Missing TIme Machine backups from past 4 months

Hello, I hope someone out there might have had a similar issue and can lend a hand.

I recently lost a MBP due to a golden retriever vs. cup of coffee incident which fried my logic board. In replacing the lost MBP, I now have a new machine that I'd like to pull my old files from my consistent Time Machine backups from my external hard drive.

I can access my external drive no problem, but the most recent backups date all the way back to May 3, and the only backups it shows are from that date. I had been backing up my files on the scheduled default interval as prescribed by Time Machine, and had no "Your computer failed to backup" or "Your computer has not been backed up by Time Machine in 30 day" sorts of warnings.

I ran disk utility on my external drive and it did recommend a repair, which I did perform. Upon completion of repair, I can still only see backups from May 3.

Any help/suggestions are truly appreciated.

When you attach your external Time Machine backup drive and open it with the Finder you should see a folder called "Backups.backupdb". Clicking on that should give you the name of your Mac as a folder. Further clicking on the Mac's name should display a running list of all the backups that reside on the drive.

If the last backup in that list is May 3, then that's all you have. Let us know....

Yeah, that's what I was afraid of. Inside that directory are only backups from May 3. Looks like I'm taking the old MBP back to have the hard drive pulled. Any ideas why Time Machine would 'appear' to backup normally, and nothing actually being written?

There could be a number of reasons why backups were skipped after May 3, but I would start by checking your external hard drive or replacing it.

A bit of advice: Don't depend on Time Machine alone. Many of use use two methods of backing up. I personally use Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner on a regular schedule. A CCC backup or clone is handy to have since it's bootable and will also restore the recovery partition of Lion or Mountain Lion. TM backups are not bootable.

Those are great tips, thank you. I received the same advice from a buddy as well, and am researching other options that will work with my setup.

I was actually able to locate my backups after doing a bit more research. Turns out it was a permissions issue with the new account I had setup on the new MBP. I found this on another forum after I realized that that backups I was seeing from May 3 were only like 600MB, and my external drive was 900GB in size.

"Ah, that's a problem. You've run afoul of OSX (and Time Machine)'s system of keeping each user's stuff secure from other users."

"Time Machine keeps the backups for each Mac separate, and normally only shows the ones for the Mac it's running on (selected in the Time Machine Preferences window), even if there are other backups of the same or a different Mac on the same or different disk/partition.
Also, if you have more than one set of backups for the same Mac, Enter Time Machine will only show the backups in the set currently selected via the Time Machine Preferences window.

To see these "other" backups, you need the Browse Other Backup Disks or (Browse Other Time Machine Disks on Snow Leopard or Leopard) option. It's available by Alt/Option-clicking the Time Machine icon in your Menubar, or by control-clicking (right-clicking) the Time Machine icon in your Dock."

Thanks again for all the help, hope someone else down the road finds this info useful.

Hi there,

I just experienced the same problem-and have been freaking out. I just installed a new drive, went to time machine, and I am missing several months of my most recent backups. The date they are missing from coincides with the installation of a new logic board in the spring--which makes me think it's the same problem--a permissions issue of some sort. Any clues on how you were able to find where the permissions are and/or where the files/backups were hidden?

thanks,