Time machine missing files

Had the same problem on High Sierra. Restored all from an old imac (High Sierra) to new imac (High Sierra, first run/install, nerver launched before) with time machine. Everything goes fine. One week later, I realize a folder, with a lot of important files, was missing on the desktop. I had to recover it from a time machine backup tooked from my old imac. Could Apple explain why some folders/files aren't restored when migrating all from time machine. It's a shame that's this problem is not fixed on last version of macOS !

I just found out why my files have been disappearing after years of backing up and restoring with Time Machine. While trying to upgrade to Sierra, did a complete back up w TM and even checked a certain folder to see if my vinyl recordings were there before I upgraded to the new os. What I didn't check was the sub folder within, where I had saved about a hundred or so vinyl mp3 recordings. Once I upgraded the OS I looked in folder happily saw a batch of recordings and the subfolder. Only it was there but completely empty. I'm very disgusted with this, I've noticed missing files in the past and could never figure it out. It will take weeks to rerecord those albums. I'm thoroughly disgusted. Anybody wanna buy a MAC Desktop?

No, the folder is where it's supposed to be... and empty. Also Migration Assist is flawed too. It did not bring the mother folder or subfolder into new Sierra set up. Since day one, Apple has boasted that this method of backing up and restoring w TM is the way to go. MA has major defects too, looking through my apps nothing has been updated, no photo libraries were imported, had to go into TM and bring them to new os manually. At least those were saved by TM, Thank God! AND I KNOW all this could have been avoided if I could have accessed what I paid for when I bought this machine, a clean boot of Yosemite from the App Store.

Thanks for the suggestion Loner T. At least it feels good to be heard. Peace.

I did notice many other folders w empty subfolders. there were some out of place as well. Tons on documents and files not migrated with Migration Assistant. Tons of files not backed up by Time Machine. What a pain in the u know what. I'll never buy an apple product again. Years of information lost.

MA has limited capabilities. Over the years, there have been quite a few issues with TM. You have been through a really bad case of data loss. TM did save you bit of work too. There are alternatives to TM, like CCC or CloneZilla, which can be useful.

Many have chosen to write their own using rsync, which is included in macOS.

Well Jon...guess what. Everything you're describing regarding the creaky Haswell rMBP, and the TC problems are /were happening to me. Apple replaced the laptop in thier usual excellent and expedicious manner, but the TC problem remains unresolved. I have no confidence in the $400 TC and since I only bought it about 6 months ago intend to make Apple either fix the issue, or refund my money. After all, implied in a warranty is that the "product is fit for the purpose for which it was intended."

It's plain wrong to release software/hardware which does not perfom as claimed...especially when it comes to backups. Apple was so much better than this and my confidence in their products has been badly shaken. Why pay a preimum for the product when I can have the same hassle on a Windows machine for far less money?

As someone once said about Mac vs. PC, "I want a tool, not a hobby."

Give a great tool back to me, or I'll find another.

Nearly the same thing happened to me, too.

iMac 27" mid 2011, OSX 10.9.1., external HDD directly connected via Firewire and exclusively used for TimeMachine.

Came to work on monday, booted up the iMac, computer got stuck at the twirling colourful beach ball.

I booted the recovery mode and choose the last backup from late friday.

It worked, but a number of my apps don't remember that they are licensed and some preferences are forgotten.

But that is just inconvenient. I discovered that some files in folders on the desktop are missing. And the last backup in my TimeMachine with these files is more than 1 month old! Everything newer is missing in these folders!

And I am very sure that I did not delete these files because guess what I was working on the last workday before this incident...

I am almost anxious to check all my data - who knows what else is missing!

I checked the exclude list in the system preferences panel and in the plist-file - no, my desktop is not excluded.

Any news on the buggy TimeMachine?

I have the same problem.

I run OS X 10.9.2 on my MBP 17 mid-2010 with a TC version 7.6.4.

Just backed up everything to TimeCapsule from old HDD, installed new HDD. Clean install, and when promted, restored all from TC. User, programs and everything seems fine on the surface, but when looking closer, a lot of files and settings are missing. Photos from iPhoto are missing, but the thumbnails have been restored etc.

Took a screenshot of new HDD vs. Old HDD and the result is quite disturbing...

(Just to clarify the index, Sound-Movies-Photos-Programs-Backup-Other)

New HDD is only 240GB compared to the old 256GB but holds more unused space.

And it seems that some files get restored even though they have been deleted. (Sound has gone up from 955MB to 1,52GB)

The only thing close to the same size is the programs (25,55GB vs. 25,52GB).

I'm lucky to be able to reinstall my old HDD and continue with no changes. Would have preferred my new though.

Just gave it a seccond try and the result was...

So I guess if you try enough times, maybe TC/TM will get it right 😁

This time I actually sat next to the machine during the transfer. I tried using (Cmd+R) and it restarted at 30-40% not 100% 😮

I just hit on a very similar issue. I've used time machine to backup for years, and have done many restores on several different machines that have all been fine. My last one might have been before mavericks, but I'm not sure.

I installed a new hard drive in my Mac Pro today and did a restore from time machine. It took a couple of hours, but when it was down to ~90 minutes remaining it suddenly said it was complete and restarted.

Just to clarify, I don't have a Time Capsule. I'm just backing up to / restoring from another internal SATA drive.

I got back to my desktop and very quickly found out TONS of files were missing. My other users' home folders were all there, but the accounts were not!

I tried entering time machine to restore the first folder that I discovered was missing, but nothing was there. So I opened the time machine volume in finder, went to the backups, navigated to the latest, and sure enough there were tons of files and directories that just Were. Not. There.

