Time Machine Error

I have a brand-new Simple-Tech 300 GB drive which I bought for $99 at Frys. I reformatted it to Mac OS journelled specifications and it works fine. I can copy anything to it. Time Machine came up briefly and asked me if I wanted to use it as the Time Machine drive. I said yes, and then it did something quickly and then shut down. Whenever I click on the Time Machine icon, it says, "Unexpected error -43"

Input validation bugs... sad sad sad

This more than anything reflects poor QA @ Apple

Wooohooo!!!! I solved my time machine error problem! Theere is this slider switch on the screen called on - off. When set to off, Time Machine Works just about the same as it did before (it doesn't work), the notable exception being that I don't get the warnings, in no small part because the backups never fail now (they never run either) and CCC 3 does a great job back in its place.

Time Machine is a right piece of crap, Maybe when they come out with a version that actually works I'll look at it again. In the meantime, may tranquility and Carbon Copy Cloner reign supreme.

Phil

I won't bore you with my tale of woe except to say I have not been able to complete the TM initial backup.

The backup failed three times with about 80-90GB of the backup done.

I am at the Apple Genius bar and my initial backup is going very well.

We brought the computer up in safe mode.
TM failed (unable to stat a Dreamweaver application file).

We excluded Applications from the backup.
After an hour and fifteen minutes TM has so far backed up 67 GB of the 124 GB to be done.

I'll post again when I have info that may be useful.

I got the EXACT SAME MESSAGE when repairing my disk permissions (while trying to figure out why TM can't complete a successful backup). Coincidence?

Where can I find such a log on my computer? I'd love to see at which file TM crashes, but your messages don't look like the ones I get from Console or its Crash Reports. Where did your log come from?

POSITIVE FEEDBACK
I went Leopard with my PPC iMAC and Intel MacPb Pro last weekend. I may have troubles with them, not yet sure.
But, my G4 is my office workhorse, and I went Leopard overnight. I designated the 250Gb Maxtor internal backup drive as my TM backup drive, On it already were about 6Gb of iPhotos etc.

All smooth as silk. In Mail this morning, as each email batch came in, there is a separate entry in TM.

So guys & gals, sure there are problems, but not for everyone except for those in trouble and seeking this forum out, as I did. truly can't see Apple releasing the product otherwise. Some rough edges, sure, but hang in there!!

Hi,
After reading through this tale of woe I must say it is so frustrating when a machine doesn't work as expected.
I really think that it was a mistake for there to be an update option on the Leopard install disk. I feel it will be a rare circumstance that a system will be in good enough shape for that update to work well. Just think of what the installer has to do. It goes through every inch of tiger and changes what it needs t to make it leopard. How many possibilities are there for something to be missed? I am sure it is thousands. I did the update and my very fast 2.4 CD Macbook pro turned to molasses. Time machine worked sort of as long as you didn't do anything else with the machine.
I realized then that the update was not the way to go.
I would suggest everyone having trouble with any part of Leopard, by trouble I mean really non functioning parts not just an occasional glitch in graphics or mail doing something weird, Should back up just your data the best way you can and do an erase and install. I know this means finding all of the install disks of .dmg files but think of the time you are spending being frustrated with a broken computer. You know that after a clean install you will be functioning at least. There will be bugs. This is a .0 release. Those of us brave enough to try it have to deal with the issues. I agree there should be a bit more info from Apple about the potential snags but i seriously doubt that they can second guess all of them. I do believe that the update method was misleading.
I have been using Leopard a lot and I find it very functional. Lots of great innovations. Just give it time.

Greg N

I've read this agony column about TM and have shared the pain. However, I seem to have fixed my problem through TMs' options: make sure that you exclude the target disk and make sure you do not exclude your system disk!

FYI my target for TM is an external USB2 250GB Seagate drive formatted in MacOS (journaled) I forget which flag I set.

I thought my Time Machine was on the fritz as well, until I saw the post about checking the system.log for more details. It kept saying "Nothing to Backup". Now you would have thought that if the TM prefs explicitly exclude the boot drive that it would not run, but it ran anyway and gave me a vague error message "Error creating backup file".

I (apparently) had mysteriously excluded my boot drive and that's where my issue was fixed.
Simply removing that from the exclusion list removed the error condition (duh!)

After having failed 5 times to persuade Leopard's Disk Utility to repair the volume of my LaCie backup drive, I finally succeeded in negotiating the sweet message of "appears to be OK."

