Time Machine fails with “error occurred while creating the backup folder”

I'm in the same club as others here. I've got a new 1.5 TB drive, formatted at 500GB for storage and 1TB for Time Machine. If no one is logged in, or just me (the admin) then backups work fine. If someone else (my daughter, for example) is also logged then all backups fail with "Error: (-50) Creating directory <date-timestamp>.inProgress failed."

I've gone through all the suggested steps to remedy the problem (disk is formatted as Mac-OS Extended (Case-sensitive, journaled), disk utility repaired both disks (no errors found) and repaired permissions (no errors found), rebooted). Full backup went fine and then 12 incrementals after the reboot before another user logged in.

The error messages are pretty much less than useless, (-50) is a parameter error, but problems creating directories seems like a permissions problem. The disk is owned by my userid, not system, however the Backup directory is owned by the system user. Could this be the problem?

help, please.

Carl, So the drive has 2 partitions on it? One is 500GB and the other is 1TB?

When you say ' your daughter is "logged in"' what do you mean? Logged into what? Do you mean also backing up to TM partition? Or does the problem only manifest itself when someone has the 500GB partition mounted on their Desktop?

Though you have indicated the two partitions have been formatted "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)", what is the Partition Scheme of the two partitions. If either of them are still "Master Boot Record" then you may have a problem. Use Disk Utility to verify each partitions Partition Scheme. Cheers!

"Logged in" as in, she's logged into the computer.

I have an iMac that is the family computer, several users (my wife and daughter primarily) login to that machine and rather than logging off and back in they "Switch user..." so multiple users are "active" at once in the system. The TM disk I'm setting up is attached to that iMac.

The disk is GUID partitioned, (the disk partition scheme (MBR, GUID) is disk wide, not partition specific). The 2 partitions are formatted slightly differently, TM is case-sensitive and the data disk isn't (but that shouldn't matter).

c.

I see. Well, I'm not entirely convinced that having multiple user accounts active is the cause of your TM failures. I routinely have multiple user accounts active on my MBP and TM backups proceed successfully.

Now I will say, that TM backups WILL fail if one user account still has the backup disk image mounted on their Desktop. This can happen if the user manually mounts the backup disk image and does not eject it before the next backup. Also, there are rare occasions when the disk image is not automatically ejected by Time Machine itself. Then, on the next backup, it will fail because the disk image is "in use".

Sometimes users won't notice this because they do not have the Finder configured to show Hard Disks and Servers on their Desktops. This is resolved via Finder/Preferences.

The way you answer this has me confused.

Are you saying that TM runs separately for each user? Not running as a system service that backups everything?

Or are you saying that simply having the TM disk visible on the desktop causes a problem (which again seems really broken)?

c.

No, TM is a system-wide service. However, it relies on having sole access to the backup disk image. If any user account has already mounted the disk image, then Time Machine can't use it for backups as it is "in use".

You may notice that even if your own Admin account still has the disk image mounted on your Desktop, or under "Devices" in the Sidebar, that backups will fail.

You state "disk image" are you implying a sparseimage bundle version of TM? Because what I have is a directory containing "images" of the file system, one directory with the "backup" and then incremental "backup" files with the changes.

Or are you talking about a user having a TM client app open?

c.

Carl Muckenhirn wrote:
You state "disk image" are you implying a sparseimage bundle version of TM? Because what I have is a directory containing "images" of the file system, one directory with the "backup" and then incremental "backup" files with the changes.

Or are you talking about a user having a TM client app open?

c.

Yes, your Macs' backup disk image is a sparsebundle. Other than during TM backups there is no reason why you would need to have the disk image (sparsebundle) mounted on/in any users' account. As you have discovered, it only causes failed backups later.

If you need to recover files from a TM backup, do it via the TM interface found when you click the TM icon in the Dock. Do not, however, drag files/folders back to your Mac manually from a TM backup disk image (sparsebundle) that has been mounted on/in a users account. You risk serious permissions issues that way.

Does that make sense?

Glenn Carter wrote:
...

Yes, your Macs' backup disk image is a sparsebundle. Other than during TM backups there is no reason why you would need to have the disk image (sparsebundle) mounted on/in any users' account. As you have discovered, it only causes failed backups later.

If you need to recover files from a TM backup, do it via the TM interface found when you click the TM icon in the Dock. Do not, however, drag files/folders back to your Mac manually from a TM backup disk image (sparsebundle) that has been mounted on/in a users account. You risk serious permissions issues that way.

Does that make sense?

