Time Machine - System preferences quit unexpectedly

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Time Machine - System preferences quit unexpectedly

I have a problem in Lion and Time Machine.

I open Time Machine to set it up for the first time and click 'Select Disk' button I get the following message:

"System preferences quit unexpectedly"

Note: I have a clean install of Lion (I did not install over the top of snow leopard). I am trying to setup time machine for the first time, no previous settings exist.

Here is what I have tried so far:

1) Repaired disk permissions - no change.

2) Started Lion in safe mode but same problem exists.

3) Created and logged in with a new user account but same problem exists.

4) I have tried deleting the following files :

/User/[account]/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TMLaunchAgent.plist

/Library/com.apple/TimeMachine.plist

Non of this helped.

5) Reinstalled Lion from recovery mode.

Non of the above has fixed the problem.

Any ideas?

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.1)

Posted on Sep 18, 2011 3:47 AM

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Answer 1

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Sep 18, 2011 4:32 AM in response to geofili

Tell us about the drive. Where is it. Is it connected externally. Make/model.

I wish Apple would take 6 months of more rigorous beta instead of having customers, or have a real public beta/RC the way Windows 7 and 8.

Tried Lion Community and TimeMachine section? I know the question issue you have has been posted.

http://www.apple.com/support/timemachine

http://www.apple.com/support/lion

https://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os/mac_os_x_v10.7_lion?view=discussi ons#/?tagSet=1388

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Answer 2

geofili Author

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Sep 18, 2011 4:38 AM in response to The hatter

Hi, thanks for your response.

The drive is an external QNAP TS-439 Pro II on the LAN.

I didnt think it was the drive because it was working perfectly on another mac pro with Lion.

Anyway, I seem to have fixed the problem....

I logged into the QNAP box and turned off TimeMachine support.

With it switched off , I found I could then open time machine on my computer without it crashing.

Therefore must be the drive.

I then re-enabled time machine support on the QNAP box and when I opened time machine again on my computer it did not crash and it found the QNAP device.

I guess this is really bad programming from apples side - it should not crash like that on a new mac with a fresh install of lion.

Anyway, seems to be working ok now 🙂

Hope this helps somebody else.

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Answer 3

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Sep 18, 2011 5:08 AM in response to geofili

Thanks. Good sleuthing work!

Every OS release seems to ah, "affect" these external units, and also TimeMachine. So the Lion forum (and SL before that) was littered with drives not working, USB not working, not mounting, etc. and some units (LaCie) that use something proprietary as well (driver and / or software) that "break" and need updates and firmware patch.

Interesting though that you tested and used on another Mac Pro. Makes me wonder what the difference is, or did the other Mac somehow "tag" and own the unit? all disk drives have unique IDs.

In your case, networking was changed and would affect NAS devices. iSCSI? Do you remember how 10.5.0 had changed the IOKIt and how drives mounted (or not as was often the case) because of changes? That was buggy too, and it went back-and-forth between 10.5.0 and .1 and then .2 so had your head spinning and spin wheels.

That is a very nice unit. Really. At least you are "VMware ready" and probably works fine with WHS. I was looking into HP MediaSmart NAS and at the time supported TimeMachine, SuperDuper, iTunes. I think Apple made that harder with some changes in Mac update.

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Answer 4

geofili Author

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Sep 18, 2011 5:54 AM in response to The hatter

It was a strange situation. I dont think the QNAP unit can be tagged or owned by another computer. In fact it is used to backup multiple computers running leopard and windows and is a completely independent device with its own OS.

I installed a fresh copy of Lion on a new Mac Pro and the only thing that was giving me headaches was the timemachine system preferences kept crashing, seemingly for no reason.

To me it is really bad programming for lion to crash just because there is a QNAP box on the LAN.

The QNAP device is really nice. It can do so much but we only use it as a glorified raid5 backup server and file server at present. Such a waste but I don't have time to learn any of the advanced features.

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Answer 5

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Sep 18, 2011 6:52 AM in response to geofili

I was thinking or assuming that just as the HP NAS server, using WHS with latest power pack, in order to support TimeMachine the client had to install software also.

And in this case, maybe there is client side software.

I hoped to use Window Home Server to support a mix of PC Windows and Mac for backup and central media server.

The fact that TimeMachine will be 4 yrs old doesn't bode well nor that we have to reinvent the wheel.

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Answer 6

geofili Author

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Sep 18, 2011 8:42 AM in response to The hatter

Forget WHS, the QNAP box is all you need - no client software needs to be installed on a single machine.

For backups , it has built in timemachine support for the macs and we use windows 7 backup for the pcs (professional or ultimate is required to backup to a network).

We also use it as a central media server for music, movies and photos and share the same music between mac and pc users using iTunes and windows media player.

We also use it as a file server to share between pcs and mac and it supports seamless user permissions between both mac and pc.

We have it configured with 4x 2TB HD in Raid5 and it can also replicate the data offsite to another NAS or to Amazon S3.

It's a really great solution as a central file server in a tiny box - it doesnt use much power and is very quiet - the fan never seems to turn on.

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