Why did Snow Leopard delete ALL of my leo…

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

Nov 30, 2009 3:37 AM in response to Ben Van Houtte

Ben Van Houtte wrote:
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.

That looks like a different issue. This thread is about Time Machine deleting old Time Machine backups, not starting a new backup folder and having the old one inaccessible.

I know because this just happened to me. I did a clean install of Snow Leopard, and I figured that I could just use Time Machine to restore my Documents, Downloads, Pictures folders, etc. By the time I realized that Time Machine was deleting my old backups to make room for my new install, it was too late and by the time I turned Time Machine off, it had completely deleted all of my backups from before the reinstall.

I'm now in the process of recovering these files, but this whole thing could have been avoided if Time Machine asked me whether to remove the old backups BEFORE doing it!

The logs look something like this:

Deleted backup /Volumes/Home Edition/Backups.backupdb/Kona/2009-11-25-135735: 27.79 GB now available
Removed all 1 expired backups, more space is needed - deleting oldest backups to make room
Deleted backup /Volumes/Home Edition/Backups.backupdb/Kona/2009-11-26-020229: 27.83 GB now available
Deleted backup /Volumes/Home Edition/Backups.backupdb/Kona/2009-11-27-145456: 28.02 GB now available
Deleted backup /Volumes/Home Edition/Backups.backupdb/Kona/2009-11-28-032652: 28.09 GB now available