Time machine has deleted all my backups

[REBELinBLUE]

I got home from work today to see a message about needing 232.79GB to backup but only having ~100GB.

Firstly that makes no sense because I "only" have 200GB of files on my hard drive (although obviously the backup would need more), but more importantly there is no way they have all changed since yesterday.

I opened the time machine backup and noticed it had deleted every single backup apart from one from last night.

The log is full of entries like this

Jun 2 01:01:26 MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[435]: Starting standard backup
Jun 2 01:01:26 MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[435]: Backup destination alias resolved to path: /Volumes/Time Machine
Jun 2 01:01:31 MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[435]: Disk image /Volumes/Time Machine/MacBook Pro_002332bafd06.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Backup of MacBook Pro
Jun 2 01:01:31 MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[435]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Backup of MacBook Pro/Backups.backupdb
Jun 2 01:01:37 MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[435]: Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Leopard
Jun 2 01:01:37 MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[435]: Node requires deep traversal:/ reason:kFSEDBEventFlagMustScanSubDirs|
Jun 2 01:39:45 MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[435]: Starting pre-backup thinning: 232.79 GB requested (including padding), 116.73 GB available
Jun 2 01:39:45 MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[435]: No expired backups exist - deleting oldest backups to make room
Jun 2 01:52:06 MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[435]: Deleted backup /Volumes/Backup of MacBook Pro/Backups.backupdb/MacBook Pro/2009-05-10-005448: 116.73 GB now available
Jun 2 01:52:06 MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[435]: Deleted 1 backups: oldest backup is now 11 May 2009
Jun 2 01:52:06 MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[435]: Stopping backup.
Jun 2 01:52:13 MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[435]: Backup canceled.
Jun 2 01:52:19 MacBook-Pro /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[435]: Ejected Time Machine disk image.

From late last night (don't know how far back it goes, console.app doesn't show much further back) until the time when I got home.

Has anyone got any idea why it has done this, there is no reason for it that i can work out and now I'm a bit worried it is going to start screwing up backups in the future.

 

[crees!]

Actually the oldest backup is from May 11th. Seems TM needed to make room for future backups and removed the oldest.

 

[uberamd]

I got home from work today to see a message about needing 232.79GB to backup but only having ~100GB.

Firstly that makes no sense because I "only" have 200GB of files on my hard drive (although obviously the backup would need more), but more importantly there is no way they have all changed since yesterday.

I opened the time machine backup and noticed it had deleted every single backup apart from one from last night.

The log is full of entries like this



From late last night (don't know how far back it goes, console.app doesn't show much further back) until the time when I got home.

Has anyone got any idea why it has done this, there is no reason for it that i can work out and now I'm a bit worried it is going to start screwing up backups in the future.

It tells you exactly what is going on. It was trying to backup 232GB of space, and you had 160GB free, so it deleted the oldest restore point, checked again, still not enough free space... etc. Sounds like the full backup never completed, or needed to re-backup everything for some reason.

 

[REBELinBLUE]

As I said, the log is full of that, it just went through deleting every single backup since sometime last night, until it finished this evening.

But as I also said, there is no way it needed that much space for the latest backup and as there is no possibility that every single file on my hard drive changed.

Again, it deleted every single backup bar one from last night, the backups went back weeks and it was always typically a few hundred MB at most, there is just no possibility what so ever that it needed more space than every single file on my hard drive

This is the entire log, as far as console.app will go http://files.me.com/rebelinblue/lbjic1

 

[REBELinBLUE]

Just thinking, could it be something to do we the fact that I restored my MBP from the time machine backup at the weekend, so it is trying to backup the whole thing (since looking at the logs this has been going on for days). It seems that is the problem, I guess time machine starts a new backup rather than continuing from the previous one (I assumed it was smarter than that, guess not) and since there isn't enough room on the drive for a complete backup it started removing the existing ones, until it got to 1 left and there there still wasn't room for the old compacted backup and a new complete backup (since the backup drive is only 365GB, keep meaning to upgrade that), that is when it complained to me

 

[JediMeister]

Here's the article noting the Time Machine behavior after a system restore.