Apple - Time Machine is skipping files and folders. How to fix?
I have the same issue since one of the mavericks updates, not necessarily the .0 version, not sure when exactly it started. I have this issue mostly with one folder: ~/Library/Preferences. I can fix the issue (see below), but 1-3 weeks later the issue is happening again with that folder. I think this folder might be hit often by the bug, cause the prefs-files in there are often changed, I dont know. Anway its a bug! If I should guess, the reason might be a bug in fsevents-daemon (fseventsd), which is responsible for tracking file system changes.
Sometimes I also have other folders than Preferences not backing up anymore, but this happens not that often.
To test which folders are "stuck" and do not backup properly you can:
- do a fresh backup and keep the backup volume connected
- in Terminal:
tmutil compare -n
The terminal command runs 30 mins with my backup of 150 GB size. It helps identifying files which are not in the Latest backup. Be informed, some files might be shown, which are ok to be not backed up.
I also tried touch files, which did not help. What helped, was renaming the parent folder. To fix the issue for a particular folder, e. g. ~/Library/Preferences, I rename the folder twice like:
in Terminal:
sudo mv ~/Library/Preferences ~/Library/PreferenceS
sudo mv ~/Library/PreferenceS ~/Library/Preferences
Note, the last letter s/S at the end. I need sudo for the Preferences folder, cause OSX has set special access rights for that folder. So sudo might not be needed for other folders. After doing so, the files in that folder are backed up correctly again. Problem: the issue is not solved permanently. Unpredictably after 1-3 weeks the issue is back.
other links:
- Time Machine not detecting changes in certain folders
- http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/509489/potential-time-machine-issue-mavericks-leaving/
- Some files are gone after recovery from Time Machine backup... WHY?
Both I and my housemate ran into this problem on separate iMacs. It first cropped up around the time we upgraded to Mavericks. After battling it for weeks I can confirm that (a) messing with your preference files won't fix it and (b) starting over with a new Time Machine backup disk and clean preference files won't fix it. Time Machine may behave itself for a while but within one to four weeks it will start skipping files and folders at various levels, particularly in folders like ~/Library/Preferences that see a lot of change.
I'm chiming in in hopes of saving others some frustration. Run tmutil compare -n immediately after a backup and see if anything critical is missing. If so switch to an alternative backup system as soon as possible. Numerous folks have posted about this over the years and no one has ever gotten Time Machine working again once this has cropped up.
You may run across this thread which details similar problems in Mountain Lion. At this point that thread contains a number of red herrings related to corrupted Time Machine preference files which don't seem to be relevant for Mavericks or Yosemite.
I just recreated a Time Machine backup from a completely blank hard drive. I found that it was still skipping files, but after digging in more, I discovered that lots of my files (for reasons I can't fathom) were marked as being excluded from Time Machine. Specifically, the files were marked with sticky exclusion.
I wrote a script to scan my entire filesystems for things that are being excluded from Time Machine and report back, differentiating between which files are meant to be included but aren't and which files are meant to be excluded. It can then optionally remove the exclusion marker from all of the excluded files it finds. Once I did this, all of my data was backed up properly.
I am now running OS X 10.11.1, so I'm not sure if the files that were missing from when I originally made this thread were due to being excluded (though I can confirm at least a few of them were), or if there were bugs in Time Machine that's been fixed in the subsequent OS updates, or if clearing out my Time Machine backup and starting completely fresh fixed it. Will update this thread as I learn more.
Script can be downloaded here: https://github.com/briankendall/check-time-machine