"Making backup disk available" taking forever

I think I have fixed this.

What I did was start up disk utility and use it's repair feature on the bundle. The first time, I got an error saying it could not be repaired, but I tried again a couple days later and it seems to have worked.

How to:

1. Disk utility it in the Utilities folder in Applications or use spotlight to find it.

2. You want to repair the sparsebundle that is on the time capsule or external drive. It's at the top level and named something like Liz M's MacBook_123456789abc.sparsebundle.

3. If it doesn't show up on the list in Disk Utility, use Finder to find it and then drag it into the list in the bottom half of the pane.

4. To run the repair, clicke the sparsebundle and then the "Repair Disk" button.

5. The first time I tried, it didn't take long but did repair some key things. The second time, it took 9 hours! But it completed and looks good.

6. If you get an error that it's in use, go to Airport Utility and:
- click on the time capsule on the left
- click "Manual Setup" at the bottom
- click disks icon at the top
- if anyone else is backing up to the time capsule right then (or using the disk for anything else), wait for their backup to finish
- click "Disconnect All Users" at the bottom
- retry the repair disk and it should work; if someone else does backups to the same time capsule, they can continue while you're repairing though it might be slow.

My backups seem to be working just fine now. I have noticed that if you have the sparsebundle mounted in Finder, Time Machine seems to have trouble starting up, so eject it before starting a Time Machine backup.

Hope this helps! I typed this on my iPhone which is a bit tedious. And nearly impossible to proofread. So, take care following these instructions and post here if you find a mistake. Thanks.

- Liz

Using disk utility to repair the sparsebundle seems to have solved the problem.

Do try repairing the backup as I described in a post earlier.

I don't think the problem is so much Snow Leopard as just that after a while problems can creep into the backup, probably when you forget to stop a backup in progress when you sleep the computer or take it somewhere.

I'm not sure what you mean. Can you be more specific? What is duplicated?

That will probably go away next time you reboot. I can think of a couple ways that you might be able to make it go away without rebooting but they involve using the Unix Terminal and could be tricky. It should be safe to ignore it.