So now that we've established that I'm NOT backing up gigantic files, I now know that I have in the past and for whatever reason Time Machine backed them up...even though they remained unchanged. And basically clogged up the works. However, that doesn't;t discount the fact that I have backups going back to last year that it won't access. I can still manually drag stuff off. And I tried manually dragging some to the trash to empty out the space but it won't let me.

Basically I'm just checking to make sure my two options are:
1. Keep the backup as is so I can MANUALLY try to find old versions of files. Then buy a new drive and start the backup all over again.

2. Just say @#$%& it and erase the whole thing and start over. Losing a years worth of backups.

Its a nice corner Apple has painted me into.

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The time is now.

When I find a hard drive I throw it in a dock and grab the Photos.

I remove the platter from the hard drive and plan to recycle the Aluminum. I have a stack of platters that I plant to do something with.

Grab what you want NOW and file it accordingly.

Music on Raid 1 and Photos on Raid 2 and at the moment no TimeMachine. Looking for something faster and possibly WiFi accessible for everyone. I had that once and I was the only one that used it so I don't know.

I feel your pain. If it is important get a Raid. Time machine is for restoring basic functionality to your computer when you have a lapse of judgement.

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Staunton, Virginia

Oh I back up to other places. I have a clone that I keep at home and I use Backblaze to backup to the cloud. I use TM for exactly what you said. Lapses in judgment. But it seems Apple has made it all but impossible b/c of their stupid "It just works" setup.

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I do a few Carbon Copy Cloner drives throughout the day, with one set to run overnight. I dropped Time Machine from the cycle b'c it never worked quite right. I may add that back at some point but for now it's kicked to the curb.

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I liked TM b/c it would do versioning. Which a clone will not. If there's a better alternative to back up changed files, I'd try it.

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Quote
bazookaman
...And I tried manually dragging some to the trash to empty out the space but it won't let me.

Did you successfully drag anything to the Trash?

As soon as you drag stuff into the Trash from a Time Machine backup, you've hosed the backup and will not be able to empty the Trash. At this point, your only options are to erase the backup drive to clear the stuff from the Trash, or disconnect the backup drive and replace it and put the original drive aside as an archive.

If you use the Time Machine interface ("Enter Time Machine") you'll find an option to delete all backups of a particular file or folder via control-click on the item that you want to delete, or select the item and opt to delete all backups of it from the cog-menu in the window's toolbar. This is the safe way to delete files/folders from your backup.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/16/2021 09:07AM by Sarcany.

Have you tried calling apple? I dunno what their policy is, like if its $50 a call or something like that... but maybe worth a shot? Perhaps its a corrupted "something". Or have you looked in Apples forums?

I get "losing" the backup, but mostly you are losing the "versions" backup -- right? Only you cans answer this -- If you were to move to a new drive and start a new TM, what are the odds you would ever plug the old drive in to recover some file? If its highly unlikely... then I say just move forward. Bummer to lose all the versioned files, but not the end of the world. As soon as you run the new TM backup... you are backed up again. Sucks, but...


fwiw, my recent backup journey:
I used TM for years, and I have used the versioning option many times. It ran like a top, even with hundreds of files being backed up regularly.

But I never had a true "clone" backup, and decided to switch to CCC last year wth its cloning and its "safteynet" feature for versioning.

Its not intuitive to setup the safteynet feature... I didn't have it for months. And finding an old file means manually searching the safetynet folder.

CCC itself seems to stall my whole machine when running, and it takes 20 minutes to backup my working drive to my backup drive... it checks every single last file everytime. I don't remember Time machine doing that. While it backing up you can hear my drives working, constant head R/W.

Im probably at the point where Im going to switch back to TM for its versioning backup, and use CCC for my OS clone.

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

Quote
Sarcany
Did you successfully drag anything to the Trash?

As soon as you drag stuff into the Trash from a Time Machine backup, you've hosed the backup and will not be able to empty the Trash. At this point, your only options are to erase the backup drive to clear the stuff from the Trash, or disconnect the backup drive and replace it and put the original drive aside as an archive.

