MacOS – Time Machine only backs up /Users and /opt

afpmac-minimacbook promacostime-machine

I have 2 MacMinis. The two MacMinis are both connected via firewire. I have one MacMini backup over afp over firewire to a hard drive on the other MacMini. This system works perfectly and the whole MacMini gets backed up.

I have a MacBook. The MacBook has the same system, but does not have the firewire connection and only backs up over WiFi. When I look at the backup of the MacBook, it only has the Users folder and the opt folder. No errors are reported in TimeMachine, and no files are in the Exclude list.

Best Answer

Select Options… in System Preferences » Time Machine and specify which directories you don't want backed up.

theis answer shows, what happened on your device:

Time Machine Synchronize just my Home Folder to external hard drive in MacOS Leopard

So you have to do it the other way round

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Mac – Use a network Time Machine drive locally

You can try mounting that volume and then use the tmutil command to tell Time Machine where do you want backups to go to. Just make sure that nobody else is using the sparsebundle from the network

Stepwise:

Mount the .sparsebundle disk image
Open Terminal
In the Terminal command line, type:
```
sudo tmutil setdestination /Volumes/{mounted-disk-image}
```
Be sure to replace {mounted-disk-image} above to the drive's mount point name.
Open the Time Machine menu and force-start a backup.

Watch the contents of the Backups.backupdb folder in the disk image as Time Machine runs and ensure that it is creating your new backup set.

Note that you'll need Lion for this. Enter the command man tmutil in the Terminal for more information.

MacBook – a typical transfer rate for a Time Machine backup over FireWire

Turns out that the problem was that the disk wasn't empty. Formatting the disk and starting again solved the problem.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Mac – Use a network Time Machine drive locally

MacBook – a typical transfer rate for a Time Machine backup over FireWire

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