Time Machine Error

?After a reboot, got the 'preparing' thing for a while but this time the .inprogress file timestamp was updated and after about 5 minutes it started backing up. This looks to be all about faulty mounting/unmounting (in my case, my fault, but this state should be detectable and recoverable, and why exactly does the weekly iTunes/QT update require a reboot, is this WinXP??)

I seem to be having success after a few trial and error runs with TM on both my main Mac (Intel iMac) and my old G4 Powerbook, backing up to a Western Digital 500Gb drive and a Smartdisk Firelite.

My question is, I leave both machines overnight and the next backup seems to want to 'do' a huge amount of data-750Mb/!Gb or so and I have apparently added nothing to my HD's on either machine!

Is this everybody else's experience? Is it actually backing up a gig, it seems to do it very quickly, is it just scanning that amount of data but only copying some of it?

Nothing but positive here.

This is a new Mac Pro (10.4.10) with 3 internal drives labelled as follows:- Macintosh HD, Bay 2-500 and Bay 3-500.
The third drive was added specifically for Time Machine.

Leopard was installed as an update - NOT archive & install. All has been sweetness and light.

After 2 days (on 29th October) I invoked TM for the first time. It took about 30 minutes to do its stuff (there's not that much on the mac yet)

As I'm planning to use Aperture I set TM to NOT do automatic backups, instead invoking the backup from the dock when I take a break.

So far I haven't had one single problem with TM, it works exactly as Apple promised.

The issue of not-permitted characters has been known for a long time so I'm surprised that people are still using them - but as you can see - I've got a space and a hyphen and they are not causing any issues.

I would hazard a guess that it is not the use of these characters in the drive names that is causing the problem but more likely their use further down the directory tree on the problematic drives.

To the poster who says the TM is a pile of S...

I would suggest that time-machine is perhaps the most tested piece of apple software ever released - remember it was first shown almost 15 months ago.

Hmmm...I don't see here a reference to the thing that SOLVED my slow backup problem with Time Machine - disabling antivirus! I was using Norton AntiVirus 10, and found that it was virus-checking everything it was writing to the drive. Since there's no way to exclude a drive in AV10, I uninstalled it and voila! 20-hour long backup went to 20 minutes!

My first attempt with Time Machine went just fine, but when I decided to change the location of my backup from one drive to another, I started having the same problems many people here have reported: extremely slow backups, system hangs, etc. Erasing the preference files was not sufficient to fix this.

Then I re-booted into my Bootcamp Windows XP partition, which is equipped with MediaFour's MacDrive software. When I looked at the root directory of my main Mac drive, I noticed that there was a new, invisible file there: com.apple.timemachine.supported. A file with the same name was on all my other Mac HFS partitions and drives. I deleted all of them, and then switched back to the Mac OS, and deleted the Time Machine preferences from my Library/Preferences folder, and reformatted my preferred destination drive partition. The next time I launched TimeMachine from the System Preferences, it was like it was being launched for the first time, and I have had no problems since (knocks on wood...)

People who are not running a BootCamp partition with Windows on it may need to find some other way to see and delete the invisible files - perhaps through the Terminal.

Much easier than Terminal or XP: "Show&Hide"

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19239

I was getting the "An error occurred while creating the backup" error as soon as TM started to try to backup.

After 2 hours on the phone with AppleCare, it was working. What fixed it was:

1/ Changing Partition Map from APM to GUID (in Disk Utility, Partition)
2/ Renaming Computer (in Sharing Pane of Preferences) to iMac. Previous name had spaces, slashes, single quotes etc.

Doing 1/ was not enough, things only worked after 2/ was done. Don't know if 1/ was essential, but its done now and I'm not going to undo it.

Apple need to put some smarts into Time Machine:

-if it needs GUID for Intel Macs, then it needs to do a check and advise you of this prior to backup. It could even offer to do it for you, with appropriate warnings about losing all your data on the drive as a result.
-if it doesn't work with computers with wacky names, it needs to warn about this too, or else be fixed to work with such names. Our Mac had a wacky name because that is what the Leopard install gave it. We just entered our family name, which included a / between our surnames, and the installer inserted a quote eg. John Black/Smith's Computer. We just accepted this default offering. So Apple effectively broke TM with their own installer.

Hi luke

just to point as few errors in your last paragraph, If you look at my post just 3 or 4 places higher up,. you'll notice that I have spaces in all my drive names.