Negative. It won't let me. It tells me I am not allowed to do that.

Quote
Sarcany
If you use the Time Machine interface ("Enter Time Machine") you'll find an option to delete all backups of a particular file or folder via control-click on the item that you want to delete, or select the item and opt to delete all backups of it from the cog-menu in the window's toolbar. This is the safe way to delete files/folders from your backup.

That right there is the problem. Like I said, I have a years worth of backups. I can look on the TM drive (in the Finder) and see backups from this time a year ago. And hundreds of subsequent ones. And it is there that I "see" the backups of a Parallels db and even some of an external drive. THOSE are what are taking up all the space. However, Time Machine itself does NOT see those. TM tells me my OLDEST backup is March 10...of THIS year.

So you see, I cannot actually GET to those old files to Control+Click them to remove them from the backup.

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Quote
bazookaman

Quote
Sarcany
Did you successfully drag anything to the Trash?

As soon as you drag stuff into the Trash from a Time Machine backup, you've hosed the backup and will not be able to empty the Trash. At this point, your only options are to erase the backup drive to clear the stuff from the Trash, or disconnect the backup drive and replace it and put the original drive aside as an archive.

Negative. It won't let me. It tells me I am not allowed to do that.

Quote
Sarcany
If you use the Time Machine interface ("Enter Time Machine") you'll find an option to delete all backups of a particular file or folder via control-click on the item that you want to delete, or select the item and opt to delete all backups of it from the cog-menu in the window's toolbar. This is the safe way to delete files/folders from your backup.

That right there is the problem. Like I said, I have a years worth of backups. I can look on the TM drive (in the Finder) and see backups from this time a year ago. And hundreds of subsequent ones. And it is there that I "see" the backups of a Parallels db and even some of an external drive. THOSE are what are taking up all the space. However, Time Machine itself does NOT see those. TM tells me my OLDEST backup is March 10...of THIS year.

So you see, I cannot actually GET to those old files to Control+Click them to remove them from the backup.

YUP, once you mention Parallels it starts to make sense why all the trouble. I just recently had to migrate from an old Macbook Pro vintage sometime around 2008 or so to a new Macbook Pro with the new apple chip for my mother aged 94. I have maintained a TimeMachine backup for years due to the simplicity and reliability of it and I am about a 90 minute drive away and don't need trouble. Took several tried to successfully migrate and finally found the downloads folder get info showed 37GB of data which was bogus, it had a lot of old junk but nowhere near 37GB. I finally remembered it also had a boot camp partition and just on a hunch I excluded the downloads folder from the restore and it completed absolutely perfectly with everything intact and where they belonged. Suspect your Parallels app is what has caused your grief, good luck. I have used TimeMachine for over twenty years and always found it very reliable and easy to use, especially for clients with little tech skills, just set it up and forget it.

Quote
bazookaman
...I have a years worth of backups. I can look on the TM drive (in the Finder) and see backups from this time a year ago. And hundreds of subsequent ones. And it is there that I "see" the backups of a Parallels db and even some of an external drive. THOSE are what are taking up all the space. However, Time Machine itself does NOT see those. TM tells me my OLDEST backup is March 10...of THIS year.

So you see, I cannot actually GET to those old files to Control+Click them to remove them from the backup.

At some point, you must have renamed your boot volume through some other method than the Finder, or changed the Sharing name of your Mac in an unusual manner and broken the link to the Time Machine backup for the volume. If the path to the boot volume has changed outside of the standard GUI methods then it will start a fresh backup.

Your old backups remain, but will not be updated and will reduce the available capacity for new backups.

...I'd just get a new backup drive.

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I had many issues with and have a client with many issues with TM.
Switched to CCC a year plus ago and have had no problems.
I will switch the client to CCC next week as well.
For $40 it ain't worth pissin about with TM.
No ones perfect.
At least the Mac has long life cycles.

