OS X Technologies :: Time Machine Stops Backing Up To External Disk - System Freezes
Feb 27, 2012
I have used Time Machine to backup my data on an external hard drive with ample space for the past year. However, for the past month or so when plug in my hard drive and try to back up my files using Time Machine, it completely freezes my computer, to the point where I need to hold down the power button for 10+ seconds and completely restart. At first I thought this might be due to not enough RAM, but discovered it does this even if all other programs are closed.
I have a 2 TB Seagate external drive and it is partitioned in 3 sections; 500 GB for my backup clone, 500 GB for Time Machine and 1 TB for extraneous extras.For some reason the TM backup failed today, now what?
So I have Time Machine syncing with an external drive and its been backing up perfectly without a problem for the last month. I have not plugged in the external drive in a week, but when I plugged it in to backup today, time machine will not back up to it. The computer sees that the drive is there and identifies at as the Time Machine drive but will not backup to it. The external drive is not full and there is no damage on it. Also, in the time machine system preferences window, the oldest, last, and next backup dates are all blank, they were filled before.
It's weird, time machine use to work fine. I have 3 HDD connected to my computer, and one of the slaves is mac journal case sensitive. Backups have been fine for the last couple months. However recently, time machine will not back up exactly a chunk of 222gb of data. When time machine gets to that point, it just stops. No error message no nothing. And at the top, it says "waiting for backup." Nothing else. I reformatted the hard drive guid, mbr, case sensitive etc etc, nothing. I even swapped out the external hdd and same problem.
How do I troubleshoot this or find out what is causing the problem? Is there a particular format time machine doesn't want to backup? Is there a partition format type time machine doesnt like?
I have Time Machine set up to backup my laptop, and it works just fine. I then decided, having enough space to spare, to point Time Machine of my girlfriend's laptop to the same backup location (she had been backing up to an external drive).
After setting everything up (network location, password, and everything), Time Machine happily starts backing up: Until it just stops copying/transferring data.Â
I start with a fresh, new, clean backup and I get no error message of any kind; after Time Machine selected the files to back up (= first run, so everything gets selected; that's about 40gb) it starts copying everything. But then it just stops. No errors, no progress, no anything.
This usually happens after having copied between 1 and 3 gb (I tried multiple times). Being on a gigabit ethernet, the copying is pretty fast; the first gb takes minutes. I even proceeded to letting the laptop run its backup through the night; even after a dozen hours, the indicator still is stuck at "1.27 gb of 40.24 gb" (or whatever).Â
I went so far as to check the laptop's hard drive (no errors). The backup system appears to work just fine; after all, Time Machine starts the backup just fine and doesn't report any errors or issues. (Also, if there was something wrong with it, it shouldn't work with my own laptop, either.) The only difference I could think of is that my laptop runs Lion, while my girlfriend's still runs Snow Leopard (both to their respective newest versions; could this discrepancy be the cause of any incompatibilities?).Â
I am going to backup the main system drive though. I'm thinking shall I use Time Machine to back it up or use a 3rd party application to back it up and make it boot-able at the same time?
Can anyone tell me how to tell Time Machine how to find an external hard drive (that is attached to myiMac) that I'd like to back up? If recoginizes it in a window for selecting a drive to back up to, but I can't seem to find any window to tell it what drives I want backed up. It backs up the internal hard drive on the iMac.
I'm currently backing up my MB (2007) to an external USB drive using Time Machine.
I also have a 250gb external drive full of everything I need for work and my music collection. Basically I've realised that if this drive goes down I will probably not be able to do my job, and won't have anything fun to do the rest of the time either because all my stuff will be gone!
This data drive is used daily on Windows XP, 2000 and Vista machines so it's formatted in FAT or NTFS (can't remember which) that Time Machine won't back up from. So TM isn't an option.
Do any of you backup experts know if there's a piece of Mac software or a particular model of external drive that I can get to basically synchronise TWO external drives? I need to be able to back up my external data onto another external drive on a daily basis so I can sleep at night.
