OS X V10.5 Leopard :: Time Machine: "Backup Volume Could Not Be Found."
Feb 15, 2012
I saw that this issue has been addressed and there seems to be a few solutions for it but I had a hard time understanding some of the steps described in previous posts. I am running OS Leopard 10.5.8 and I am using a FreeAgent 500GB hard drive for Time Machine. Today I tried to back up and all of a sudden I'm getting the "Backup Volume Could Not be found" error. I tried deselecting it and reselecting it, and now its saying it doesn't have enough space to back it up.Â
I really don't want to completely erase the hard drive if that isn't going to fix it. Before now it would just overwrite a few old backups and make enough room for a new one, while leaving 2 old ones on there. I want it to do that.Â
I need to change my backup volume for Time Machine. But I don't see [Preferences] or [Change Disk] when I click on Time Machine from the System Preferences.
I am getting the following error from Time Machine when doing my first backup. The startup disk being backed up, and the TM disk are both the same size.
Macintosh HD: 465.44 (total); 393.99 (free); 71.45 (free) Time Machine: 465.44 (total); 465.29 (free)
The Time Machine error is: Quote:
"This backup is too large for the backup volume. The backup requires 472.7 GB but only 465.3 GB are available." why would this be? Other disks are excluded from the backup, and Time Machine is telling me that it needs more space than it actually needs. What should I do?
Well TM is acting up. I get an error that reads: "This backup is too large for the backup volume."
Both the internal boot disk and the external baclup drive are 1TB. The internal one has a two partitions, the OSX one that is 900GBs and a 32GB NTFS one for Boot Camp. The external drive is a single OSX Extended part. that is 932GBs.
Both the Time Machine disk, and the Boot Camp disk are excluded from the backup along with a "Crap" folder for temporary large files.
Time Machine says it needs 938GBs to backup only the OSX disk, which has 806GBs in use with the rest free. WTFFF?
This happened after moving a large folder (128GB in total) from the root of the OSX disk over to my Home Folder.
I have reformated the Time Machine drive and have no backups at all of my data and it refuses to backup!!
Why would it need 938GBs of space to backup if the disk has "only" 806 GBs in use??? Is there anyway to reset Time Machine completely???
Late last night I accidentally ejected Time Machine from the Devices section of the Finder window. I've now spent half a day trying to get the computer to recognise my external hard drive again as attempting to use Time Machine results in the message "Storage Machine for Time Machine backup can't be found." I can find my WD desktop 1TB drive with Disk Utility but not in Finder. If I click on the WD Ext HDD 1021 Media in Disk Utility there is the option to Verify in the top menu, but nothing happens when I click on it. All the options verify, and repair are greyed out. I've checked the computer hard drive and done the verify and repair disk and permissions process.
I've turned off the computer, disconnected the external hard drive, turned off time machine, then turned everything back on but still can't get the external hard drive to be recognized. This is extremely frustrating and I have run out of ideas. I know it all started when I clicked on the eject button for the external hard drive in the devices section of the finder. Such a simple mistake, but I have searched everywhere online and can't find a resolution that I can actually try. I can't verify and repair the WD hard drive if these options aren't available in Disk Utility.
I might be going mad but I have bought a new portable hard drive today & I erased it using disk utility as it was a Windows one and then added it as a new disk in Time Machine.Â
I expected to find a check box to encrypt the data but its not there.Â
I encrypted the other portable HDD's I have but can't see from the description now if they are or not. I am certain that they are however.Â
The new disk is 1.55 TB free of 2 Tb's, the previous one is 1.43 free of 2 Tb and my oldest is only 253Gb free of 1Tb. I guess that the difference is the amount of old data and backups I have done with Time Machine already or hasn't it backed up properly?Â
One last thing, on the Time machine prefs there is an option button & when I click it it says "excludes these items from backups" and it lists the new portable HDD and the size of the backup which is 447.09Gb. It estimates the size of the full backup as 492.65 Gb. What this means & whether its set up correctly?Â
I am using Mavericks 10.9.4 & an iMac 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 machine
Info: iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.4), 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5
I just got my Mac back from a repair at the Apple Store. I was very excited to have everything back. However, Time Machine cannot back up! The error given is that the backup volume "cannot be found."