Wacky names - where? You computer should be called by default "Macintosh HD: - with a space in it - Leopard does not change that. I've never seen an update since before OS7 change that.

Do a spotlight search on your computer for 'john black's computer'. You will not find it - even if you are called john black - because even though you can see those words in certain network panels, there are no files with that name, the files are actually called johnblack.

Your point about a GUID v APM warning is probably valid, but the rest of your point is completely wrong.

Good question, I will check on and let you know.

I've been using Time Machine successfully since Leopard's release on my Power Mac G5. My external firewire 800 drive is partitioned using the Apple Partition Map scheme, with a 750 GB partition devoted to Time Machine. All is well.

Here's my question. I would like to occasionally hook up the drive to my MacBook and let Time Machine back it up on the same partition. Will this work without the drive being repartitioned as GUID? And if it is repartitioned as GUID, will Time Machine still work on my Power Mac G5 when I hook the drive up to it? Stated differently, is GUID compatible with both a PowerPC Mac and an Intel Mac?

I have two iMac both Intels. Both have Leopard.
I bought a G Drive 320. After two days of trying to backup for TM on my 20" iMac, I've almost given up. Strangely, it works fine on my wife's 17" iMac.

Here's what to do if you own a G Drive: Shut off your iMac. Plug in G Drive. Turn on G Drive and wait 10 seconds before powering up Computer. Go to Disc Utility and select Partition 1. Type in the name of your backup, select GUID, and make sure you select "extended." Do not select "extended journal." These instructions are directly from the G manual. On my wife's computer this worked fine, but my computer, no.
Maybe you've experienced what I have, i.e it starts to back up for about 15 minutes and always stops at 292 GB. Did this 15-20 times. Apple tech was extremely patient over the two days we fooled with this. I still can't figure why my computer won't backup on G Drive. I even trashed Photoshop CS2 as Adobe says it is not compatible with Leopard.

We've proven: the G drive works, and Leopard works . . . but apparently on selective iMacs.
Any ideas?

Arnie Warren

Alright so heres an update. This POS is still not working.
I tried it on a MYBOOK, a Lacie drive, and now a seagate. Everytime its crashing with a bus error. *** mate?

OK - I have solved this problem after days and multiple attempts including trying everything in these posts. I have a Powerbook G4 and a Western Digital 500 My Book. Couldn't get Time Machine to work whatever I did, reformatting several times, partitioning the right way etc. In the end I managed to get the initial backup to perform by limiting it to just my documents folder. Then expanded it until it started failing again. Then, on nothing more than a hunch, I decided to partition the external drive into 2 partitions - one of only 95 GB, plenty big enough for my back up and the rest for other things.

Once I did this, the expanded back up worked like a dream and it has taken clean backups every hour for the last 6 hours without complaining. Everything else is as suggested - Apple OS (Extended) format and partition, but 2 distinct partitions, the smaller one, which I just went ahead and labelled 'Time Machine'. It seems to work fine and also does not take that long to back up either.

Hope this helps some people

David

After days of doing some of the same things you all have been trying to do (reformatting my external drive, partitioning the drive as GUID / Apple OS (Extended), Changing the name of the drive and bugging the **** out of the Apple Genius' at my local Apple stores, I've finally had a great deal of success for the past six or so hours. I finally spoke to the right Genius. When I explained to him that I kept getting an error that said something like "error when copying files, he almost instantly said that I may have a corrupt file that is not allowing the back up process to continue. This reminded me of the time when my iCal would not work because I somehow had a corrupt event.

So, the solution:
- Within the Time Machine preferences under options, I excluded almost everything from being backed up. More specifically, I went through and selected / checked files on my hard drive under "do not back up" under options. Then I initiated a back up. It worked. I in the process of removing files and folders from the "do not back up" list under options to see if I can identify the file(s) that Time Machine does not like. But so far, so good. I'm already backing up most of my important files. Now to see if it will allow me to include my Library file(s).

I'll keep you posted.

You may have a "corrupted" file or simply a file that Time Machine does not agree with. Try limiting the files that Time Machine is able to back up. By going to the Time Machine Preferences, clicking options and then adding files and folders to the that list (which will exclude them from being backed up). Initially, the list might be fairly long. But if you are able to get Time Machine to back up a fairly small amount of information from your internal hard drive, you can then systematically shorten the list exclusion list until you encounter the problems again. Then you might know what files are causing Time Machine to not work.

I hope this helps.