Time Machine back ups missing on MacBook Pro

Question

Time Machine back ups missing on MacBook Pro

I have always had my external hard drive attached to my iMac and it frequently backs up. I don't get error messages saying backup was not completed (I am familiar with those messages because I have had those backing up a MacBook Pro). So as far as I'm concerned my iMac is regularly backed up. Recently the iMac died. So I have purchased a new MacBook Pro as a replacement and am going through the set up process. I attach my back up drive and low and behold it tells me the last back up was in Jul 2o22.... Surely this cannot be right? Why would this have happened? Is it just likely to be some error in descriptions or not and I have lost everything from Jul22 onwards? The main things I wanted to have retained are my emails and music files. All else is backed up to iCloud. If I set up new MacBook Pro of the Jul2022 back up will and that syncs to iCould would it overwrite and delete later versions or would iCloud update the new MacBook Pro with the latest data and versions?

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Posted on Feb 17, 2024 5:19 PM

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Answer 1

rkaufmann87

Level 10

148,500 points

Feb 17, 2024 5:35 PM in response to Michael_mos101

It seems that you were ignoring your Time Machine backup which is a common problem. Maybe a little education will help so you don't have similar issues in the future. All HD's die and computers can have issues from time to time, which are most often software related and sometimes hardware. Where I am going with this is from time to time it is wise to test, we do this when we notice something wrong but when things are seemingly going okay we tend to happily go on and ignore everything else. With Time Machine it is smart to check your Time Machine drive about 1x a month or at least every couple of months. How do you do that, simple, just restore a file from a previous backup to verify it can restore oaky and look to see when the last backup occurred, was it earlier in the day, yesterday or last week sometime. That will tell you if the drive and Time Machine are both working well. If you notice an anomaly then it's time to troubleshoot.

It is also a tendency of most users to buy cheap EHD's because they simply don't know about the difference in drives. Most experienced users on these forums stay away from the Walmart quality EHD's out there like WD, Toshiba, Seagate etc, why because they tend to have a higher failure rate and at some point they have been burned. Many experienced users use quality EHD's, a favorite is the OWC Mercury Elite Pro due to it's high quality enclosure, reasonable price, the support the manufacturer provides and the ease of changing out the HD when it needs to be replaced!

So I suspect your Time Machine drive or something got goofed up so you Time Machine did not backup for some period of time. What that was is now lost of course as is the data from 2022 to when the old Mac was last used.

Sorry to tell you that but that appears like what you are running into based on your description.

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Answer 2

rkaufmann87

Level 10

148,500 points

Feb 17, 2024 9:12 PM in response to Michael_mos101

See if the old Time Machine backup from 2022 has most of your music and restore that.

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Answer 3

rkaufmann87

Level 10

148,500 points

Feb 17, 2024 7:12 PM in response to Michael_mos101

Well iCloud while not a form of backup it will have some of your data assuming you did not erase it. iCloud content is totally controlled by the user meaning it cannot be erased unless you erase it. It will not spontaneously erase itself.

Also note that ALL hard drives fail, it isn’t a matter of if it’s a matter of when which is why you should periodically check their health.

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Answer 4

Feb 17, 2024 5:46 PM in response to rkaufmann87

Thanks, it is not sounding good for me!! For what is backed up to iCloud however will this be retained and not overwritten if I restore from 2022? Also the drive I use for back up was a Porche drive. Hopefully they are OK as I use that type for my MacBook Pro as well which has been backing up OK.

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Answer 5

Feb 17, 2024 7:45 PM in response to rkaufmann87

Thanks again. I can access all my documents in iCloud on all my other devices, but email and music files (from hundred of CDs I have imported over many years) do not back up to iCloud and they are the critical things that I had my back up for. While I have all my music library on my iPhone that is not synced with other devices because I don't have an Apple Music subscription.

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Answer 6

Feb 17, 2024 10:48 PM in response to rkaufmann87

Thanks, yep that's the plan. The data transfer is taking over 24 hours so far... unsure if it has hung but Apple instore rep reckons she has seen it take between hours or days depending on the amount of data.

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Time Machine back ups missing on MacBook Pro

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