I've tried rebooting, remounting the drive and doing checks on it. Everything checks out. I can even write and read to and from the backup volume just fine via Finder. The only issue is that Time Machine can't. What's the problem? How do I fix it?
Attached is a screenshot of my Finder window next to the Time Machine Sys Prefs window.
I have been backing up my computers to an external HD with Time Machine for some time, but I just bought a 1Tb Time Capsule today. Is there a way to move/copy my existing TM backups to the new drive (in the Time Capsule), rather than starting a whole new backup, so that I can preserve my existing TM 'history'? I could just start a new backup, but it would only back up the 'current state', and I would lose all the prior data.
I've spent a good deal of time over three days trying to do something that I think is both doable and shouldn't be all that hard. I have a 750gb external HD attached to a Mini, and I'd like to use that drive to do TM backups for the Mini, as well as three MacBooks.
But I can't seem to get access to the backup drive from the laptops to either get going in the first place, or to remain available for TM. I get "volume can't be mounted" errors, "image can't be mounted errors", etc. I find that I can't ever eject the backup drive from the Mini (always told an application is using it...even if I've just booted up the Mini). And with one of the MacBooks, even a direct FW connection to the drive doesn't result in the drive showing up in Finder.
Isn't this a pretty straightforward thing to do? Is there a step by step somewhere that might help me figure out what I'm doing wrong, or what I need to fix? Should I reformat the drive again and start over (there are no important backups on it yet)? By the way, the drive is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
I'm having trouble backing up with Time Machine. Here's the setup:
1. Three, 1TB external hard drives in a concatenated software RAID. This means that they are treated as one large drive. There is no mirroring, no increased data rate, blah blah blah. It's just three hard drives in the place of one. I am aware that this means my backup is three times as likely to fail with the hardware, but that's OK.
2. These three are connected to a USB hub.
3. This hub is connected to a G5 tower. The G5 tower can back up to the concatenated drives (I'll call them just a RAID from here on), and also all additional external hard drives that I connect to the G5 tower have been backing up to the RAID no problem. This is great.
Here's the problem:
I'm trying to get two more computers to back up to the RAID wirelessly. I read a lot online about how this didn't used to be a supported feature (backing up to an external hard drive over a network with time machine), but that Apple has recently upgraded Time Machine to support this functionality.
The first computer I started with to try to backup over the network was a Macbook Pro, trying to get it to backup to this RAID. It can see the RAID over the network, mount it, copy files to it/read it, but CANNOT time machine backup to it. I select the network RAID as the backup device, hit "back up now," then get this message:
"The external volume cannot be mounted."
This is really bizzare, considering that it is mounted, and that I can copy to it. Just for your information, I have an airport extreme wireless network that has been working beautifully, no Keychain access issues, no 3rd party firewall, nothing. I've run through Applecare on this issue: the MacBook Pro has never done ANY time machine backup on the RAID, not even a partial one, so there's no dangling sparse bundle or backup folder or anything like that. All network permissions check out, etc. I've tried repairing the RAID with disk utility, as well as repairing permissions (although I have not done either of these things to the MacBookPro).
The latest thing I tried was plugging the RAID directly into the Macbook Pro. Here's where I got the first clue (at least I think so)...Plugged DIRECTLY into the MacBook Pro, the RAID will mount, but the MacBook Pro WILL NOT backup to the RAID. It gives me the same message: the selected volume cannot be mounted. Again, this is strange considering that, just like when I am viewing the RAID over the network, plugged directly into the MacBook Pro the RAID will mount, I can read it, copy files to it, etc.
I have considered plugging the RAID into the Airport extreme directly, but first of all this would mean much slower transfer speeds with the G5 tower, which is a big issue considering the files I am backing up every day, and two, since it seems that the RAID won't be recognized by the MacBook Pro even when plugged in directly, I'm thinking that this is a more fundamental issue.
if i am running my new lion OS on drive #1 and i have a Raid1 array on drive #3 and #4 with all my DATA - can i back this up using Time Machine? i would like to place my OS's on a single drive and have my DATA in a raid array but if this means that i lose the ability to retain a Time Machine backup of my data i will simply upgrade to Lion and keep the data on this drive so it can continue to get backed up in time.Â
Well TM is acting up. I get an error that reads: "This backup is too large for the backup volume." Both the internal boot disk and the external baclup drive are 1TB. The internal one has a two partitions, the OSX one that is 900GBs and a 32GB NTFS one for Boot Camp. The external drive is a single OSX Extended part. that is 932GBs. Both the Time Machine disk, and the Boot Camp disk are excluded from the backup along with a "Crap" folder for temporary large files.
