Time machine error - linking files?

I'm getting the same error message.

I used Disk Utility to clone my FW media drive, named "d2", to another drive, named "Porsche", and then cloned it back to the original drive. This is the way I defrag. The "Porsche" drive was always excluded from Time Machine backups.

My Time Machince drive was unmounted during this operation to prevent interruption of the defrag. I restarted my Mac without thinking about temporarily having two identically named drives. The Time Machine drive mounted, and I gather, tried to back up the entire temporary clone before I had renamed and erased it. I stopped the backup and erased the temporary clone, renaming it back to it's original drive name, "Porsche".

Now TM refuses to finish backup, yielding the same error message as listed in the topic.

I just tried removing my troublesome FW disk, "d2", from TM's backup plan via Sys Pref.s. I could then hear the drive deleting whatever files that must have succeeded in being backed up before the error ended the process(es), and see the available disk space in TM's Sys Pref. increase by the appropriate amount.

I've now put the "d2" drive back into the list of drives to backup, and TM is attempting back the whole drive up. Hopefully it won't fail this time. I'll report my findings after the 123 GB backup finishes. Admittedly it will be a big waste of backup disk space, but at least TM will continue to function.

Otherwise, I guess I'll have to try renaming the drive and adding to the backup list.

I got the same error after adding the "d2" drive to the exclude list and the removing it from the exclude list.

<sigh> I'll try renaming the drive.

Renaming the drive in question stopped the error, BUT it also wasted hundreds of GBs of space with a redundant backup, and nullifying the benefits of incremental backups.

Can someone provide instruction on how/where to find the "in-process" file?

Thanks!