Time Capsule Pop-up Message

I had the same issue. It would would stop after hours of initial backing up and show the message mentioned above. I clicked "Use this disk" and TM would start all over again. Annoying!

I have given up and would like to know why this is happening. Glad its happened to someone else.

Cheers

Hi, and welcome to the forums.

I've never seen that message reported. Quite odd. Is there a question mark icon on it? If so, what do you see if you click it?

But no, there are no viruses that run on OSX. There is a very small amount of malware, but you have to invite it onto your system (usually with an Admin password) and/or agree to run it (usually with the "this app was downloaded from the internet" prompt).

You might try a "full reset" of Time Machine, per #A4 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of the +Time Machine+ forum).

Do one other thing for us, please:

See #A1 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] for a handy widget that will display the backup messages from your logs.

Use it to copy and post all the messages from one of those backups here.

My TIme Machine is backing up on an external drive connected to my Mac Mini Server. I started getting the pop-ups just a couple of days ago after upgrading to 10.6.5. I've clicked Don't backup on the pop-up, then selected the backup disk from Time Machine preferences, again after which it has backed up perfectly normally. However, I've had to do the selection over again every day, it only seems to work as long as I don't shut my computer down in between. Talk about automation!

Please download the widget per the link in my previous post, and copy and post the messages here.

I am also getting this message since I updated to 10.6.5. My setup is a MBP that I use both at work and at home. At work I have an external firewire disk for time machine to backup, and at home it is a time capsule over the network. I use two small AppleScripts and MarcoPolo to tell TimeMachine which is the proper backup disk. That way I always have two up-to-date backups.

It seems that Apple has introduced another safeguard that kicks in whenever the backup location changes. That may be useful for people who have little clue of what's going on with their system, but it positively annoys me each time I connect my MBP in a new location, which is about twice a day.

Clicking "Use this disk" starts TM alright, but when I have time I'll try to incorporate that click into the AppleScripts that change the backup location.

vsteiger wrote:
I am also getting this message since I updated to 10.6.5.

Please see #A1 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of the +Time Machine+ forum), for a handy widget that will display the backup messages from your logs.

Use it to copy and post all the messages from one of those backups here.

I'm getting the message as well. Upgraded the machine to 10.6.5 this morning. We back up at two different houses. Backups worked fine this morning at the house where the OS upgrade happened, but failed with the same message when we rolled in here this afternoon.

I installed the widget and looked at the log entry. Interestingly, it has dropped back to late September as it's last entry (which was successful). Backups have been running fine on the external drive and the most recent entry in the SparseBundle was November 11th (the day we left). So I think something is out of whack between what the Mac thinks it's last backup was and what has actually been written to the drive.

This shed any light on the problem?

Here's the log entry (pretty mundane, looks OK to me, but it's from LONG ago).

+Starting standard backup+
+Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb+
+No pre-backup thinning needed: 641.0 MB requested (including padding), 1.33 TB available+
+Copied 8 files (93 bytes) from volume Macintosh HD.+
+Copied 18 files (93 bytes) from volume Marcies Pictures.+
+Starting post-backup thinning+
+No post-back up thinning needed: no expired backups exist+
+Backup completed successfully.+

OConnorStP wrote:
. . .
I installed the widget and looked at the log entry. Interestingly, it has dropped back to late September as it's last entry (which was successful). Backups have been running fine on the external drive and the most recent entry in the SparseBundle was November 11th (the day we left). So I think something is out of whack between what the Mac thinks it's last backup was and what has actually been written to the drive.

It sounds like there's a problem with your logs. Normally they should be "rotated" and deleted after a week or so; and the widget only looks at the last two, usually 2-3 days.

Do you power your Mac off every night? If so, the automatic maintenance scripts don't run. Apple recommends sleeping a laptop instead of powering it off if it won't be used for "a day or two." See: [Sleeping your Mac vs. Powering it Down|http://web.me.com/pondini/AppleTips/Sleep.html].

Try that overnight; then see what the widget shows the next day.

