Time Machine Backup Only Goes Back 24 Hours

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Level 1

74 points

Time Machine Backup Only Goes Back 24 Hours

I opened Time Machine to get a copy of a file from a couple of weeks ago, and discovered my backups only go back about a day. I looked at several folders, and they're all the same. I used to be able to retrieve items from months and even years back, and now nothing. Have all my older TM backups been lost? Fortunately, I have other backups, so I'm wondering, what's the point of TM?

FWIW, my backup drive has a 2 TB capacity with 35 GB free. It's backing up a 1 TB internal drive. TM says a full backup is estimated to be 877 GB. When the drive gets close to full, does TM dump old backups? Though it's been near full for a long time, and I've never had this problem before.

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Sep 12, 2021 11:21 AM

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Answer 1

BDAqua

Level 10

245,459 points

Sep 13, 2021 10:48 AM in response to John Baro1

Oh, quite agree, generally a drive 3 times the size of what you're internal drive will backup for years, but depends on how much new stuff you create, & occasionally TM will mess up & instead of just backing up the new stuff will think it needs to Backup everything again.

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Answer 2

John Baro1 Author

Level 1

74 points

Sep 13, 2021 11:53 AM in response to BDAqua

I do programming, so I create and edit LOTS of files all the time. A drive 2x the size of my internal drive has been doing fine since 2015. If I'd have know TM was going to start dumping older versions of my files, I'd have gotten a bigger backup drive. Luckily TM is not my only backup, so TM is looking a bit redundant, not to mention pointless for backups. I'm assuming it's still useful for transferring files/settings to a new computer.

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Answer 3

BDAqua

Level 10

245,459 points

Sep 13, 2021 6:57 PM in response to John Baro1

TimeMachineEditor starts backups in Time Machine when it is most appropriate, the whole backup process is still handled by Time Machine. TimeMachineEditor does not make changes to your system, it simply runs as an alternative scheduler to start your backups. Therefore it is safe and easy to use.

TimeMachineEditor (tclementdev.com)

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Answer 4

John Baro1 Author

Level 1

74 points

Sep 16, 2021 5:09 PM in response to BDAqua

I got a new drive for Time Machine backups, and set it up today. Here we are about 7 hours later, and it's still "preparing to copy," over 3.2 million files and counting. Now it's 3.3! This could take quite some time.

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Answer 5

John Baro1 Author

Level 1

74 points

Sep 17, 2021 5:23 PM in response to John Baro1

It's been about 30 hours now, and it just passed 9 million files. Preparing to copy. I wonder how long it will actually take to copy the drive once it's finished preparing. I also wonder about my drive spinning non-stop for days.

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Answer 6

John Baro1 Author

Level 1

74 points

Sep 20, 2021 7:24 AM in response to BDAqua

I started the copy of my 2 TB TM drive on Thursday afternoon. It took about 33 hours to prepare for the copy (9,296,358 items), and finally Monday morning it's finished. BUT IT'S NOT! There isn't enough space on my new 6 TB drive to copy 2 TB from my old TM drive. It says it now has only 12 MB free and couldn't complete the operation. WTF?!?!?!?

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Answer 7

BDAqua

Level 10

245,459 points

Sep 12, 2021 12:39 PM in response to John Baro1

When the drive gets close to full, does TM dump old backups?

Exactly

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Answer 8

John Baro1 Author

Level 1

74 points

Sep 12, 2021 5:14 PM in response to BDAqua

A warning would've been nice! So, it sounds like I've lost all the old versions of everything, and that I need to keep getting larger and large backup drives.

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