No, actually, I do not have a sparsebundle disk image, I have an actual disk. "LemonTimeMachine" is the Volume name, it contains a single directory at the root level which is named "Backups.backupd"

Is anyone sure of what the ownership and permissions should be on a working Time Machine volume? Currently, my mounted disks have these permissions:

Lemon:~ carlmuckenhirn$ ls -la /Volumes/
total 8
drwxrwxrwt@ 5 root admin 170 Dec 11 23:32 .
drwxrwxr-t 36 root admin 1292 Dec 1 08:23 ..
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 Dec 10 16:48 Lemon -> /
drwxrwxr-x 11 carlmuckenhirn carlmuckenhirn 442 Dec 11 23:25 LemonDisk
drwx---r-x+ 6 carlmuckenhirn carlmuckenhirn 374 Dec 11 16:18 LemonTimeMachine

Which looks wrong to me. I expected the LemonTimeMachine volume to be root:admin and 755. Going into LemonTimeMachine shows:

Lemon:~ carlmuckenhirn$ ls -la /Volumes/LemonTimeMachine/
total 16
drwx---r-x+ 6 carlmuckenhirn carlmuckenhirn 374 Dec 11 16:18 .
drwxrwxrwt@ 5 root admin 170 Dec 11 23:32 ..
-rw-r--r--@ 1 carlmuckenhirn carlmuckenhirn 6148 Dec 11 16:19 .DS_Store
drwx------ 3 carlmuckenhirn carlmuckenhirn 102 Dec 9 18:04 .Spotlight-V100
d-wx-wx-wt 5 carlmuckenhirn carlmuckenhirn 170 Dec 11 23:32 .Trashes
drwx------ 2 carlmuckenhirn carlmuckenhirn 102 Dec 11 23:32 .fseventsd
drwxr-xr-x+ 3 root carlmuckenhirn 102 Dec 9 18:06 Backups.backupdb


help.

c.

Sorry Carl, though we were talking wireless backup.

Glenn,

With my configuration cleared up, are there any recommendations to fix this problem?

I reformatted (again) the TM disk and again, the initial (full) backup completed, then a series (10) of hourly incrementals also appear to have completed. Then I start getting (everyhour when TM fires):

Dec 13 11:40:14 Lemon com.apple.backupd[57451]: Starting standard backup
Dec 13 11:40:22 Lemon kernel[0]:
Dec 13 11:40:24: --- last message repeated 1 time ---
Dec 13 11:40:24 Lemon com.apple.backupd[57451]: Backing up to: /Volumes/LemonTimeMachine/Backups.backupdb
Dec 13 11:40:25 Lemon com.apple.backupd[57451]: Error: (-50) Creating directory 2009-12-13-114025.inProgress
Dec 13 11:40:25 Lemon com.apple.backupd[57451]: Failed to make snapshot container.
Dec 13 11:40:30 Lemon com.apple.backupd[57451]: Backup failed with error: 2

Question remains, what is error (-50), what condition does it indicate? How do I fix it?

There are no other errors in the logs that correspond to these events.

c.

Unfortunately, I have only ever seen that error message when backing up to a wireless Time Machine backup like a Time Capsule or HD attached to an Airport Extreme. It means a Mac or Windows machine is still connected to the device and won't relinquish it so that your Mac can perform its' backup.

As for why it is occurring with your directly connected external HD, I don't know why. The only thing I can think of is that it is not formatted/partitioned correctly (but you ruled that out earlier), or that this drive has a sleep function built into it that is not being awakened after a certain period of time.

Carl, I can't remember, is the backup drive directly connected to your Mac? USB? Firewire? Or are you using a hub (USB?) of some sort? If so, try bypassing the hub.

Unfortunately, Pondini has very little on this one as well. From his Troubleshooting Guide:

+*C10. Error: (-50) Creating directory*+

+This may indicate a problem with your TM drive. Do a Repair Disk on it. See #A5 above.+

+If no errors are found, or they're all found and fixed, but you still get the message, try a "full reset" as in item #A4.+

+If Disk Utility can't fix them all, the disk may be failing. Copy the messages from the last run of Disk Utility and post them in a new thread in this forum for advice."+

Carl Muckenhirn wrote:
. . .
Dec 13 11:40:25 Lemon com.apple.backupd[57451]: Error: (-50) Creating directory 2009-12-13-114025.inProgress

There are a couple of possibilities here.

One very long shot is, how much free space is on your TM drive/partition, and do you have other things there besides TM backups?

Another is a problem with the drive's firmware or driver. Even though it's new, it may have been in stock somewhere for a while, and needs to be updated to work properly with Leopard. Check with the maker for updates.

When you're looking at your logs, are you filtering for backupd messages only? If so, remove the filter and see if there are any other suspicious messages (such as a disk I/O error) at the same time. That may provide a clue.