Error message "incorrect number of file hard links" after Lion installation. Please could you advised to solve this problem; my iMac (mid 2010) is working well

Well, the good news is that, without the external drive, the backups are now working fine. Not knowing what to try next, I just gave TM access to the external drive again and started a backup to see what would happen. It's about 10% through a backup now, having made considerable preparation in terms of releasing space and indexing. This time it cleared enough space to contain the entire backup, something it didn't do previously. I'll let you know what happens.

Martha Mcsherry1 wrote:

Well, the good news is that, without the external drive, the backups are now working fine.

Do you mean it only did a small incremental backup of the internal? If so, yes, that's certainly odd. 😕

What sort of data is on the external? Is any of it exluded? How much of it changes frequently?

This time it cleared enough space to contain the entire backup, something it didn't do previously.

Sounds like it's doing another big one. 😟

It seems that all is once again well! The widget reports successful back ups and we are back to incremental backups with both drives. Yay!

Yes, the initial backups, first with the internal HD and then with the external drive, were indeed full ones, but I expected that, having reset TM. There have been a number of hourly backups since then which have been incremental. At one point, I thought I would take a look into TM to see what was there but then it was very slow about letting me out again and I didn't learn too much either, except that the file listings looked familiar.

I don't know how it got back on track but doing a backup which was limited to the internal HD seems to have had something to do with it. Thanks so much for sticking with me. I learned a lot in the process which I hopefully won't need to use again any time soon. But if I have further problems, I know whom to contact. 😉

Thank you!

Martha Mcsherry1 wrote:

It seems that all is once again well! The widget reports successful back ups and we are back to incremental backups with both drives. Yay!

Great!

Why, I have no idea -- I guess the Time Machine gods decided you'd been punished enough. 😝

Anyhow, glad it's sorted out, and you're quite welcome.

I had this same problem on my MacBook Pro. I tried running Disk Utility on my laptop in target disk mode from my Mac Pro (both are 10.8.2) but that did not help, but when I followed the directions to start up from the Recovery HD and run Disk Utlity on the actual laptop, that solved the problem. Go figure.