM
in response to: HugoMe
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A precision:
Anyone can verify for himself, using artdecodex to identify which song the pic inside the "Local" folder relates to, and ID3X25 to see if the song contains the image
powerbook G4 17 1,33 Ghz; MacPro 2x2,66 dual core xeon
Mac OS X (10.5.1)
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Posts:
159
Registered:
Sep 13, 2006
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Re: Time Machine is skipping a bunch of files (local artwork)
Posted:
Nov 26, 2007 8:05 AM
in response to: HugoMe
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I checked mine too by checking my TM's "Latest" folder and my Local directory was not there. So, I went to my /Users/<username>/Music/iTunes/Album Artwork/Local folder and then invoked TM to see if I could find any previous folders. TM did have the Local folder, but it had to take me all the way back to my first TM backup on the day I installed Leopard and configured TM.
I guess this is because nothing has changed in that folder since then but I though that each folder, through the use of TM's special hard links, is supposed to show a complete picture of your hard drive.
Macbook Pro
Mac OS X (10.4.8)
2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo, 3 GB RAM, wireless Mighty Mouse
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Posts:
80
From:
Paris
Registered:
Mar 13, 2005
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Re: Time Machine is skipping a bunch of files (local artwork)
Posted:
Nov 26, 2007 2:23 PM
in response to: Ryan Homer
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i checked the first backup but it is not here either
My feeling is that in your case as in mine, there is a problem, maybe due to an initial dysfunction in hard drive writing, and that timemachine doesn't know how to handle it
MacPro 2x2,66 dual core xeon;powerbook G4 17 1,33 Ghz;
Mac OS X (10.5.1)
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Posts:
80
From:
Paris
Registered:
Mar 13, 2005
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Re: Time Machine is skipping a bunch of files (local artwork)
Posted:
Dec 2, 2007 1:47 PM
in response to: HugoMe
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still not resolved
MacPro 2x2,66 dual core xeon;powerbook G4 17 1,33 Ghz;
Mac OS X (10.5.1)
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Posts:
2
Registered:
Mar 26, 2007
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Re: Time Machine is skipping a bunch of files
Posted:
Dec 4, 2007 12:12 PM
in response to: tietze
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Saw the same thing as tietze (first post above) and resolved to the same method by adding these top-level folders to the exclusion list by hand:
/Applications
/bin
/Library
/private
/sbin
/System
/usr
... instead of using the automatic "System Files and Applications" which never comes out of the "Calculating Size" state. To allow other people to find this workaround, these are other messages that I saw, .e.g in the system.log:
Dec 3 22:57:01 Dator 0x0-0x21021.com.apple.systempreferences[0]: 2007-12-03 22:57:01.843 FindSystemFiles323:613 FSOpenIterator failed
Dec 3 22:57:11 Dator FindSystemFiles335: FSOpenIterator failed
And for Apple: Let's point the finger to the program that might not be running as expected; you can run it from the Terminal:
csh> /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SystemMigration.framework/Resources/FindSystemFiles
2007-12-04 21:03:25.787 FindSystemFiles274:807 Querying receipt database for system packages
2007-12-04 21:03:33.485 FindSystemFiles274:807 Using system path cache.
2007-12-04 21:03:33.486 FindSystemFiles274:807 Calculating system size...
2007-12-04 21:03:33.487 FindSystemFiles274:807 FSOpenIterator failed
(then it hangs)
Mac Book Pro
Mac OS X (10.5.1)
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Posts:
74
Registered:
Nov 6, 2000
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Re: Time Machine is skipping a bunch of files
Posted:
Dec 17, 2007 8:04 AM
in response to: tietze
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I have now done a fair amount of investigation of the file-skipping issue. The results are a little inconclusive but somewhat hopeful - I think.
I've been using Time Machine for a few weeks to back up my home directory - that is, I've excluded everything except /Users. I became concerned when I discovered that even after a number of incremental backups the Time Machine sparsebundle was 88GB, vs. 97GB for my home directory. The only significant nonstandard thing I can think of that I do is sync many of my documents with another Mac using Duover (which in turn uses ditto) - but since those documents report their modifications dates correctly and open fine, I find it difficult to believe that's the problem.
First I ran a diff -rq on my home directory and the most recent TM backup. Disturbingly, I noticed a lot of files missing from the backup, most notably various PDFs, Illustrator files, and other docs I'd created the previous few days. (It was this result that made me worry about my Duover sync.) I know diff is supposed to have issues, but I manually went into the sparsebundle and looked for some of these files without finding them. (I did not look in all the TM backups, only the latest.) However, it didn't look like these should account for the 10GB discrepancy.
Next I ran DiskWarrior on my backup disks, wiped the original TM backup in its entirety, and set up TM again on a different destination disk. I let it run, and ended up with an 86GB sparsebundle (so, about 11GB different). Then (to avoid the hard link diff issues), copied both my home directory and the latest TM backup to a separate, local drive and ran a diff on them there. The results were much better: mostly cache files and things I'd created during the process.
My VMWare Fusion VM was not backed up, which accounts for 8GB and, it turns out, is by design.
The iPod Photo Cache in my iPhoto Library covers an additional 3GB, and at that point everything pretty much makes sense.
~/Library/MobileSync was also not backed up, which concerns me a bit. Granted, the chances of my iPhone and Mac dying simultaneously are low but still...
So my thoughts so far:
- Time Machine could use more transparency. I understand why my VMWare VM was excluded, but silently excluding anything other than cache files from a backup is a dangerous thing to do. A warning, combined with a readable log file, would be nice.
- The documents missing the first time remain unexplained. I'll have to do this again in a few days and see what turns up.
MacBook Pro C2D 2.16 GHz
Mac OS X (10.5.1)
3GB RAM, 200GB HD
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Posts:
74
Registered:
Nov 6, 2000
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Re: Time Machine is skipping a bunch of files
Posted:
Dec 17, 2007 10:06 PM
in response to: tietze
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Unfortunately there's still a real problem. Today I came home after doing some work (some on the work laptop I sync with my own laptop, some on my own laptop) and forced a TM backup. It backed up about 6 MB, none of which seems to have included the work I did today:
Whether I examine the sparsebundle directly, or go back one step in the Time Machine interface, a file I created today (InDesign) is missing, and some InDesign and Illustrator files I modified still show modification times of months ago.
On the theory that it has to do with my syncing the two laptops, I went through a few rounds of creating a brand new InDesign file, forcing a backup, and then looking in the TM interface for it - no luck. None of these new files got backed up.
Unless someone has some idea of what's going on and how to fix it, I guess it's back to Retrospect for me...
Mac OS X (10.5.1)
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