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Level 1

8 points

Time Machine Error. Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copy

I purchased my iMac 24" in February.
After I had set up the machine I configured an IceCube Firewire 300 GB (Seagate) Hard Drive as a backup volume and flicked the switch in Time Machine. All went as expected. I even restored my whole hard drive from the Time Machine volume about a month ago after I repartitioned the boot volume to set up Boot Camp. No problems.
About a week ago I purchased a 500GB WD HDD and set it up inside the IceCube enclosure (I remembered to make it the "Master" disk too!!). I partitioned it with Disk Utility with a GUID Mac OS X (Journaled) partition for my Leopard boot partition, and as MS-DOS FAT32 for my Boot Camp external partition. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy all the Windows files across from Boot Camp to the new FAT32 partition and set up Time Machine to make a backup of the Leopard boot partition.
After several hours Time Machine stopped with the error message above. ("Time Machine Error. Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup").
I have spent days formatting the new WD drive, repairing permissions on the boot drive, excluding large files and cache files from the backup in Time Machine to no avail. Every time I get the same message. I even set up another 200GB firewire drive to see if it was anything to do with the enclosure of WD HDD. Same result!!

I have searched these forums for any ideas, and have done wide searches with Google but nothing has worked.
I can not understand why my Mac worked perfectly with Time Machine before I installed the new Western Digital Hard Drive.
What have I missed?

iMac 24in 2.4 GHz 500GB, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on May 23, 2008 10:41 PM

28 replies

Liz M

Level 1

26 points

Jun 10, 2008 9:41 AM in response to growler62000

growler62000 wrote:

I typed "backupd" in the filter search box at the top right & have a long list with “Backups.backupdb” (Should I have added a “b” after the “d” in the filter box?) I tried & got a much shorter list. In any event all the entries are dated 6-3-2008 & my problem happened on 6-1-2008.

I recommended "backupd" since that's the name of the program that generates the relevant messages -- and appears in the line with each message.

"backupdb" would be a database backupd uses, most likely, and would only appear in lines with messages about the database. I doubt this would give you the name of the file that couldn't be backed up.

I wonder if the logs are erased every 24 hours?

No, the system logs are saved for about a week. Every day, the current system log is copied into a separate file and then emptied. The new file is compressed and named system.log.1.bz2. Logs system.log.1.bz2 thru system.log.7.bz2 are kept; older ones are deleted. This all happens at midnight; if your computer is sleeping then, I'm not sure how that's handled.

To see the older system.log files, scroll down thru the log list and look under /var/log.

Message was edited by: Liz M to add last sentence.

Liz M

Level 1

26 points

Jun 10, 2008 11:32 AM in response to growler62000

This is the key line:

Jun 6 01:04:22 Iconoclasts-iMac /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[6104]: Error: (-43) copying /Library/Printers/Brother to /Volumes/LaCie/Backups.backupdb/Iconoclast’s iMac/2008-06-06-010413.inProgress/E327445C-11E9-4182-8DF4-075990511F3D/Macintos h HD/Library/Printers

Time Machine couldn't backup the directory /Library/Printers/Brother; perhaps because you were printing something right then and you had the bad luck of a program modifying this directory at exactly the same moment Time Machine tried to back it up. If you had done the manual backup without closing any programs, it probably would have worked fine.

Time Machine runs every hour and normally works just fine, even though a lot of programs are running at the time.

As an aside, you rarely need to exit programs or reboot in order to fix something on a Mac -- and it's not as helpful when you do reboot. It really is different from a PC!

Bottom line, when this happens, just do a manual backup without bothering to exit any programs; most likely, it will just work. If not, try again or check the log.

Jun 10, 2008 11:49 AM in response to Ward Clark

My wife's Time Machine (10.5.3) just experienced a backup failure identical to mine from this morning.

Time Machine reported "file not found" in the Console log for a .DS_Store file what was last modified at 3:20 PM yesterday. There have been hourly opportunities to backup this file. Why does Time Machine want to back it up now?

