Time Machine is skipping files and folders. How to fix?
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?