Time Machine Backups

Enter Time Machine and browse the backups, try restoring random files.

 

Connect the drive and look for a ".sparsebundle" file. It's your backup. Plus the available space on the drive will be smaller and smaller.

 

If you go to TM Preferences, click 'show TM in menu bar' then you'll see it do soemthing every hour.

And as per a previous poster, try restoring a file from a few weeks back every now and again by clicking on 'enter time machine' .

 

I don't think it will let you use the same hard drive that OS X is using. Just look on the external drive for a sparsebundle file or unplug the drive and wait for it to tell you that it can't find the specified drive.


EDIT: by the way, it won't be backing up your external drive. To access the backups click on the time machine icon in the menu bar and select "Enter Time Machine." It will load with a Finder window and you can go back in time to see what you had where in the past.

 

TM will backup FROM the HD but unless you have partitioned your HD and are using one of those partitions as the TM drive (if thats possible), it wont be doing that, and it wont let you backup TO the same partition.

And if you are backing up to the same physical disk, that's beyond pointless because a HD failure will kill all your data and your backups !

Open TM preferences and see where its backing up to.

 

1. Open a finder window.
2. Look on the side bar.

"Free Agent Drive" and "Untitled 1" are my external drives "Backup of Eric Hoffmann's ..." is my wireless Time Capsule
Your external drive will be called something else. Click on it. Look for a file like this:


If there is a file like that on your external drive then that is where Time Machine will backup your data. I'm positive that Time Machine will not allow you to backup your hard drive to the same hard drive.

 

Don't mean to hijack this thread, but I didn't want to create a new one and I'm 90% sure on the advice I have read.. so just wanted confirmation:

I already have a Time Capsule, but there's something wrong with the wireless in it... anyway, Apple is sending me a replacement..

I want to get the time machine data off existing TC and onto the new TC..

I can find this Apple KB article here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1281

which says to archive off the data from existing TC onto a USB disk.

Then I can erase the existing TC to send back to Apple.

So my query is, how do I get the archived TC data from the USB disk onto the new TC?

Do I just mount the new TC, and then copy the files from the USB drive to the TC mount?

Thanks

 

When you connect the usb disk I believe it gives you the option to move it back. This is what I should have done when I got mine instead of moving it over my network!

 

do you know if this usb disk has to have only this TM data? ie, a clean disk.. or can it have other stuff (data) on there too as well as the archived TM backup?

 

I'm not sure exactly, I connected the old drive to my TC and it won't let me try anything but there's not enough space on the usb drive so I'm sure that's why. I know you can move individual files with your Finder but I bet it takes longer. When I got my TC I had been using an external drive to do my backups so I just moved the .sparsebundle over to the TC's drive and all was well. I would almost prefer to do that since I know exactly how it works. I can't find good results on Google about restoring a TC drive.

 

i think i answered my own question..

at the bottom of the KB article..

it says

 

One more small hijack....

Does anyone know if there is a way to exclude files from being backed up? I have a VMWare file that I touch every day and because of this it backs it up over and over. I don't need that file backed up as I have saved my original off to a share. I would like to exclude it from the backups if possible. If that isn't possible, is there a better program out there that can do this?

 

Disregard, it helps if you actually look under the options...

 

It is to an extent... It is a windows load that I use for school (server stuff) and after each class I replace the file with the original to "reset" things. Because of this, I saved it off onto a share at the house which is also backed up.

 

Yes but if its a huge file which a Windows VM will be, perhaps its better to have one nightly backup when its been cleanly shutdown, rather than 24 hourly backups (which might fill up the TM disk anyway) and will likely be broken as they will be in flight copies.

 

sure it will! i have mine partitioned to 2 drives, and one partition is my OSX and the other is my time machine.

sure its not a good idea becuase if the data on the OSX is crapped chances are the data from the time machine will be as well.

but you can do it... i did

 

As long as you recognize that it's a bad idea.

 

haha of course i do! only way as of right now