Where is the Time Machine Icon?

Welcome to Discussions.

The Time Machine icon appears on the dock irrespective of whether or not Time Machine's backup drive is connected. You might have accidentally removed the Time Machine icon from the dock. Open your Applications folder in the finder sidebar. Click once on the Time Machine application icon and drag it to the dock. That won't actually move your Time Machine application but will put an alias of it in the dock.

Time Machine will not back up to the disk you are booted from. In order to run Time Machine you will need to assign it a different internal disk than your boot disk (if you have one) or an external disk in System Preferences > Time Machine > Change Disk.

My understanding is that it will only work with an external drive attached. To activate Time Machine, you first go to the system preferences and turn it on. The icon for the program shows up in the Dock, or alternatively, it should be in the applications folder on your hard drive.

Hope that helped.

you can also backup to another partition (not recomened)
mine alows me to backup to my windows partition even though it is on the same disc, but it will not allow a backup to a large capacity usb drive

+you can also backup to another partition (not recomened)+
+mine alows me to backup to my windows partition even though it is on the same disc+

This is a very risky practice. Time Machine has a nasty habit of belching a full backup when it runs across a corrupted file. That very much risks not leaving enough free disk space on your Windows partition. Keep a sharp eye on your free space on that partition until you can get Time Machine working on your external.

+but it will not allow a backup to a large capacity usb drive+

Click on the USB drive icon in the finder and do a Get Info (command-i). If the format isn't Mac OS Extended (Journaled) you need to reformat the drive. That will erase it so safely copy any files on the drive before reformatting it. There are good directions for formatting a drive for Time Machine in this article. People with PPC Macs should substitute Apple Partition Map for GUID when following the directions.

If that doesn't do the trick launch console which is in Applications > Utilities. Choose All Messages in the left pane of Console and type in "backupd" without the quotes in the search window to see the Time Machine log. Start a new topic and post the log.