Ive been using a Seagate 8TB hard drive successfully for a while for Time Machine backups. It has stopped working. When to try to restart it , I get a msg saying it is read only. Do I need to reformat the drive?
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 11.1
If Time Machine detects corruption it will lock the backup to preserve its contents, rather than attempt to create another backup which is likely to fail, possibly leaving you with no backups.
The ideal solution is to obtain another backup drive before attempting to continue to use the existing one. Reformatting it is likely to work, perhaps for a long time, but it is 100% certain to fail again. When drive failures become intolerably frequent throw it away.
Refer to If you can't back up or restore your Mac using Time Machine - Apple Support.
If Time Machine detects corruption it will lock the backup to preserve its contents, rather than attempt to create another backup which is likely to fail, possibly leaving you with no backups.
The ideal solution is to obtain another backup drive before attempting to continue to use the existing one. Reformatting it is likely to work, perhaps for a long time, but it is 100% certain to fail again. When drive failures become intolerably frequent throw it away.
Refer to If you can't back up or restore your Mac using Time Machine - Apple Support.
Bring up the Info pane for the Time Machine hard drive and see what the privileges are. Here's what my TM drive indicates:
What does yours indicate for Privileges.
My privileges look the same. Seems like a problem with the hard drive was detected and the software has made it read-only to stop me for corrupting it further. I guess my best path forward is to get another drive and transfer the existing backups onto the new drive until the new TM backups make the old one irrelevant. Sound right???
THANKS!
That's what I'd do, except I don't bother transferring existing backups. Put the existing backup drive aside until you're certain you no longer need anything on it, then reformat it and add it to TM's rotation. It might continue to work for years.
Time Machine stopped backing up
