TM working fine except it stopped backing up the Documents folder

Douglas Weber wrote:
Any ideas why Time Machine would appear to work fine except that it stopped backing up the Documents folder months ago?

I've been using TM to backup my 80G Mac Mini HD to a 360M external drive since Leopard came out. Was seemingly running fine. My Mac Mini's HD failed so I created a boot partition on a FW400 external, did a clean install, and used the TM backup during the installation.

what exactly did you do? did you do a full system restore from TM using the restore tool on the leopard DVD or did you do an erase and install and then migrated your user data using Setup Assistant?

After that was completed, I noticed that the Documents folder icon in the dock was a question mark. When I entered Time Machine and looked at its history, I discovered that the last backup of the Documents folder was the end of January. As a result, I'm missing almost 5 months of updates. Fortunately, this isn't my primary machine but now that this has occurred, I've lost my blind confidence in TM.

there are very few things you can have blind confindence in and Time Machine certainly should not be on that list. personally, I still (after all the updates) wouldn't trust it as a sole backup tool because of all the bugs.

This begs two questions:
Why was TM apparently working but not backing up the Documents folder?

apparently so.

What else didn't it backup that I have stumbled across yet?

if you did full system restore,
check the exclusion list in Tm system preferences->options. is the Documents folder on it? that would explain this. if you used Setup or Migration Assistant, start TM and look at quicklook a backup of the file /Library/preferences/com.apple.timemachine.plist

all excluded folders should be listed there.

there is nothing strange in that TM plist file. the only thing I can think of is that your old drive had some sort of file system problem (after all it failed so that wouldn't be surprising at all) that required repair. things like that can affect TM in very unpredictable ways.