[trip221]

I have a new Macbook and the first time I hooked up my external HD and ran Time Machine, it took a while and backed up I don't even remember how many gigs worth of stuff.

Yesterday I added a few CD's to my itunes collection, probably 200mb's worth. Later on I plugged in my external hd and told Time Machine to "back-up now." It only copied 1mb to the time machine drive? What's up with that?

I do have my external partitioned so that I can manually back up music, pictures, etc., so I copied the new stuff to that partition, but what's wrong with my Time Machine?

[TETENAL]

You can navigate to your backup drive in Finder and check whether it backed up your music or not. If your music folder is not in the Time Machine exclusion list in System Preferences, then it should back it up.

[peeb]

What makes you think it only backed up 1mb? Something is wrong if it did not copy everything.

[trip221]

If you have the system preferences - time machine window open, it will show you the back-up status percentage bar and say "xxx mb out of xxx mb." For me it only went up to "... out of 1 mb."

I'll have to go back through the finder to see if it's there. I left the default settings, so I assumed that would back up everything.

[peeb]

I think that you might have misread this, or that the percentage bar is not what you think it is. My suspicion is that everything was copied over - have a look and see.

[Hal Itosis]

This may not exactly answer the question, but we can see a list
of paths and items that Time Machine definitely excludes like so:

defaults read /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions

Note the last group is in userland, so for example "Library/Caches"
means: every /Users/*/Library/Caches folder.

[Tomchu]

I've noticed that after a long backup, Time Machine will run another backup right after with only 1-2 MB of data copied. That probably happens because FSEvents catches changes to your hard drive DURING the first Time Machine backup, and then TM goes back to write those changes to the backup structure as well.

[peeb]

That's what I am thinking happened.

[trip221]

Okay. So by now I've added at least 4 gigs of music and some pictures. I opened the finder and searched for a song. When it shows that file, I hit the Time Machine icon and it opens up in the Time Machine screen. It shows the file in the "Now" screen, but if I move it back to the most recent backup (about an hour ago), no files appear. It's the same if I search for a recently added picture.

I double checked the time machine preferences and the only thing excluded from backups is the actual external drive I'm backing everything up on (so TM doesn't back up itself?).

NEW INFO:
I opened up my time machine drive in the finder and looked through the files in the backup folder. They are all there so why aren't they showing up when I run time machine?

[Tomchu]

Do you have Spotlight indexing turned off on all or part of the volume you're searching? (Privacy tab)