Here's how.:

1) I clean-installed Leopard (successfully) onto my MacBook Pro 17" Core Duo 2.16GHz, 100GB HDD (7200rpm), 2GB RAM; after a reboot, did Software Update immediately.

2) Verified disk permissions of Macintosh HD. The result was:

*Verify permissions for “Macintosh HD”*
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAg ent" has been modified and will not be repaired.

*Permissions verification complete*

(Let it be.)

3) Disk-verified Mac HD. The result was:

*Verifying volume “Macintosh HD”*

Performing live verification.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
*The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK.*

4) Opened System Preferences>Energy Saver> Sleep
Set MBP never to sleep. Made sure Bluetooth and AirPort were both off.

5) Connected a portable hard disk drive (LaCie Little Big Disk 240GB, 7200rpm ) to MBP via FireWire 800. (First attached one end of the 9-pin cable to MBP's FW800 port, and then, the other end to LBD's FW800 port.)

6) Made sure LBD was mountable. (As TM Preferences popped up, turned it off for the time being.) Opened Disk Utility; securely erased LBD; chose "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)", typed the name "LBD" ; clicked Erase to format it. (Partition Map Scheme was GUID.)

7)Opened Time Machine afresh and closed all the other apps;TM seemed to recognise LBD as a verified backup disk, and started copying the entire Mac HD to LBD. (Took about 50 min. to finish.)

8) As soon as the 1st backup was done, I let Disk Utility verify LBD again. Result:
*The volume LBD appears to be OK.*



A success at last! but I don't know why. The only difference this time is that I turned off Bluetooth and used MBP's built-in Keyboard. Previously, I was using an Apple Wireless Keyboard & Wireless Mighty Mouse; and each time I formatted, re-formatted, and re-re-reformatted LBD, Time Machine/Disk Utility blamed it in unison as a faulty, irreparable, in-need-of-re-formatting volume.
The weird thing was, the seemingly villainous little disk continued to do its job meticulously, and received from Console a very positive message: "Backup completed successfully." I'd never have realised its perversity if I hadn't tried to verify it.

Can Bluetooth be the culprit? Could it possibly interfere the FireWire 800 circuit and muddle the digital signals?? Or could it cause some shocking irregularity of voltage to baffle my poor MBP's Power Manager???
I think not....Well, I hope not. (Sorry for taking so much space.)

Message was edited by: phelice

My Time Machine is getting the system frozen every time it starts backing up.
I don't know why, but after one day trying finally started the whole Time Machine system and made a whole day of backups, closed the macbook went outside, and yesterday I connected again for another time machineshow. Worked fine first time, but when the second hourly programmed backup started it froze (justa the same that first day install)
05/11/07 18:10:15 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1798] 1798 Backup requested by automatic scheduler
05/11/07 18:10:15 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1798] 1798 Starting standard backup
05/11/07 18:10:20 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1798] 1798 Backing up to: /Volumes/Hosaka DataCenter/Backups.backupdb
05/11/07 18:10:20 com.apple.backupd[1798] 1798 2007-11-05 18:10:20.577 FindSystemFiles[1799:713] Querying receipt database for system packages
05/11/07 18:10:21 com.apple.backupd[1798] 1798 2007-11-05 18:10:21.915 FindSystemFiles[1799:713] Using system path cache.

And the hangs. In this state I can not open any other app, (just keep bouncing on the dock but does not open any window) and my mac only goes alive if I unplug the external drive (yes it hurts me too).

By what I see on the log it seems a problem between Time machine and the mds process , which I think is spotlight process. I'll try your solution of changing names on my computer and external drive and I'll report back.

Does your WD 1TB drive have the latest firmware? I used to have problems with my My Book going to sleep even when an application was actively writing to it hanging the app and not allowing a clean restart/shutdown (it would just sit there waiting for a response from the drive). The firmware update seems to have resolved this problem, but the fan is still loud.

Taras

Followup on my last posting: It's still working as advertised for me. Came into the office this am and connected my drive and Time Machine promptly kicked in.

More info:
• I had done an Update install of Leopard, not a complete reinstall.
• There is nothing else on my Time_Machine hard drive.
• I excluded my System and Applications and Library folders.
• I excluded my Parallels hard drive.

I see that Time Machine seems to do some sort of consolidation of the daily backups--only one for last Thursday and one for last Friday show up now, instead of the hourly ones that show up during the day.

I'm giving up. I will never get back the time I've wasted trying to get TM to work.

