Time Machine Error

phelice wrote:
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.)

Phelice, in desperation (after four days of formatting, partitioning, re-installing and generally banging head against wall with Time Machine) I took a long shot and switched bluetooth off.
Presto - Time Machine then completed it's first backup and I was able to see the history in the Time Machine application for the first time.

THANK YOU.

Yes, something to do with bluetooth was affecting Time Machine.

(Subsequent backups have run into problems with MDS though)

So this post is "answered" ? That's the best joke I ever saw here...

I had the good idea to keep Panther on my Mac, so I could see some strange things on the volume used as target fot TM back-ups. After trying to delete all visible BU with no effect on the available size, I switched to invisible items display and found :
1 A file 'Lost+found" with 13Go, about the size of the BU by TM I try to erase
2 .HFS+ Private Directory Data with the same size (usually zero), but click on it makes lags.

Maybe this is related to journalization TM triggers on the target volume for its BU ?
As many, I had to transfer my data and reformat this volume.

On the other hand, I had also to erase Tiger from another partition, but this is another story maybe Spotlight linked.

Good luck to all, betatesting is a holy quest !

Message was edited by: Kami78

Bill Bradford wrote:
(Subsequent backups have run into problems with MDS though)

Excluding the backup drive from Spotlight indexing solved this.
So with Bluetooth off, my main backup is complete and hourly ones now working 100%.


Dare I ask... has anyone tested the restore function? Now I've got some backups, are they actually any use if I have a crash?

I had the same problem as everyone else - a runaway "preparing" message, some times dumping < 1MB in 15 minutes, and eventually a failure notice ("Unable to complete..."). I am running with a Maxtor 180GB drive via Firewire, partitioned into two devices: one for SuperDuper, and one for Time Machine (called "Time Machine").

My machine name (hostname) had a hyphen and a period in it. I did two things:
1) Changed machine name to "rich_mac"
2) Per another suggestion, I removed the empty text file that was down at the end of the directory tree on the Time Machine backup directory (the "*.InProgress" file).

Now the Prepare phase took less than 30 seconds, and the backup is running great (46.39GB total). Will let you know if it fails before it finishes.

Macs running on PowerPC processors should reformat the drive with Disk Utility, and repartition it using the Apple Partition Map scheme; Intel-based Macs, on the other hand, should select the GUID partition scheme. "Once the external hard disk is reformatted, select it again in Time Machine preferences and use it for your backups," Apple added.



"Past backups may not appear if your computer name includes certain characters," said the note, dated Monday. The only acceptable characters are the English alphabet, lower- and uppercase, and the numbers 0-9. The computer's name is set in the Sharing Preferences panel.

Have you tried the backup with the HD connected directly to the computer, as opposed to through the Belkin hub? Though I always run out of USB slots, I find that things like hard drives work best when you don't have them connected to hubs (though I have two Belkin USB 2.0 hubs myself).

Got the TM "Error - Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup directory"
Apparent problem: computer name (System preferences - shared files) set by my company's technician with "/" in it.
Solution: I gave it a new name with no / in it, TM seems to work fine.
Thanks
LaCie 500 Quadra FireWire 400

To someone who asked if the restore from Time Machine backup really works.

I have successfully restored a complete system from a Time Machine backup. I did it by booting from Leopard install DVD and used the Utility 'Time machine' there.

The restore took some time (25GB of files and iBook G4 + MyBook connected with FW400) and the first boot was very slow.

Nice to know that my iBook can now survive a total hd crash.

Mark, THANKS! My Time Machine was backing up fine until I interrupted a back up yesterday. Then nothing but failures with the Cannot Complete Backup error message. I read through this topic and assumed that since I had had a number of successful back ups, I shouldn't have to go through anything as extreme as reformatting the drive, etc. Then I got to you post, when into the backup drive and tossed the hollow folder as you described, and now TM is working again. I suggest anyone who has had successful backups, and is now getting failures, to try this simple solution before taking more radical steps.

watched the leopard tour, got a G drive like the guy on the tour, installed leopard on an old emac, plugged in the G drive,message says do you want time machine to work on this drive, say yes,no problems since.(10/27) Go figure!
For what its worth-disconnected lacie drive, and turned off sleep first. Still use lacie with silverkeeper to do a bootable backup (needed to repartition. takes forever, but worked with leopard. scheduled daily backups no problem. was surprised at first that time machine wasn't bootable but it makes sense when you think about it) hope you all get it working.

Here is my story, will make a long story short.

I've upgraded my computer to Leopard OS with the upgrade option only, my computer could not log me in, called tech support and advised me to do a archive and install, it worked. I purchase a Seagate 250GB Freeagant Desktop to backup my files not before reformatting it, once done I downloaded the software from Seagate's website but it is not compatible with Leopard OS, this doesn't limit my external drive to do the backup, the only problem I see here is that I can't use the drive management from Seagate, other than that it does the hourly updates.

I do not now much about external driver but the Seagate seems to work fine to do the backups.

Hope this information is helpfull. By the way, I was going to buy a Lacie D2 Quadra before buying the Seagate, knowing all the problems the Lacie is causing I am glad I didn't.

Bill,
Just to let you know I also experienced problems with Time Machine and Bluetooth on my MacBook Pro. Time Machine was backing up and suddenly the Bluetooth Mouse and Keyboard could no longer be used, while my Trackpad and MBP keyboard were fine. I switched off the mouse and keyboard and all was fine.

In retrospect, this appears to have been happening to my iMac as well, however that's been taken back to Tiger, since Tiger "just works."

Clearly there is a Bluetooth/Time Machine bug.

It seems to me Time Machine is kind of finicky and has some preference in choosing its backup drive(s). I think G Drive is a very safe choice. So is LaCie Big Disk Extreme+. They are more or less new models and designed to be compatible with Leopard.
My LaCie little Big Disk is an old model (bought in 2006). Maybe that's one reason why it took such a long time to be accepted. Once accepted, however, forever accepted, I hope.

I'm going to try a G Drive for comparison.

I am a first time mac user and had all of the same problems with time machine and a firelite/smartdisk external drive. Over the last week since upgrading to Leopard I tried all the suggestions in this post from the naming conventions to the partition change to GUID to verifying permissions to reformatting the external drive and I still got the same 'unable to backup' error. Finally when I turned bluetooth off, the first time machine backup completed successfully! I have no idea what was really necessary in all of this but clearly bluetooth is a problem.

As another point of reference when I visited the Apple store the 'expert' there did tell me that you do have to make the GUID change.

Thanks for figuring this out!

I have had the 'Unable to Create Backup Directory' (shurely shum mistake – you mean 'Folder' – ed.) error, I am using a TM disk shared over AFP/APF – whatever AppleShare is called these days. All was working fine for about 4 days until I did a software update which required a reboot on the server, then the client had a stale reference to the TM Volume, so I turned off Time Machine and then tried to change the disk it was using, but I still couldn't unmount the original because it was 'in use'.

Looking at the Volume permissions, only System had Write permissions and not Me (which is the usual case), Turned Time Machine back on, it created a new mounted network Volume, which has the usual permissions, but its just sitting there with 'preparing' in the TM Settings window. I think I'll have to reboot the client.

This takes me back to the early days of Tiger where volumes would shift about of their own accord whenever you plugged or unplugged a device. Sigh. TM is an excellent idea, but not bugfree it would seem.