Time Machine is not backing up certain files

[guitarplaya08]

hello. i've been working on an important word document, word quit unexpectedly, document gone. luckily there was a copy of it in the microsoft user data.

but, my first reaction was, oh that's ok time machine would have backed it up. i go into time machine and it's not there. so i save the microsoft user data recovered file to a new file name in a documents folder. quit word. restart. do a time machine backup. it completes. but when i open up time machine, this document (and another one from 5 days ago) are not in ANY of the backups. and if i keep backing up, time machine will backup, but these files are not in any of the dates/times in time machine.

doesn't this defeat the purpose of time machine?

your help would be greatly greatly appreciated. thanks so much

 

[BobZune]

Unless you excluded the older containing the document from Time Machine backup, it should have backed it up - of course once an hour by default.

Check under System Preferences --> Time Machine, Options "Do Not Back Up" list and see if the containing-folder is listed (or a higher level one). If so, remove it and do a back up. [I assume your TM disk/partition is bigger than your machine's hard drive in size.] If you have not accidentally excluded the folder(s) and TM is not backing up those files, it points to a bigger problem.

 

[guitarplaya08]

the only two things under do not back up are external devices. It's pretty bizarre. I can't seem to figure it out. I tried saving a document to the desktop and then backed it up, and it backed up successfully, but when i open time machine.. it's not there. so I restarted my computer and did another back up, and this time it backed up 4 gigs! (just after a back up and a restart)

but the documents still aren't in any location in time machine!

 

[BobZune]

It does sound very strange. Instead of opening the Time Machine (TM), have you browsed the disk, just like you would an external drive? (I'd suggest disabling TM backup in the TM preferences before doing that, you can enable later).

There should be a Backups.backupdb, folder and inside that, a folder with the machine name. In there, go to the "Latest" and dig down to your directory (USERs -- name-here -- Documents) and see if the file (it can be a link) is there.

If it is not there, I am out of ideas given the details. You can consider reformatting the TM drive (with the right partition map scheme -APM for PPC machines, GUID for Intel), give is another name and do an all new backup. [Make sure you ARCHIVE your important data - not just backup.]