The file must have existed for Time Machine to think it should be backed up (and Terminal confirms the files does exist). So why is Time Machine experiencing "file not found"?

This is starting to look like a 10.5.3 Time Machine and/or file system bug.

Liz M

Level 1

26 points

Jun 10, 2008 12:10 PM in response to Akhiris

I'm using wired, too.

It's possible that the error we're all getting occurs more often when backing up over wireless; not sure about that, though.

Have you checked your system log to see what error messages you're getting? Post an except here, if you can't make sense of it.

For instructions on looking at your system log, check one of my previous postings in this thread.

Liz M

Level 1

26 points

Jun 10, 2008 12:17 PM in response to Tiffany95

Is the Time Machine backup disk full?

Jun 10, 2008 12:48 PM in response to Liz M

Gobs of G's left on the drive. Really stumped here...

Liz M

Level 1

26 points

Jun 10, 2008 12:49 PM in response to Ward Clark

.DS_Store files are accessed a lot and in earlier versions of MacOS was damaged so often there was a special procedure for rebuilding it.

Given that yours wasn't modified recently, it was probably locked for some reason at the moment of the backup. I'm not sure why it would need to be copied even though it does not appear to be modified recently. Mine is modified very frequently, even when I'm not aware of doing anything on my desktop.

I agree there is a bug of some sort here, though most likely of the sort where someone didn't think of every possible thing that could hapend during a backup. Time Machine ought to retry copying a file that fails the first time -- or re-try more often than it does. Or, TM could remember the file and re-try the copy after everything else is backed up, though I suspect coding it that way would be tricky. An easier approach would be to skip the file and make a note that it has in the log. It seems a bit much to abort the backup completely because of one file like this.

Jun 10, 2008 1:09 PM in response to Liz M

Hi Liz:
You said: “Time Machine couldn't backup the directory /Library/Printers/Brother; perhaps because you were printing something right then…”

I think it is a 10.5.3 update bug. I never had any Time Machine failure b4 this update. I doubt I was printing at the time & other failures have logs where completely different files failed to backup. Also, my printer is NOT a Brother brand but, an Epson.

I have recently had success by doing nothing & letting the next hourly backup proceed (I do need to close the pop up window that alerts me to the failure to backup) So, until Apple fixes this problem my actions will be in order; do nothing, if the next backup fails, do manual B.U.w/o closing anything & finally should that fail, close all programs & retry.

Jun 10, 2008 1:25 PM in response to growler62000

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20080609091558564

This may be of help to some.

My permissions were already Read/write. I did eject, turnoff & then restart my LaCie TM backup drive. We'll see.

Akhiris

Level 1

0 points

Jun 10, 2008 2:00 PM in response to growler62000

I ended up having to delete my sparsebundle file and let it back up again normally. I haven't had any problems since, but this isn't a very good solution.

Liz M

Level 1

26 points

Jun 10, 2008 2:11 PM in response to Tiffany95

Yes, I'm not sure what's happening here. It does look like there is a problem with your backup disk. I would try repairing the backup disk -- run Applications/Utilties/Disk Utility, select the disk and click "Repair". Your log does make it look like TM is having problems creating files on the backup disk...

phillat5dock Author

Level 1

8 points

Jun 10, 2008 5:04 PM in response to Liz M

What you could try here is to exclude the problematic .DS_Store file from TimeMachine backups. Open TimeMachine preferences and click Options. In the Do not back up: window click the plus sign and in the window that opens select Show invisible items. Navigate to the problematic file and click Exclude. Close the preferences window and see if TimeMachine will now complete the backup.

Jun 10, 2008 6:55 PM in response to phillat5dock

phillat5dock wrote:
What you could try here is to exclude the problematic .DS_Store file from TimeMachine backups.

In my case and my wife's, the .DS_Store file "not found" problem was transient. The next backup (manual or automatic) went fine.

Time Machine Error. Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copy