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Time Machine wants to start with a new, full backup instead of using the existing one

Hi, my Time Machine wants to start a new, full backup, instead of continuing with the existing one on the time Capsule.

Looking a the Troubleshooting guide, I've found the following piece of info, which is, as 99% of the times with the troubleshooting guides, totally useless to resolve my problem...

Message: Time Machine starts a new, full backup instead of a smaller incremental backup

There are three reasons why this may occur:

  • You performed a full restore.
  • Your Computer Name (in Sharing preferences) was changed--when this happens, Time Machine will perform a full backup on its next scheduled backup time.
  • If you have had a hardware repair recently, contact the Apple Authorized Service Provider or Apple Retail Store that performed your repair. In the meantime, you can still browse and recover previous backups by right-clicking or Control-clicking the Time Machine Dock icon, and choosing "Browse Other Time Machine disks" from the contextual menu.



It should be noted (hence the uselessness of the guide) that:

-I haven't performed ANY full restore

- I havent changed my computer name

- My computer has not had ANY repair, much less a hardware repair. Neither recently, nor in the 9 months I've owned it.


Which puts me back to square one, with the marginal improvement that now I have a way of browsing my old backups.

In the event I decide to start all over again, will there be a way for me to "sew" the two backup files?

Or will I always have to go the silly way around?

Anybody has any idea?


Thank you for your time (machine/capsule, your choice;-)

MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)

Posted on Jul 11, 2013 5:11 PM

Reply
3 replies

Jul 12, 2013 1:27 AM in response to John Galt

Hi John,

no, that doesn't have anything to do with my problem.

Just look at the image below.

User uploaded file

Time Machine thinks that the disk I've always used to do my backups has none of them.

If I open the disk with Finder, obviously they are where they should be.

It is even possible to navigate them as per the instruction reported above, but even following Pondini's advice #s B5 and B6 (which are more applicable to my problem) didn't solve the problem.

Actually, not being a coder, I'm always scared of doing more damage than good when I have a Terminal window open.

My question is: how is it possible that Apple hasn't thought of some kind of user command to tell the idiotic Time Machine software that a hard disk backup is a hard disk backup, no matter what?

Estremely frustrating and annoying: I'm wasting HOURS in trying to find a solution to a problem that should not have arisen in the first place...

Have a nice weekend

Antonio

Jul 12, 2013 7:24 AM in response to soffici

I am at a loss to explain the reason this occurred. Consider performing what Pondini calls a "full reset" of Time Machine: http://pondini.org/TM/A4.html


This does not erase your backups or cause a new set of backups to be created.


Make sure your Time Capsule firmware is up to date. It should be running Firmware 7.6.3.


Other than that I'm out of ideas, and I agree you should not have experienced this problem. Hopefully Pondini will take an interest in your question and have more constructive suggestions than I have been able to offer.

Time Machine wants to start with a new, full backup instead of using the existing one

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