Time Machine not backing up

[Shoefly22]

I am having this problem with my time machine. My external hard drive is fine, there have been no changes in the past month to anything, except for running Onyx to do maintenance. However, this same problem occurred right before I used Onyx, backing things up.

Whenever i plug it in, and I do a "back up now" it does it for only superficially for a few seconds. I know that due to podcasts and other data downloads that a backup cannot occur that fast. And in past cases it took at least a few minutes.

Any thoughts?

 

[baryon]

I'm also having problems with Time Machine. I'm not sure if it's the same thing, but today I overwrote a file accidentally (a file that has been there for days, leaving plenty of time for Time Machine to back it up), and I thought "no problem, I have Time Machine!". Then I went into Time Machine only to find that there was no trace of that file. Actually, it seems as if Time Machine's last backup was 1 month ago. This is very strange as it keeps backing up every hour, it says so, and I can hear the disk spinning and backing up for long periods of time, which makes sense. Everything seems normal, except that the files I accidentally delete are never there when I need them.

 

[tug]

now i had that problem, all of a sudden it stopped backing up, when i say stopped, i mean it was b/u so it seemed, but the b/u was apparently going nowhere, it told me last b/u was 5 may/ latest b/u ...... i looked a bit closer and turns out that the b/u disc wasn't selected so i selected my b/u disc again, set it to b/u now and everything went back to normal (so far)

i wonder if thats whats happened to both of yours?
personally i dont rate time machine very much, thought apple would have improved its speed and efficiency by now.

 

[Bear]

For those that have noticed Time Machine not backing their stuff up:

1. Have you not restarted the system since the last good backup? I think there is an issue with Time Machine when you have slept the system "too many times".
2. Try restarting your system and edit a file and see if it picks up the changes on the next backup.

 

[Shoefly22]

Thank You!

I restarted the Computer and it is backing up like normal. 14 gigabytes of changes that desperately needed to be backed up.

I had no idea it needed to be be restarted like that, I am disappointed in time machine.

Any suggestions on other software to copy my system in case there is an even greater failure?

 

[benchlegs]

Carbon Copy Cloner works great and it's FREE!

http://www.bombich.com/