Here's the log entry (pretty mundane, looks OK to me, but it's from LONG ago).
. . .
+Copied 8 files (93 bytes) from volume Macintosh HD.+
+Copied 18 files (93 bytes) from volume Marcies Pictures.+

That's actually a problem (nothing at all was backed-up -- the 93 bytes aren't really data; and even if you didn't do anything, various processes on your Mac should be updating some small files).

But since it's from long ago . . .

Make sure things really are getting backed-up. If in doubt, make a small test file in, say, your Desktop folder, run a backup, then make sure it shows up when you go into Time Machine and look at the most recent backup.

Yep, we let the Macs sleep rather than shutting them down. This rotating backup has been working like a champ for several years. I think this has something to do with the arrival of 10.6.5.

Is there a mechanism to let Time Machine "rediscover" the contents of the backup drive?

Something very weird is going on. There's no way you should have messages from September in your logs (unless your Mac was off for most of the time since then). And without the logs of recent backup attempts, I don't know how to figure out why they're failing now.

Let's look at them directly. Start with the tan box in: [OSX Log Files|http://web.me.com/pondini/AppleTips/Logs.html]. That will show how to find your system.log (outlined in blue near the top of the sidebar.) Select it and see the sample in the blue box.

The date & time at the bottom should be at or shortly before the current time.

If it is, type backupd in the search box in the toolbar. That will limit the display to messages sent by Time Machine backups, but all run together.

Each backup run has a different +process id,+ the number enclosed in square brackets. Copy all the messages from the last group (beginning "Starting standard backup") and post them here (the numbers will display oddly here because of the square brackets).

Also scroll to the top and note the date/time there.

Maybe that will provide a clue or two.

Below is the log of the first backup this morning at work, which was started only after I clicked "Use this location" in the warning pop-up message. I wonder if there's a plist entry somewhere with which I can suppress this warning from popping up.

Starting standard backup
User continued after being warned of changed destination volume UUID
Backing up to: /Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb
No pre-backup thinning needed: 100.0 MB requested (including padding), 254.79 GB available
Copied 2708 files (20.3 MB) from volume Gurzgri7 Disk.
No pre-backup thinning needed: 100.0 MB requested (including padding), 254.77 GB available
Copied 758 files (2.1 MB) from volume Gurzgri7 Disk.
Starting post-backup thinning
No post-back up thinning needed: no expired backups exist
Backup completed successfully.

Yes, I do the same thing as you, vsteiger: when I connect a new disk I run an Applescript (perhaps the same one as you!) that changes the TM target. Obviously this new (10.5.6) feature gets in the way of that. If anyone figures out how to suppress (or dismiss with GUI scripting) this annoying new feature I would be very grateful!

Trying to hijack this thread back to the original topic... 🙂

I went ahead and let the backup run. It inspected every item before starting, but then went ahead and backed up normally -- I was worried that it would do a complete backup, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I'm headed to the other house tomorrow and I'll watch it when I get there.

Interestingly, I have a completely parallel situation with another MacBook Pro and it went through the transition just fine. Didn't pop up the window, just switched to the other external drive as normal. So I'm still inclined towards "bug" rather than "feature"... I'll rummage through the logs as you suggested the next time I'm on it and see what I can turn up. I'm pretty sure the backup is running/logging correctly but I'll confirm that...

vsteiger wrote:
Below is the log of the first backup this morning at work, which was started only after I clicked "Use this location" in the warning pop-up message. I wonder if there's a plist entry somewhere with which I can suppress this warning from popping up.
. . .
User continued after being warned of changed destination volume UUID

Aha! That's the clue I was looking for. 🙂

And I think MichaelWilliams may have another.

If Apple has published anything about this, I can't find it. But they have added some protections recently, so yes, this may be another.

The message is saying the destination has been changed; but it doesn't send that message if I manually change destinations via +Time Machine Preferences.+

Are you seeing the same behavior -- message if changing via Applescript, but not if done manually?

Can any of the other posters confirm this?