Time Machine Deleted Backup?

giantrats,

Please read thru this as Pondini is the resident TM guru, and much info to offer.

http://pondini.org/OSX/Home.html

giantrats wrote:

. . .

I see a backup file that seems to have just been made from the HD I restored,

Have you made any other backups since then?

Take a look at the backups via the Finder. You should see a single Backups.backupdb folder, with a single folder named for your Mac.

Inside that is a series (we hope) of date-stamped folders, one for each remaining backup.

Inside each of those is one folder for each drive/partition that was backed-up.

If that's a little cryptic, see the green box in How Time Machine works its Magic for an illustration.

TM's capacity to back up multiple drives, and keep track of drives that are no longer connected, or have been replaced, or even two with the same name, is very powerful, but can make some things a bit hard to see. And it doesn't always treat a restored drive as being the same as the original automatically, so does a full backup of it, which is what it sounds like may have happened here.

See what you can find and let us know.

giantrats wrote:

. . .

But after TM made a new back up, only the later date has been an option.

Doesn't sound good, but still doesn't quite add up.

Time Machine will never delete the last remaining backup, for obvious reasons.

So even if it did a full backup of the restored drive, on that backup it wouldn't have deleted the last remaining backup, so the previous backup of the drive shouldn't have been deleted to make room.

So, something else must have happened. If, for example, you'd excluded the failed drive from backups, then done other backups, there wouldn't have been previous backups on those, so the older ones might have been deleted. Seems unlikely, but what you see, and the empty space, would tend to confirm something like that.

First, just to make sure there isn't some sort of directory problem, run Repair Disk on it, if you haven't already.

If that doesn't turn up anything, you may have to try to recover the data, some of which has probably been overwritten. See Data Recovery. That probably won't be much fun.

Sorry not to have better news. 😟

You may have learned the hard way (most of us do 😉), that its; always prudent to keep "secondary" backups. See the green box in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #27 for some suggestions.

giantrats wrote:

. . .

And on the third time, the back ups were no longer there.

Bizarre. I've not seen that, or any reliable reports of it, and have no idea how it could happen. 😟

Wish I had something constructive to add.

giantrats wrote:

. . .

TM did give me an error, which I think was about space, or that it was no longer connected to the backup I'd just restored from. It was a normal dialog, and I hit OK.

That's probably where it happened, and you likely got the after-the-fact message, so it was already too late:

It was different at first. On Leopard, the title of the option was Warn when old backups are deleted. Instead of a proper warning, though, the backup just failed. Worse, the message wasn't clear (shocking, right!) that all you had to do was un-check the option and let the next backup run, so folks stewed or didn't know what to do, and backups just stopped. Then a week or a month or six later, when something awful happened, they were out of luck.

In addition, even if there was a proper warning, it would be hard to tell how many old backups would need to be deleted, unless you looked at the message carefully. Plus, you'd probably see it fairly often, likely once a week, so eventually most folks would just dismiss it or check Don't show this again.

Kind of a "catch-22." 😟