Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Level 1

71 points

Time Machine - An error occurred while creating the backup folder

Immediately after upgrading from 10.6.8 to 10.7.2, my existing Time Machine backup to external USB began to fail with this message. Really, nothing else changed. Is there no solution? I've tried all the suggestions I see, nothing helps. Please don't respond unless you have a real fix or work-around for getting USB drives to accept Time Machine backups again. It does no good to post that you're not having problems; MANY of us are!

We are 25-year Mac users, both former Apple employees, love Apple and Mac, but Lion/iOS5 has been a disaster with so many things failing. Even an Apple engineer I know won't upgrade his home system until serious problems are ironed out. Usually the 10.x.1 release fixes the worst problems, but we're already at 10.7.2 .

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.2)

Posted on Nov 7, 2011 8:51 AM

Best reply

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Posted on Nov 7, 2011 10:10 PM

See #C10 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

View in context

19 replies

Ron Voss Author

Level 1

71 points

Nov 9, 2011 7:11 PM in response to Pondini

Yes, and with the same report from multiple users at the moment they upgraded to Lion, I ruled out a hardware problem long ago! 😉 I'm willing to wait a bit longer for a solution or work-around. 🙂

madtw

Level 1

0 points

Nov 9, 2011 9:43 PM in response to Ron Voss

I upgraded all four Mac computers we have in the house to OSX Lion. 3 out of 4 exhibited the TimeMachine error in this thread shortly after upgrading to OSX Lion but did not have any backup issues with OSX SL. All machines are backing up to the same network based TimeMachine backup server. The machines that had problems are:

Macbook (Late 2008)

Macbook Pro (Mid 2009)

Mac Mini (Late 2009)

The machine that has not had this problem is the iMac (Mid 2010).

Interestingly enough, the machines that sometimes get the error all happen to be Core 2 Duo machines while the iMac is a Core i3 machine. I'm not sure that this is what is causing the error. I always attributed it to someone putting the machine to sleep while a backup is in progress or taking the machine out of WiFi range while a backup is in progress.

I have not tried fixing the backups as suggested on some web pages. My TimeMachine server is using ZFS as the underlying file system. The server snapshots the filesystems periodically so when I get this error, I just rollback the filesystem to a known working snapshot and let TimeMachine continue doing its thing. So far so good... but I really have the impression that Apple dropped the ball with OSX Lion. I certainly won't be upgrading as quickly next time...

Johnusa2

Level 1

4 points

Nov 16, 2011 7:35 PM in response to madtw

Let me add my voice, I"m now having the exact same problem after upgrading to Lion. Same error. Tried the same fixes, all of them, including running Disk Warrior, same result - it works the first time you plug the drive back in or after you reboot, then a few times later it gives you the "folder" error and won't unmount the drive until you force eject it. And my backup drive is new, so it's not stress on the drive. I even reformatted the entire drive, again, and started from scratch, same error after I spent a night backing up everthing anew.

It's very difficult to believe that this is just a random occurence happening to all of us at the same time in the same exact manner.

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Nov 16, 2011 7:41 PM in response to Johnusa2

It's not happening to everybody, though; only a relative few.

Some (or all) of those having this need to tell Apple about it, so they can figure out what's causing it, in what circumstances, and fix it.

See Reporting a Problem to Apple.

Time Machine - An error occurred while creating the backup folder