Time machine suddenly does not include new directories in its backup

Question

My Time Machine is going for a year quite strong, but now it suddenly stopped including new directories in its backup. The situation is the following:

(1) Around Dec 21 19:00:00 I have created a directory "/Users/bongu/Pictures/Import/Eye-Fi/NewDir" and copied some photos inside it.

(2) Later I kick off a normal backup. The sytem log files says it worked fine:

Dec 21 19:35:59 leosbook com.apple.backupd[2218]: Starting standard backup
Dec 21 19:35:59 leosbook com.apple.backupd[2218]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Wisdom/Backups.backupdb
Dec 21 19:36:02 leosbook com.apple.backupd[2218]: 2.28 GB required (including padding), 319.50 GB available
Dec 21 19:36:04 leosbook com.apple.backupd[2218]: [...]
Dec 21 19:36:07 leosbook com.apple.backupd[2218]: Backup completed successfully.

(3) However the new directory NewDir does not get backed up. (Even at subsequent scheduled backups. The directory is not part of the latest backup. I checked in the Time machine interface. From the command line an ls reveals the same:

> ls /Volumes/Wisdom/Backups.backupdb/leosbook/latest/book/Users/bongu/Pictures/Import/Eye-Fi/NewDir
ls: /Volumes/[...]: no such file or directory

(4) Additionally the newly created directory is not excluded. I checked in the Options of the Time machine preferences and tested via tmutil in Terminal:

> tmutil isexcluded "/Users/bongu/Pictures/Import/Eye-Fi/NewDir"
+    /Users/bongu/Pictures/Import/Eye-Fi/NewDir

How does this possibly happen? And any idea how can I resolve it?

Answer 1

Just a few suggestions:

1. Check that you are not looking to far back in time. obviously the folder will not exist in the past.
2. Check that the folder is actually being included in the backup.
3. Check to see that your time machine isn't full, if it is you could tell it to delete old data as it needs it.