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!#$@@$#!

never do yesterday or today what you can put off til tomorrow or next year.

Ugh. What a pain in the ass. I don't deny that I did any of these things mentioned here. Other than accidentally backing up a VM, I don't know. But what kills me is that Apple's software just keep chugging along as if nothing is wrong. And I only find out about a mistake a YEAR later.

New drive ordered.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/16/2021 02:58PM by bazookaman.

Just a heads up, CCC has Snapshots which can meet most versioning backup needs. I don't use Time Machine, though, and we certainly don't currently have the cool interface of TM.

That said, it's not out yet, but I think you'll find that CCC 6 eliminates a lot of CCC 5 pain points (such as checking over all files and high CPU demand), is shockingly faster, and has some amazing new features that you'll love. Keep your eyes peeled for a release by this summer. (Hopefully!)

Quote
FormerlySaleenl
Just a heads up, CCC has Snapshots which can meet most versioning backup needs. I don't use Time Machine, though, and we certainly don't currently have the cool interface of TM.

That said, it's not out yet, but I think you'll find that CCC 6 eliminates a lot of CCC 5 pain points (such as checking over all files and high CPU demand), is shockingly faster, and has some amazing new features that you'll love. Keep your eyes peeled for a release by this summer. (Hopefully!)

Any hints about forthcoming features on M1 Macs?

Will it make a full bootable copy of all APFS volumes from an M1 Mac to a standard USB HD or SSD that can simply be restored back to the original drive?

Got a trick to clone a drive with a result that's bootable on *both* a M1 Mac and an Intel Mac?

...Or are those just pipe dreams?

(Yeah, I know that even just booting from USB vs Thunderbolt may be a special challenge on the new Macs... And Shirt-Pocket seems to have given up entirely on making a bootable backup from a M1 Mac. But I think/hope that Mike's smarter than Dave. )

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Quote
Sarcany


Any hints about forthcoming features on M1 Macs?

Will it make a full bootable copy of all APFS volumes from an M1 Mac to a standard USB HD or SSD that can simply be restored back to the original drive?

Got a trick to clone a drive with a result that's bootable on *both* a M1 Mac and an Intel Mac?

...Or are those just pipe dreams?

(Yeah, I know that even just booting from USB vs Thunderbolt may be a special challenge on the new Macs... And Shirt-Pocket seems to have given up entirely on making a bootable backup from a M1 Mac. But I think/hope that Mike's smarter than Dave. )

This is my hope as well. I'll keep an eye out for the (hopefully) summer release.

>Any hints about forthcoming features on M1 Macs?

Not really. There's not anything I can think of that is M1-specific. As far as I can tell, all new features will also benefit Intel Macs. (They better, I don't want to migrate to and M1 and Big Sur!!!)

>Will it make a full bootable copy of all APFS volumes from an M1 Mac to a standard USB HD or SSD that can simply be restored back to the original drive?

Not unless Apple either allows us to bless system volumes (super doubtful) or updates their tool (ASR) so that CCC can. That said, Apple has created such a complicated way of handling drive/volume structure that it's becoming unbearably complex to create an "easy" bootable backup - even with Intel Macs. It's a sea of workarounds that are very frustrating.

We still think there's a place for bootable backups in the Apple ecosystem and will work to create them if possible, but we have to evaluate the complexity of creation against the utility of possessing a bootable backup.

At the end of the day, I personally have a data-only backup on a wicked fast SSD drive. When I dropped my phone on my MBP and managed to massively crack my screen (I have NO idea how I was so "lucky"), I was able to get up and running on a backup machine in less than an hour using my backup and migration assistant. So, not an instant bootable backup but I migrated from Intel to M1 flawlessly. I was also able to migrate back when I got my trusty Intel machine back.

>Got a trick to clone a drive with a result that's bootable on *both* a M1 Mac and an Intel Mac?
>
>...Or are those just pipe dreams?

File that one under "pipe dreams"!