Time Machine is skipping files and folders. How to fix? Running OS X 10.10.2 on a Early 2009 Mac Pro. System installed on a 256 GB solid state drive. 10 GB of memory.

I'm having a problem with Time Machine where it's not backing up some of my files and folders. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it, but it includes very, very important things like the parent directory for projects I'm working on, arbitrary hash directories in some git repositories, an assortment of emails, Messages attachments, random preferences files, and somehow the entire contents of my Pictures folder. And probably more -- I haven't checked everything.

I've recently forced Time Machine to do a full traversal when it made a recent backup (and confirmed that it was a full traversal by looking at backupd's output in Console.app), but these files are still missing.

I also tried going into one of the directories that wasn't being backed up and running:

find . -exec touch {} \;


to make every file appear to be recently modified, and then told Time Machine to make a new backup, but it still skipped them.

Does anyone have any suggestions for what I can do to fix Time Machine? I just want it to do a full backup, not skipping anything.

As a last ditch effort I could blow away my Time Machine drive and start from scratch, but I really, really don't want to do that because it contains several months worth of backups, and I occasionally do need to go back and get older versions of files.

Edit:

I haven't found a solution to this particular issue, but I have decided to discontinue using Time Machine for backups as I can no longer rely on it. I've decided to give ChronoSync a try since it seems pretty comparable.

Edit 2:

While re-reading some of my old questions I decided I'd make another update because I've learned more about this issue since my previous edit. I discovered that the cause of my data not being backed up was a bug in Qt's development tools, as detailed here. The fault was not Time Machine's. Since posting this question I've been using Time Machine again with no issues, though I still occasionally use my check-time-machine script to make sure everything is in fact being backed up properly.
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?