Snow Leopard: Time Machine only does the initial back-up

[Markvnl]

Hi everyone,

New Mac user here, and I must say I love both the hardware and OS X. However, I ran across one problem I can't seem to solve.

I have an external HDD hooked up to my iMac. It's from Freecom, and I believe it contains a Seagate ST310005 disk.
I formatted the disk, and set up Time Machine. It seems to go well, TM makes the first back-up without any problems. But, even though TM is turned on and set to back things up, nothing I put on my PC after the initial back-up gets backed up. I put a folder on my desktop, put some files in it, and they are nowhere to be found in the TM back-ups.
I made sure the folders are not excluded from TM.

Can anyone help, please?


Thanks,
Mark Veldhuis.

 

[cawesjmu]

Maybe a silly question, but you did wait at least an hour? It does hourly back ups, so any changes you make will only show up after the next backup. Is your hard drive always mounted? Meaning can you open it up at any time. Sometimes a drive will unmount for some reason and then TM will not be able to find it, but it would give you an error if that was happening.

 

[Markvnl]

Not a silly question at all.
Yes, I waited more than an hour. I also tried to use "Back Up Now", thinking it would back up anything I did after the initial back-up. But no.... :-(
The drive is always on, always mounted.
I can see that TM is active every now and then (spinning icon in the menu bar), but no actual back-ups are being made.
I get no error messages from TM at all.


Kind regards,
Mark Veldhuis.

 

[cawesjmu]

I can see that TM is active every now and then (spinning icon in the menu bar), but no actual back-ups are being made.

When it's spinning up in the menu bar, and you click on it, what does it say? "Initializing backup" "xx MB of xx MB" or "finishing" or "cleaning up"? And when it's not spinning, does it say when your last back up was? Or that it was delayed?

 

[Markvnl]

When it's not spinning, it says when the last back-up was.
I just clicked "Back Up Now", it was spinning very briefly. Maybe it couldn't find anything to back-up, but there are definitely files on my desktop that are not in the TM back-ups...
Weird, i want this thing to work.

 

[cawesjmu]

In system preferences when you have chosen your disk, I think you can click "back up now" and you can see a little progress bar and it should go through the sequence of "initializing, xx MB of xx MB finishing, cleaning up." But if it's not giving you any errors and the "last backup" time seems right, then it thinks it's backing up.

I'm pretty sure when you go into the Time Machine view (with the stars and folders one behind the other) it starts with the most recent, but make sure you're not looking at the original. If you click on the arrows, forward or back, it should take you to the next window that had any changes. Sorry I can't be any more help but it's hard to know what wrong when there's no errors. Hopefully someone else with a little more technical skill can tell you how to delete time machine preferences or something like that.

 

[Markvnl]

Thanks for your help, I appreciate it!

I just copied a 3.22 GB. file to my desktop. Then clicked "Back Up Now" in TM. In the Time Machine window, it goes very fast from "calculating changes" to "finishing backup". It simply does not see the new file! :-(

Anyone else who can help?

 

[kiwian]

Try booting the machine in safe mode, by holding down the shift key at start up. Then restart your machine, this should mean Time Machine will go through a "deep traversal" the next time it is run. The deep traversal will "check every file on the disk in a specific directory, ensuring all files on the source disk are catalogued and accounted for"

Also how are you checking your backup, by using the time machine application or by looking at the folder structure on the external hard drive?

 

[Markvnl]

I just booted in safe mode, restarted in normal mode, and did some tests with Time Machine. It seems to work fine now. Thanks!!
Will keep an eye on it, hopefully it will work properly from now on.

I checked the backups both with the TM app and by looking at the folder structure in Finder.


Thanks again,

Mark.