I have 2 macs in my house.. a macbook pro and a macbook air. I have an old dell desktop running windows 7 that has a terabyte external harddrive hoooked up to it. I want to be able to use it as a network time machine drive. Both laptops are running snow leopard. I was wondering is this possible and if so, how can I do it. Currently I am able to see the desktop and the external hardrive on my network from the macs, and I am able to drag and drop onto them, however I want to be able to use time machine.
Nothing happens, the comupter, macBook Pro, Snow Leopard, freezes. The only functional button is the esc key. Once it is pressed the computer functions.
I have tried repairing permissions on my hard drive, repairing disk on the external disk. Still the same.
can't open the program time machine located in the folder /applications/time machine anymore, message says program ain't working for unknown reaason, but I still can open time machine in the menu bar. any clues what the trouble might be? and/or is there any way to reinstall time machine only on os x 10.7.3?Â
btw., on the system backup hd which is a mirror of the imac system, the programm still works
My MBPro is getting cranky in a number of ways that indicate a reinstall of Snow Leopard is in order. After the requisite disk first aid check I attempted to run the installer only to get a dialog box telling me that the system cannot be installed because this disk is used by time machine. The MacBook disk is of course a source for back ups but not a back up drive. Even after restarting and explicitly turning off Time machine I get the same results.What do I need to set to allow the installer to run. The installer cd is a stand alone snow leopard install cd, not a machine specific cd.
I need to deploy multi iMac for my company with exact same setup.I am able to do this with the Time Machine without problem.But I would like to know is there a way to backup the "Time Machine" USB HDD I have created, just incase my USB HDD is corrupted or I need to distribut the Time Machines to other office for deployment? Can I create a dmg file with my existing Time Machine USB HDD. so that I can make multi copy of USB HDD with the same dmg by restoring the dmg?
I see a lot of info about problems with various external drives working with Time Machine. I have Lion 10.7.3 and find that my old external drive that worked with PCs doesn't work. So, does Apples have a list of recommended esternal drives or at least a list of ones Apple knows are compatible?
I'm looking for a good, reasonably priced, external disk to temporarily use for Time Machine backups. My 10.9.4 install is messed up and Time Machine no longer works with my ReadyNAS NV+ system. I want to use the disk to backup my MBP and reinstall the OS. suggest a proven external disk (2TB+) with a USB 2.0 (or Ethernet) interface?Â
Info: MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9), 2007 15" Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz
Time Machine reported it failed backup due to the shortage of disk space. But I see the total space of partition is 192GB，the whole backup snapshot estimated is 177.56G.Â
The massage said that " failed backup, 52.85 GB is needed for backup but it's only 25.17 GB available." Â
I know it's 166.35GB of ancient snapshot still exist, but why not OSX to delete it automatically and release more space for new snapshot?Â
By the way, I can't delete those ancient snapshot in Finder manually, perhaps permission denied.
Info: MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013), OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)
What can be done if Time Machine failed to save certain data to external hard disk, but I do have the old hard drive? I have a new IMac 10.9.2. The old IMac was hit by lightning/surge. Restored data from external LaCie disk but some information is missing. Apparently Time Machine did not save it to the external disk, or we just can't locate it. We do haves the old hard disk and will put it in a box to be able to access it.
I have tons of pics and music....so does time machine really back up ALL of it and keep the same quality???? I cant seem to retrieve or look at the files individually when Im browsing thru the time machine backup hard drive.
I needed some extra HD space, so I deleted the 1.5TB hard drive I've been using as my TM backup and thought I'd partition it and re-run TM in the partition.
I erased the drive and created two partitions: 1TB and 500GB. I transferred 250GB of files to the 500GB partition and then set-up the 1TB partition to be used as the TM backup. I ran TM and it told me that it had backed up 264GB...the problem is that my internal HD has 478GB of data on it...so...something's not being backed up.
My only thought at this point is to erase the HD again, re-partition it, and run TM first...and then transfer the data to the other partition.
I have a Time Capsule as my Time Machine backup, which backs up my MBP and the external drive I use to hold all my files. The initial backup was roughly 400GB--325GB of which is iTunes related.