Time Machine says it needs 938GBs to backup only the OSX disk, which has 806GBs in use with the rest free. WTFFF? This happened after moving a large folder (128GB in total) from the root of the OSX disk over to my Home Folder. I have reformated the Time Machine drive and have no backups at all of my data and it refuses to backup!! Why would it need 938GBs of space to backup if the disk has "only" 806 GBs in use??? Is there anyway to reset Time Machine completely?
I just purchased a Seagate 3 TB USB 2.0/3.0 external drive to use as my time machine backup drive. I have a MacBook Pro that was purchased about 3-4 years ago. The MacBook Pro has a 120 GB hard drive and is currently running MAC OSx 10.6.8. I also have another WD 1 TB FireWire external drive that I use to store all of my media files. Â
After I followed the instructions for installing the new Seagate drive for use with the MAC OSx, I initiated a time machine backup. It very quickly determined that it needed to back up almost 900,000 files totaling just about 400 GB. It started the backup process at a rate of about 1 GB per minute. In a little less than an hour it reach 53 GB and remained there for an additional two hours before I decided to stop the backup. Â
Once I got the backup stopped, I deleted the backup and decided to look at my energy saving settings. I noticed that the "Put drives to sleep whenever possible" check box was checked, so I unchecked that option and restarted the MAC. I then initiated the time machine backup again. Like the first time it quickly determined that it needed to backup the same amount of data as before and started the backup process at a rate of about 1 GB per minute. Before going to bed at around 11 PM last night it was at about 60 GB so I thought I was out of the woods (having gotten further than the 53 GB earlier). When I woke up this morning at 5:30 AM it was sitting at 69 GB.Â
I am really frustrated at this point and don't know why the time machine back up would be failing on a brand new hard drive. PS - I was previously using a Seagate 1.5 TB USB drive as my time machine backup and never had any issues with it. I decided to use the 1.5 TB drive for a different purpose, which is why I have the new 3 TB drive to use as a backup. And I still have the full backup on the 1.5 TB drive just in case anything were to go awry.
I lost an external hard drive due to failure. Luckily, I found out that for some reason Time Machine had backed up the drive's volume along with my startup internal drive.Now I just want to restore that lost drive's volume folder from Time Machine to a NEW external drive. However, I imagine that if I merely click "Restore" from Time Machine app it will attempt to put this volume (which is 100GB) onto my internal drive.
Is there a way to direct the location of the restore of that volume folder to my new external drive? Or can I just go into my Time Machine Backup drive and drag and drop the volume contents from the Time Machine volume onto it?
Info:Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), Quad Core, Intel Xeon
I use a lot of plug ins for music production in Logic. Like an idiot, i upgraded to snow leopard, after having this problem with the upgrade to leopard from tiger. Of course half of my plug ins dont work.So i Time Machine backed up everything on my HD. I put my old leopard install disc in and restored to my Time Machine volume. It took about 2 and a half hours.
At the end of that, it asks you to restart, and i do and as soon as the apple pops up on the off-white screen, kernel panic and i have to restart. this is never ending Ive tried repairing and verifying disk permissions from the leopard disc of my HD and still nothing.My final guess would be to just do a clean install of Leopard and then restore from time machine again. This seems SUPER risky to me as there are TONS of important project session files that i CANT afford to lose.Everything is backed up on my Time Machine drive, im still just a little nervous about doing this.Anyone have any other ideas and does this sound like a secure plan?
My TM backups seem to be proceeding normally on my MBP (which is only sometimes connected to its Time Capsule), but spotlight takes about an hour to index my backup volume each time. Looking at my system.log, I notice that the TM backup volume number is increasing by one each time:Â
[code]...
and so on. Is it normal that the volume name increments each time like this? Could this be related to the long indexing time, which just started recently?
possible to back up all your data with Time Machine on Leopard and then install Snow Leopard and use Time Machine to restore all of your pictures/movies/music and the like?
I'm going to assume it's a no go since Time Machine is capable of a full system backup -- it may just turn your system back into Leopard?
