MacOS – Can’t see old time machine backups

backupmacosmigration-assistanttime-capsuletime-machine

I've installed a new HDD in my iMac, so i reinstalled OS X. I used migration assistant to set back only the settings. I also wanted to set back some other folders, but since my new HDD was smaller than the original one I wanted to dive in this later on.

Now I have setup time machine for my new installation of OS X (with the same computer name). Frankly I can't access the files/folders of the old backup anymore. In time machine the dates of the backups show up, but I can't move to them. Also migration assistant only shows the new backups and not the old ones anymore. I think the old backups are still there, since the time machine backup file is around 500 GB and the backups from the new installation are around 40 GB.

Is there a way I can get to the old backups?

Best Answer

Time machine can be problematic. A couple of things to try:

open a folders that you can't access in finder, right click > get info, and check permissions. Does your user have read & write permission?
make sure your new HD disk name is the same as the old one.
try to access through time machine or finder.
give it time - there are references in the apple forums of backups not being browsable right away, but eventually becoming available.

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Mac – Time Machine forgets old backups

The system will delete old backups if it has an estimate that it will need the space for the impending backup. Normally the system over estimates a backup by 2 to 4 GB in routine use, but I have seen some cases where it had estimates of 250 GB or more due to some folder changes. Even without an error in estimation, you could have attached an external drive that increased this estimate drastically.

Only you have the logs and data to know how plausible this is. Check out BackupLoupe if you like to have better measurements on how each backup differs in size from the others.

For this reason, I periodically duplicate my Time Machine drives (or choose to rotate them monthly) so that if there is a bug, I can look when I swap in the new drive to make sure I don't lose some of my older history.

MacOS – How to manually delete old backups to free space for Time Machine

Be careful with sudo and making sure you pick the correct Mac's files since there is no undo or confirmation of the following command:

sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/drive_name/Backups.backupdb/old_mac_name

The sudo command needs your password (and it won't echo to the screen, so just type it and pause to be sure you're dating the correct files before pressing enter). If you want to be safer, you can pick one snapshot to delete first to be sure the command works as intended. This is nice since it could take hours to clean up some larger backup sets and you want to leave the Mac confident it's deleting the correct information store.

You can use the tmutil tool to delete backups one by one.

sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/drive_name/Backups.backupdb/mac_name/YYYY-MM-DD-hhmmss

Since tmutil was introduced with Lion, this will not work on earlier OS versions.

If you want to get the current directory of backups (there can be multiple destinations defined and only one will be "current")

sudo tmutil machinedirectory

Best Answer

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Mac – Time Machine forgets old backups

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