The initial backup--which I have done numerous times now--went fine. However, the next time I have the external drive connected, when Time Machine starts up to do its hourly incremental backup--it shows XXGB of 365GB ... so it is trying to re-backup my entire iTunes library. Anybody have this problem and find a solution?
I've been using time machine to back up to my WD hard drive but I am looking for a way that I can store photos and movies on my hard drive instead of leaving them on my laptop as well as backing up the whole laptop - when I back up with time machine if I then delete photos off my laptop can I simply pull them up from time machine at a later date and look at them from there?
Time Machine has been backing up insane amounts of data, and every time it's been backing up it's been going up, It's backing up at the moment and it's currently on 21GB. Not only that but when it finishes backing up it's been getting stuck on "Finishing Backup..." and the process coreservicesd has been using 90%+ of my CPU, causing my fans to go insane.
ihad my time machine in only wifi mode for like the last month or so, then I redicided to use the backing up feature and all kinds of weird things started happening.
At first, it just gave the message "Backing up" for hours, and it would just keep at that message. (I know that at some point it can take hours to actually start the backup but it�s not this case here) Then like yesterday it started backing up but I turned down the computer as I thought it would be normal that my time capsule would work normally.
I unplugged it, and hited the reset switch several times, and nothing happened. It would not work. Am not a computer technician, I spend most of my time making music.
I have a Time Capsule and Time Machine on MacBook regularly backs up between 1MB and 5GB of data every hour, depending on how much data I change/delete/add to my hard drive. Over the last few days, it has tried to backup 150GB, 90GB, and 220GB, despite the fact that I'm not doing anything other than surfing the web and checking my email. The total amount of used hard drive space on my Mac is 330GB, so I suspect that Time Machine is running into a bug when it calculates what needs to be backed up. Worse yet, I see that the amount of free space on my Time Capsule hard drive is shooting up, meaning that somewhere on the disk, backups are getting deleted and I'm not being notified, even though "Notify after old backups are deleted" is checked off in the Time Machine preference pane in System Preferences.
So my MBP has some funky display issues so I'm going to bring it to the Apple Store this weekend. Before I go I want to make sure everything is backed up on time machine incase they need to replace the whole unit or keep it for a few days to repair it. If they lost my data or had to give me a replacement one would I just be able to hook up my USB HDD and let Time Machine bring the new MBP back to it's old condition?
Would all of my program and settings be just as I left them? Bookmarks in Chrome?
Would all my iTunes purchases still exist as they do now?
Would I need to authorize iTunes again (using up another one of the five allowed.
I know this question was asked for a while, but I can't find the answer for 10.5.2. My point is, I wanted my iDisk to be backed up by Time Machine just as any other folder of my computer (by that, I mean backing up the local iDisk copy on the time machine HD, NOT backing up time machine on the iDisk). Until now, the only thing time machine did was copying the .sparsebundle of the iDisk any time a single file changed. Two drawbacks: a single change = 8Gb (for me) on time machine + restauration of a single 60k word file required to restore the entire disk image before extracting the right file.
This is why I stopped using iDisk. Now has someone by any chance a synced iDisk with 10.5.2 and tested backing up with time machine? I know some of you will answer iDisk is already a back up in itself. Sure, but there is no versioning every hour, plus I'd had synced issues that lead to losing on or two files (happened twice). This is why I won't use my iDisk until I can properly back it up/restore it in TM. BTW, I'm lazy to do the test myself, as re-activating the sync of my iDisk will take at least 2 hours to recreate the local copy on my MBP (hey Apple, remember you have EU customers?
i've been working on an important word document, word quit unexpectedly, document gone. luckily there was a copy of it in the microsoft user data.
but, my first reaction was, oh that's ok time machine would have backed it up. i go into time machine and it's not there. so i save the microsoft user data recovered file to a new file name in a documents folder. quit word. restart. do a time machine backup. it completes. but when i open up time machine, this document (and another one from 5 days ago) are not in ANY of the backups. and if i keep backing up, time machine will backup, but these files are not in any of the dates/times in time machine.