Here's what I did for my fifth and final attempt:

1) Install and Erase option from Leopard DVD

2) Erase USB drive

3) Configure TM to exclude System and Applications, Library and Virtual Machines folders

4) Start backup (no other apps are running)

TM locks up and here is what I get in the sys.log:

Nov 6 20:44:19 BlackPearl [0x0-0x6006].com.apple.dock[108]: Unexpected reply from backup server - ignored
Nov 6 20:44:23 BlackPearl /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1012]: Backup requested by user
Nov 6 20:44:23 BlackPearl /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1012]: Starting standard backup
Nov 6 20:44:23 BlackPearl /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1012]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Big_Daddy/Backups.backupdb
Nov 6 20:44:23 BlackPearl /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1012]: Ownership is disabled on the backup destination volume. Enabling.
Nov 6 20:44:23 BlackPearl KernelEventAgent[23]: tid 00000000 received unknown event (256)
Nov 6 20:44:23 BlackPearl FindSystemFiles[1018]: Querying receipt database for system packages
Nov 6 20:44:23 BlackPearl com.apple.backupd[1012]: 2007-11-06 20:44:23.422 FindSystemFiles[1018:713] Querying receipt database for system packages
Nov 6 20:44:23 BlackPearl FindSystemFiles[1018]: Using system path cache.
Nov 6 20:44:23 BlackPearl com.apple.backupd[1012]: 2007-11-06 20:44:23.511 FindSystemFiles[1018:713] Using system path cache.
Nov 6 20:44:35 BlackPearl /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1012]: Backup content size: 44.3 GB excluded items size: 39.8 GB for volume Macintosh HD
Nov 6 20:44:35 BlackPearl /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1012]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 5.39 GB requested (including padding), 232.46 GB available
Nov 6 20:44:35 BlackPearl /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1012]: MDBackupBegin() returned result (909) > 0, waiting
Nov 6 20:45:51 BlackPearl kernel[0]: USBF: 3000.758 AppleUSBEHCI[0x6906000]::Found a transaction past the completion deadline on bus 0xfd, timing out! (Addr: 2, EP: 1)
Nov 6 20:46:22 BlackPearl kernel[0]: USBF: 3031.760 AppleUSBEHCI[0x6906000]::Found a transaction past the completion deadline on bus 0xfd, timing out! (Addr: 2, EP: 1)
Nov 6 20:46:53 BlackPearl kernel[0]: USBF: 3062.763 AppleUSBEHCI[0x6906000]::Found a transaction past the completion deadline on bus 0xfd, timing out! (Addr: 2, EP: 2)
Nov 6 20:47:24 BlackPearl kernel[0]: USBF: 3093.767 AppleUSBEHCI[0x6906000]::Found a transaction past the completion deadline on bus 0xfd, timing out! (Addr: 2, EP: 2)
Nov 6 20:47:55 BlackPearl kernel[0]: USBF: 3124.771 AppleUSBEHCI[0x6906000]::Found a transaction past the completion deadline on bus 0xfd, timing out! (Addr: 2, EP: 2)
Nov 6 20:48:26 BlackPearl kernel[0]: USBF: 3155.774 AppleUSBEHCI[0x6906000]::Found a transaction past the completion deadline on bus 0xfd, timing out! (Addr: 2, EP: 2)
Nov 6 20:48:57 BlackPearl kernel[0]: USBF: 3186.777 AppleUSBEHCI[0x6906000]::Found a transaction past the completion deadline on bus 0xfd, timing out! (Addr: 2, EP: 2)
Nov 6 20:49:28 BlackPearl kernel[0]: USBF: 3217.780 AppleUSBEHCI[0x6906000]::Found a transaction past the completion deadline on bus 0xfd, timing out! (Addr: 2, EP: 2)
Nov 6 20:49:28 BlackPearl kernel[0]: disk1s2: I/O error.
Nov 6 20:49:28 BlackPearl kernel[0]:
Nov 6 20:49:28: --- last message repeated 1 time ---
Nov 6 20:49:28 BlackPearl kernel[0]: jnl: disk1s2: do jnlio: strategy err 0x5
Nov 6 20:49:28 BlackPearl kernel[0]: jnl: disk1s2: end_transaction: only wrote 0 of 135680 bytes to the journal!
Nov 6 20:51:08 BlackPearl kernel[0]: IOSCSIPeripheralDeviceType00::setPowerState(0x7490400, 3 -> 4) timed out after 100188 ms

I have checked this disk several times and works fine, except with TM.

I'm really bummed but I'm trying to look on the bright side: I love Spaces, Mail and iCal. Cover Flow and Quick Look are slick. Even though I'm really frustrated I'm still glad I didn't upgrade to Vista and made the switch.