Frozen in Time by Time Machine

I plagued my mobile HD to a new mac os x at work and it turned my HD into a "time machine" I tried to cancel it but now on the mac the HD looks empty and my PC doesn’t recognise it any more....
is it possible to undo it? are all the files on the HD gone?

This is really sad. Between this and the Me.com fiasco, Apple is clearly dropping the ball with their software.

If anyone has a fix please let me know. I've check a bunch of forums and the only consolation is that I've got plenty of company.

Hi folks...

I experienced major problems when I first wirelessly connected my Time Capsule and setup 24" 2.8 GHz iMac Time Machine last summer. Ended up erasing the original sparsebundle and then creating a new one by hooking the Time Capsule directly to the iMac via Ethernet cable. Got a good "baseline" copy of my data at that point. Since then, Time Machine has worked like a champ even after multiple Apple OS updates. As others have mentioned, sometimes leaving Time Machine alone to sort things out seems to work. Just my two cents.

I have always had great luck with Time Machine and have restored from a backup once after some software (apparently irreversibly) screwed up a bunch of network preferences, and also set up my new unibody MacBook from the Time Machine backups of my old MBP. Took about 10 minutes and worked like a charm.

I have much better luck, and save a lot of hard drive space, by using Super Super! instead. If you register Super Duper! you get the ability to do a smart backup, which only copies files that have changed since the last backup. On top of that, a Super Duper! clone is bootable, unlike Time Machine, and requires no special programs or day-long waits to restore it.

If you do your Super Duper! backups to a drive of the same type/size as the one in your Mac, then you only need to physically swap drives to be back in business in case of emergency. No copying needed. The clone is exactly what you were working with before, without needing to be "interpreted" by the OS, like Time Machine.

All I know is that if a person using only Time Machine has a crash, then they need to get a new hard drive, reinstall OS X, then restore their Time Machine backup via Migration Assistant. That's a lot of work. If I have a crash, I pull the drive out of my external enclosure, and put it in my MacBook, and that's it. I'm done. OS X and all my files are back exactly as they were the last time I ran Super Duper!.

I can still pluck accidental deletions off the Super Duper! drive, too-- As long as I haven't done a smart backup since the deletion. That's Time Machine's only advantage: It lets you pull out deleted files from a month ago.

My plan? I don't delete things I need.

I know it is normal that usually only people with issues respond to blogs. However I would like to at least add a positive note. I have never had an issue with TM on any of my 3 machines. Even after upgrading to 10.5.6 TM worked properly. All of my machines connect to a Time Capsule for TM use. I have been using TM since the day Leopard was released. I am sure I am not the only one that has had no issues.

After 10.5.6 update my Time Machine is performing a series of 20+ Gb backups, in one day only it backed up more than 250 Gb of data, resetting all of my time machine history, leaveing my oldest backup 1 day old. Is this happenig to someone else???

i had time machine preparing for 5 hours after the 10.5.6 update (which went fine without any glitches)...this may be due to the fact that i'm backing up wirelessly to my time capsule from a nearly full 250gb mbp...also i did just get max in/out speeds of 900kbps...usually it's somewhere between 1,4 and about 3 mbps when backing up....i've just let it do it's work and it then backed up after all...now it's working fine and at full speed again!

Time machine don't recognize my USB drive as an TM backup disk. This appeared after 10.5.6 upgrade. Way to go Apple

Thank God I havent updated yet. I'll wait for the 10.5.7

I'm even having problems with the iphone 2.2 update. Cydia keeps crashing and somehow my recent calls are not updated. Anyone else facing this problem?