Hi,

How do I make Time Machine to make a new complete backup without losing older versions of backed up files?

Verbose:

I am using the Time Machine backup on my OS X (Snow Leopard) to backup the whole computer to an external drive. I especially like the "history", i.e. the feature that allows you to restore the older version of a file.

Problem: I had some data corruption on my external backup drive, I repaired it with the System Tool for doing that, it found some faults. I had the disk tool repair the external drive. After that, the external drive was OK and I could use Time Machine again.

I let Time Machine do one more backup.

Now I made a verification according to http://superuser.com/questions/47628/verifying-time-machine-backups,

namely along

sudo diff -qr . $HOME/Desktop 2>&1 | tee $HOME/timemachine-diff.log

However: After doing the command above, several differences and missing files were reported, approx. 200 files in sum.

Whereas some of the missing files were cache or excluded directories, the differences do bother me, especially as some important documents from me are listed as differing.

How can I make sure that the data on the external drive is synced correctly?

• Is it possible to have Time Machine to do a complete new backup without losing the history?

• Or to have Time Machine compare all files for differences and re-write all files that are different?

• Or can I set some flags on the files that do not match to have them copied again? (like the archive-flag in Windows/Dos). I'd rather not touch the files because I would like to keep the date of last change/date of creation)

Thank you for your thoughts!