Why does Time Machine Get Confused (not back everything up)?

[Mork]

I'm finding that after a whole day on the iMac (10.6.4), that often Time Machine doesn't back up everything - or a lot. Time Machine routinely seems to miss my VM Fusion files (>30 GB) as well as other modified files.

Not sure why Time Machine gets confused.

I have to reboot the iMac before Time Machine "sees" all the files it should have backed up when I ran it before the reboot.

Any ideas what could be causing this Time Machine issue?

Thanks.

- M

 

[madog]

I don't know if they have fixed the issues backing up VMs, but I probably wouldn't recommend it without some research. Basically, you end up having TM back up that 30GB file multiple times over and over again separately and they usually fill up your backup drive very quickly.

I know Parallels has a setting to have it force TM to ignore it for that very reason, but that may be what is causing your problem.

 

[Mork]

I don't know if they have fixed the issues backing up VMs, but I probably wouldn't recommend it without some research. Basically, you end up having TM back up that 30GB file multiple times over and over again separately and they usually fill up your backup drive very quickly.

I know Parallels has a setting to have it force TM to ignore it for that very reason, but that may be what is causing your problem.

Yeah, TM does backup the image, but that's definitely what I want it to do. What is the concern is that TM "forgets" about the image even after I've worked with it.

It would be nice, at some point, if TM were smart enough to just backup the parts of the VM's image that have changed. However, for now, I'd just be happy if TM would backup the entire image when it's changed.

It's an intermittent problem.

I'm slowly learning that having a Mac isn't that different from Windows after all.

- m