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Level 1

0 points

Why did Snow Leopard delete ALL of my leopard time machine backups?

I received my copy of snow leopard on Friday. I verified my time machine backups were functioning and current. At the time my backups went back to April of 2009. I performed the upgrade from leopard (10.5.8) to snow leopard (an actual upgrade not a re-install). There were no issues with the upgrade. Today (one day after the upgrade) I noticed time machine running. When looked at what time
Machine was doing it said it was "deleting backups". After that finished it performed a backup. When I went into time machine after that my backups only go back to yesterday. It appears time machine has wiped out all of my leopard based backups. Are
y leopard based backups still there? This appears to mean I can't rollback to leopard or even get files pre snow leopard. It would have been nice to have confirmation from time machine before it did this....

Imac 24in intel, Mac OS X (10.6), 4gb ram,750gb HDD

Posted on Aug 29, 2009 10:07 PM

31 replies

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Sep 2, 2009 8:35 PM in response to halverg

halverg wrote:
I saw the same thing. However, the backups were not deleted. Snow Leopard was not mounting the old backup sparseImage (which holds 6 months of my backups). Instead, it was starting a new backup from scratch and therefore showed only one backup in the history.

I had cloned by boot drive prior to upgrading and was able to boot into 10.5 from that disk. In Leopard, TimeMachine was able to see the prior backups.

You should be able to see them via the +*Browse ...+* option. See item #17 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip.* (You may have to mount the correct sparseimage first.)

Sep 6, 2009 8:17 AM in response to prwb79

I have had Snow Leopoard now 4 days, and just noticed that Time MAchine was doing this to me as well. I had nearly 1 years worth of backups on my drive.

And now it deleted every one of them!

I have NO backups left anymore.

***!!!???

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Sep 6, 2009 8:22 AM in response to KevShootz

KevShootz wrote:
I have had Snow Leopoard now 4 days, and just noticed that Time MAchine was doing this to me as well. I had nearly 1 years worth of backups on my drive.

And now it deleted every one of them!

I have NO backups left anymore.

Did you try the +*Browse ...+* option?

Sep 6, 2009 8:33 AM in response to Pondini

yea just did that.

I had backups spanning thru August 2008. Now I only have backups since Sept 3 of this year (2009). And that is because I stopped Time Machine from deleting any more.

Wow.

Totally confused.

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Sep 6, 2009 8:49 AM in response to KevShootz

KevShootz wrote:
yea just did that.

I had backups spanning thru August 2008. Now I only have backups since Sept 3 of this year (2009). And that is because I stopped Time Machine from deleting any more.

Details please:

Did you do a normal install of SL, or did you erase your HD and migrate/restore from Leo?

How much is used on your internal HD?

How large is your TM drive?

Sep 6, 2009 8:52 AM in response to Pondini

hey pondini.

I use a 300 gig raptor drive as my boot, have another drive with all my docs, music photos. both backup to time machine.

my time machine drive is 1.5 TB. When it started to delete my old backups, i still had 400 gigs left. Space was not a problem.

When i installed SL, i did a complete erase and install. I wiped my old drive.

thanks!

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Sep 6, 2009 9:06 AM in response to KevShootz

KevShootz wrote:
hey pondini.

I use a 300 gig raptor drive as my boot, have another drive with all my docs, music photos. both backup to time machine.

my time machine drive is 1.5 TB. When it started to delete my old backups, i still had 400 gigs left. Space was not a problem.

When i installed SL, i did a complete erase and install. I wiped my old drive.

That means TM will almost certainly do a full backup of your boot drive.

It sounds like TM was trying to do a full backup of *both drives.* Click here to download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window.

A few folks have trouble with that on SL; if you do, use Console to look at your logs; filter for the backupd process. (Post back if you need help with that).

If it was trying to do a full backup of both drives, do a Restart and try again. It will most likely behave properly. Just watch for the amount it wants to back up; cancel immediately if it's more than your boot drive.

One more thought: did you already have iPhoto 09? If not, nearly that whole thing would have been changed by upgrading, so it will need to be backed-up again.

halverg

Level 1

5 points

Sep 6, 2009 3:25 PM in response to Pondini

My backups reside on a Drobo attached to a Time Capsule. The size of the sparse image is 1.7 GB. The tip for resetting Time Machine did force TM to recognize the existing sparse image. However, the subsequent backup ran very slowly, approximately 50 KB/hour. The Drobo had 180 GB of free space; so it shouldn't have been the Drobo behavior of slowing to a crawl when disk space is low. I eventually discovered a firmware upgrade for the Drobo. After that upgrade, the backup succeeded in a "reasonable" amount of time (22 GB in 16 hours).
Thanks for the help.

