Since last march I have had great success with Time machine. It wasn't till mid-November that things went wrong. This is the error I now recieve,
"Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume."
I called apple and they were unable to solve it over the phone. They sent me a script to get my system spec's and attempt to solve issue at a later date and get back to me. That was 4 plus weeks ago. I am now trying again to solve this myself.
I prefer not to loss my old back-ups, but I feel I may have no choice.
The same problem. The log console shows I/O errors ONLY in something archives of another user. Removed files but after shows another files. Repaired permissions of both drives and single user boot and fsck not show any I/O. Even Techtool Deluxe not shows any error on surface disk.
Sorry, i forgot to say what i have a LaCie USB HDD 500 GB too. Sorry for my english, i'm a spanish user.The spec was in spanish too, sorry about that.
Capacidad: 465,76 GB
Soporte extraíble: Sí
Unidad extraíble: Sí
Nombre BSD: disk3
ID del producto: 0x0951
ID del fabricante: 0x059f (LaCie)
Versión: 0.00
Número de serie: 152D203380B6
Velocidad: Hasta 480 Mb/s
Fabricante: LaCie
ID de la ubicación: 0xfd320000
Corriente disponible (mA): 500
Corriente necesaria (mA): 2
Drivers de Mac OS 9: No
Tipo de mapa de particiones: MBR (Registro maestro de arranque)
Estado S.M.A.R.T.: Incompatible
Volúmenes:
Backup:
Capacidad: 465,76 GB
Disponible: 133,51 GB
Grabable: Sí
Sistema de archivos: Journaled HFS+
Nombre BSD: disk3s1
Punto de montaje: /Volumes/Backup
According to your profile it says your Mac is still running 10.5.1: you should update to 10.5.6 & see if that makes your Time Machine issue go away. Here's a link to the update: http://tinyurl.com/6cncbv.
Resolution
Some hard disks ship with a Master Boot Record (MBR) partition type. For these disks, you will need to change the
partition type by erasing the disk, so that it is supported by Time Machine:
Important: Erasing a disk deletes all files on it. Make sure that you have or make a separate backup copy of
important files, in another location, first.
Open Disk Utility.
1.
Select the backup disk's icon on the left side of the window, which usually appears with a numerical capacity
and is offset slightly to the left of any volume icons. If you see a tab named "Partition" appear, proceed to step
3.
2.
Click the Partition tab. (If you only see tabs named First Aid, Erase, RAID, Restore, then you have selected a
volume on the disk instead of the disk itself--repeat step 2.)
3.
From the Volume Scheme pop-up menu, choose the desired number of partitions (or 1).
4.
Click the "Options..." button.
5.
Select a new partition scheme:
Use Apple Partition Map partition scheme if the disk will be used with Time Machine and a PowerPC-based
Mac.
Use GUID partition scheme if the disk will be used with Time Machine and a Intel-based Mac.
6.
Click OK.
7.
Click Apply. This will erase the disk.
8.
Once the external hard disk is repartitioned, select it again in Time Machine preferences and use it for your
backups.
Eso es lo que pone tu particion MBR..That's what your partition shows: MBR, you should reformat.
I have tried everything as suggested from my original question with no luck. I have reformatted the Lacie drive several times and also used it as a external drive for several other machines (to ensure it's not the drive causing the error). I'm really have no idea what else to try. It worked for 8 solid months with TM backing the drive up till end of November when things went south! It's leading me to think something is on the iMac HD which is causing the error, could this be it ?
I have the same problem with a Seagate FreeAgentDesktop Media USB drive which I formatted as a Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) drive. When Time machine runs I occasionally get a rash of kernel disk io errors as was mentioned. During these errors any program accessing the file systems hang. Most of the time the backup is successful but occasionally it fails. During the error period the spinning ball shows up for Finder but the process load remains under 50%.
I have checked the drive with Disk Utility and it reports no errors.
This looks to me like a kernel usb driver bug. It is very annoying because of the system hangs and because in the past a disk io error was an indication to me that a drive was about to die.
Disk Utility will
not find errors that are due to bad disk blocks; all Disk Utility does is verify the file system's structures are intact.
You instead need to use a true disk diagnostic, like Apple Hardware Test, included on the Software Restore disc that originally shipped with your Mac, or a third party utility such as Micromat's TechTool Deluxe (if you have AppleCare) or Pro.
If there
are bad blocks on your disk, the I/O error will be returned after several retries on the part of the device.
Bad blocks on the device don't necessarily mean the disk is about to die, but it may need to be erased or reformatted.
The key is you need to find out whether "disk2s2" is your Mac's internal drive or the LaCie.
If it's the internal drive you have one or more bad blocks there and no amount of reformatting the LaCie will fix it, but the internal drive is usually disk0 rather than disk2.
Running the command "df" from
Terminal while the LaCie is mounted will tell you which disk is disk2.