In this paper, we consider a backward problem for a time-space fractional diffusion process. For this problem, we propose to construct the initial data by minimizing data residual error in fourier space domain and variable total variation (TV) regularizing term which can protect the edges as TV regularizing term and reduce staircasing effect. The well-posedness of this optimization problem is studied under a very general setting. Actually, we write the time-space fractional diffusion equation as an abstract fractional differential equation and get our results by using fractional semigroup theory, so our results can be applied to other backward problems for more general fractional differential equations. Then a modified Bregman iterative algorithm is proposed to approximate the minimizer. The new features of this algorithm is that the regularizing term changed in each step and we need not to solve the complexed Euler-Lagrange equations of variable TV regularizing term (just need to solve a simpler Euler-Lagrange equations). The convergence of this algorithm and the strategy of choosing parameters are also obtained. Numerical implementations are given to support our analysis to show the flexibility of our minimization model.