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Sep 6, 2009 3:33 PM in response to halverg

halverg wrote:
My backups reside on a Drobo attached to a Time Capsule. The size of the sparse image is 1.7 GB. The tip for resetting Time Machine did force TM to recognize the existing sparse image. However, the subsequent backup ran very slowly, approximately 50 KB/hour. The Drobo had 180 GB of free space; so it shouldn't have been the Drobo behavior of slowing to a crawl when disk space is low. I eventually discovered a firmware upgrade for the Drobo. After that upgrade, the backup succeeded in a "reasonable" amount of time (22 GB in 16 hours).
Thanks for the help.

Many of us (me included) have had success by cancelling the TM backup, then doing a Restart. (Why, I have no clue!)

I'm doing backups to a USB drive attached to an Airport Extreme, only about 15 feet from my Mac, and getting about 12 gb per hour wirelessly (although it varies from about 6 to 15).

Sep 6, 2009 10:18 PM in response to Pondini

This happened to me. TM started deleting old backups. Got about a year's worth before I noticed what was going on and stopped it. Turned out what happened (apparently) is that I had unmounted two external drives, and when I remounted them TM forgot that I had those drives on the exclude list. It tried to back up those drives, needed a terabyte of free space, and blythely started to delete backups to make room, not even noticing that the entire TM drive is only 750GB.

I'd call this a SERIOUS bug in Time Machine. All external drives should be excluded by default. You can lose ALL of your backups simply by mounting an external drive.

ChrisRR

Level 3

941 points

Sep 7, 2009 1:12 AM in response to Ron Garret

Ron, this is well explained and has also just happened to me - precisely the same thing. I had two external drives attached when TM started to do its thing. It said it had failed as there was insufficient space. What the incompetent and dangerous program did NOT tell me was that it was about to murder 6 months' worth of backups made prior to installing Slow Leopard. (sic)

So now, my contingency of being able to revert to Leopard has been dashed because of this bug in TM. I cannot restore the machine to how it was prior to SL.

What an absolute pile of garbage. Thanks Apple. You should try spending at least a couple of hours testing the latest stuff before springing it on us.
Not happy.

ChrisRR

Level 3

941 points

Sep 7, 2009 1:33 AM in response to ChrisRR

Also:
The Widget mentioned here, showed that even though it started to delete older backups, it still discovered it hadn't enough space! How basic is that! Wouldn't you think it would have the technology to work out PRIOR to deletion whether that action is sufficient? It can work out how much space is required, and how much is remaining - but it deletes stuff willy-nilly without first working out the maths of "before/after'. Brilliant! Genius! Having deleted ALL the backups it says "Oops! Still not enough space. Oh well, never mind."

inod3

Level 1

0 points

Sep 7, 2009 1:47 AM in response to mac hopeful

Same here. ALL last years backups GONE after the upgrade to snowy cat.

G-O-N-E.

Where do i go if i need stuff from last week? Certainly not to you Apple, now can i? CAN I?

Did you even test this? Its not like i did anything special. I have two external harddrives: 1 WD passport and 1 WD Studio FW 800.

Not even RAID will save you from this Blunder.

Message was edited by: inod3

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Sep 7, 2009 7:22 AM in response to Ron Garret

Ron Garret wrote:
This happened to me. TM started deleting old backups. Got about a year's worth before I noticed what was going on and stopped it. Turned out what happened (apparently) is that I had unmounted two external drives, and when I remounted them TM forgot that I had those drives on the exclude list. It tried to back up those drives, needed a terabyte of free space, and blythely started to delete backups to make room, not even noticing that the entire TM drive is only 750GB.

I'd call this a SERIOUS bug in Time Machine. All external drives should be excluded by default. You can lose ALL of your backups simply by mounting an external drive.

You need to report this to Apple. Start with AppleCare (if you're in the US, 800-275-2273). Have your serial number and the particulars handy, including this +Thread ID+ (2134197). If you're calm and clear, they'll get the right folks involved.

That said, Snow Leopard and TM were tested extensively, both by Apple and in beta. This is the first report like this in this forum, so it's not widespread.

Sep 8, 2009 7:46 AM in response to Pondini

There is another long thread of people reporting the same problem: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2132636&tstart=30. Apparently after upgrading to SL Time Machine tends to start a new series of backups but the old ones are still accessible - even though this is more complicated than it should be.

Why did Snow Leopard delete ALL of my leopard time machine backups?