Completely, utterly, 100% unacceptable. Time Machine has instantly gone from indispensable to garbage. If you can't rely on your backups to...you know...BACK UP YOUR DATA...

Thankfully, I hadn't immediately thrown my old drive into a drobo so I've now got it in an external enclosure manually copying data. Some stuff will certainly get missed but...better than nothing. I may reformat and try migration assistant again, but this time use the original drive instead of the worthless time machine backup drive.

Similar issue here: After harddrive failure in my iMac, I fixed the drive and restored from my latest TimeMachine backup.

Surprise, surprise, 90% of my (local) mailboxes in Mail were empty, or only contained a few mails of the last weeks. (The IMAP live ones just redownload themselves).

Analyzing the TM backups, I see that I had a full backup on April 1st, then all of a sudden on April 8th most of the mailbox data disappeared - for no particular reason.

I probably could have patched my missing data together from the April 1st backup and the current restored stuff, but what a nightmare. Arq came to the rescue with my latest backup via Amazon Glacier.

After a day's work, all my Mail data is restored and I ran a new Time Machine backup: Guess what, the local mail folders in the latest backup ARE ALL COMPLETELY EMPTY - AGAIN.

At this point we have to consider TM to be broken / buggy. Shame on Apple, shame.

And yes I checked permissions on my Library and everything is in order, all permissions like everywhere else on my account. Weird anyway that only my mail data seems to be concerned from what I can tell right now.

Using command line:

tmutil compare

Added: 8.5G

Removed: 11.0K

Changed: 19.6M

clearly shows that more than 8 Gigs of my mail data are missing between source volume and the last backup on TM. Yet, when TM runs again, those 8Gigs are not added to the backup.

So really looks like a fat and nasty bug!? 😠

Trying to find a way to reset this spiel.

II'm not happy to find that it's not just me having this issue.

After spending a week cleaning up my MBP and doing a TimeMachine restore two days ago, I find most of my Mail folders are empty... Even mail i got this morning has disappeared.

I Went back to TimeMachine and they were missing for the past few days but there earlier. I tried Restoring one folder and the Restore button wasn't working.

After several troubleshooting attempts I tried reinstalling the OS. No Mail in the empty folders but TimeMachine was working... And showing that there IS mail in those folders NOW. Although the Restore button is working no Mail comes in when it's "pushed." The attempt actually reconnected an account I removed last week... no mail from that account was in the folder I was restoring.

Tried to Rebuild the folder but it's the mail On My Mac that's missing. I have an iCloud account, Gmail, and Earthlink (POP). The IMAP accounts are fine. The problem is that I have hundreds of filters that move mail to a folder structure on the hard drive... Both Rebuild and Index only clear the mail showing from the server, they don't fix folders On the Mac. I just moved and I have a LOT of important stuff in those folders that I need, now! The stuff that came in from iCloud has been moved to a local folder.

Looks ok like I will be talking to Applecare in the morning.

Sorry to hear about the same bug on your system, seragan.

I would suggest the following, if you still can find an older TM backup that has a full data set:

- Export all your current local ("On my Mac") mailboxes from Mail to a safe place

- Quit Mail and manually replace the whole folder ~/Library/Mail/V2 with the one from the last good backup

- Start Mail, and then reimport the mailboxes you exported previously

- Manually move the appropriate emails inside the "Import" mailbox-hierarchy to the correct mailboxes

This is an approach that at least would have worked for me, as my faulty local Mail data seemed to have collected emails correctly since the first day of backup failure. ...meaning that the old, good backup plus the current state of my mailboxes would have resulted in a lossless, complete set.

(There can be another, more-or-less cosmetic, bug with Mail Import - showing numbered folders with duplicate mail which can be deleted afterwards).

To re-iterate the TM bug: Same thing also happened on my parents' MacBook. This time the missing data was a a folder inside ~/Documents.

To break the buggy backups and force TM to do a complete backup, the following worked as a fix:

- In TM system settings, add the problematic parent folder of the missing data to the list of excluded items

- Run a backup

- Remove the excluded folder again from TM system settings

- The next backup will take longer and TM does a "deep traversal" or such, and in the end all data does show up in the backup

Theoretically you could exclude/include your whole hard drive (to play safe), but that only works if there is another, secondary drive backed up also. (TM needs something valid to do a backup. If your primary hard drive is the only source for your backup, you would have to exclude/include several folders in two or more steps to cover all existing files).

In any case, the terminal command "tmutil compare" will serve well to show if anything is missing in the last backup.

Time to report this to Apple. Can we be sure this is only a bug in 10.9.2/3?

I just experience a similar story. (this week)

Time Machine was not reporting any read errors - but when my Seagate internal drive failed (would not mount) I replaced it and began a Time Machine restore saga. Time Machine had worked flawlessly for me many times in the past. I made 5 full restore attempts, each time selecting a resort point further back in time. I finally was successful in selecting one from early May (10.9.2). None of the backups from the 10.9.3 era would backup. The errant restore was obvious in my case since 90% of the applications were among the missing with a dock full of "?".

Even the restoration I was successful with was only 98% since there were still a few missing files that fortunately were not critical.

I agree with the thread that this is a SERIOUS failure. But I am even more disturbed that if Time Machine was having difficulty reading the HD data it was not presenting any type of error or warning message, leaving the user (me) to live in the fantasy that all was being backed up successfully.

I've been a loyal Apple GUI user since my first (Lisa), and I was in the hall when the Mac was introduced - My loyalty goes deep, but it has been severely shaken by this experience. Apple has always stood out because there stuff "just works" - until now.