I have a Apple Time Capsule which is used as a Time Machine Backup Facility and also a Wireless Hub for File Sharing and Internet Connection. I've been using Leopard for a couple of years without any significant problems. The other day, I installed Snow Leopard and suddenly, I'm facing a number of different problems and errors regarding backups to the Time Machine with the Time Capsule.
First, I was facing problems with a Case Sensitive error and now that I have ejected the Time Capsule, the Disk Utility has come up with a different name altogether and now I have the added problem of disk space on the time capsule. I know I could re-format and start over but that would defeat the whole point of my backups. The Time Machine/Capsule should re-write over the old backups when making space for new ones but its just giving me an error about not enough disk space.
I had to have the old hard drive replaced on my macbook pro running Snow Leopard 10.6.8 operating system. It was replaced at the apple store. I brought it home and yesterday restored it from the last time machine backup of my old hard drive which was Friday. That appears to be the only backup on the external hard drive I've been using with Time machine.
Today, it gets an error message. "Time Machine could not complete the backup. This backup is too large for the backup disk"...etc.
It is almost like it is trying to completely back up the new hard drive even though it was just restored from it. Is it because it thinks it is a different drive or something because it is a new hard drive? I don't want to delete the one good backup that I have but, I want to be able to use time machine to back anything up.
So finally I hooked up an external HD to my iMac 24 to use with Time Machine. My internal drive is partitioned into several sections and the system partition of about 80GB is supposed to be backed up to this eternal drive which is a 500GB, freshly formatted. Setup is easy enough. After Time Machine starts backing up it goes to about 100MB then it stalls. Essentially it keeps running, the turning clock symbol in the menubar is spinning but no data is moved.
At this point I can stop back up and then do click 'Back Up Now' in the menu at which time it will copy a few kb's and then halt displaying '2KB of 60.96GB'. I realize that there must be something on my HD it doesn't like to copy but unlike in my other backup app I don't know how to find that. The Console doesn't tell me much. I have done repeated Repair Permissions but it doesn't help.
I just got a new 1tb sata 2.5in and I want to install it, but I do not have my snow leopard disk. If I use a leapord disk will it reinstall snow leapord from my time machine backup or do I need to find my snowleapord disk?
I've been having a few problems with my MacBook Pro ever since I upgraded to Snow Leopard, and some of these problems haven't been remedied even after several reinstalls. The main thing that's bothering me is my screen has started to flicker slightly (most noticable when a page has a white background), and it occurs on any brightness. It used to do this in Leopard as well, but not to this extent - it only ever did it if I was running on battery power and if the brightness was turned down quite low. Under Snow Leopard it's doing it under all brightness levels and regardless of if it's charging or on battery. It doesn't happen at all in my Boot Camp partition, so although it could just be a hardware thing that happened to start around the time Snow Leopard installed, I'd like to reinstall Leopard and see if it helps at all.
However, my question is - I have a Time Machine backup from Snow Leopard, would I be able to use this at all after I reinstall Leopard? Even if it's just to get my documents and apps back?
If I use Time Machine to back up automatically to an external hard drive, but want to keep large files only on the external hard drive, will I lose the files once deleted off the computer (i.e. will Time Machine synchronize, or just save new files?)
I am running 10.6.8 on my MacPro (early 2008). I have 4 internal hard drives. The main boot drive has 10.6.8 and the secondary drive with a system has Lion. I cannot completely upgrade to Lion on my main drive until all my software is compatible. My main boot drive started acting like it's in slow motion 2 days ago. No matter what I do (DiskWarrior, Disk Utility, zap PRAM, fix permissions) nothing seems to work. Every mouse click or movement gives me the dreaded spinning wheel and it hangs for about 5 min and then does what it's supposed to do.
I have logged into a new account w/ no special 3rd party apps or utilities and it still does the same thing. Hard drive diagnostics say my hard drive is ok. I have tried reinstalling the 10.6.8 combo update but that hangs after a few minutes of starting. I thought about restoring a Time Machine backup from 1 day before this happened, but before I attempt a full disk backup, need to ask what to do so as not lose everything. I assume I must boot up from another disk or hard drive, correct? Can I simply select all the system folders and apps folder or do you think I should do a complete restore?
I have TM backing up to my external usb drive. Just curious but where and what's the folder called while TM is backing up? Is it called Backups.backupdb?Â