Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup folder.

Jim, sorry for the delay. 😟

In Terminal enter "crontab -e" to edit the "chronology" table and add the line

* * * * * date > /Volumes/<your backup disk name>/<some file name>

which will write the current date to the file every minute. The file will be overwritten every time so it doesn't grow.

If your backup disk name contains a space you need a "\" before the space.

This still seems to work for me. 🙂

Here is the Answer!

http://pondini.org/TM/A4.html

very simple, basically you delete a preference file. will take you 3 minutes.

This may get you going again after a failure, but won't prevent the cause of a failure. The anti-spin down advice I was given has worked perfectly all this time in that regard.

Ron, Thefink,

So it's been working fine, with no changes on my part. Except for a restart of the computer. When a backup failure does happen (only rarely/sporadically) this is the easy way back to normal operation. A kludge I know, but also, failures are not too frequent at all, knock on wood.

Thanks again guys for your time on this one.

This article might help:

http://gizmodo.com/316573/leopard-disk-utility-format-issue-screws-with-time-mac hine-but-theres-an-easy-fix

Apple's article is much simpler and clearer: Mac OS X 10.5: Time Machine stops backing up to external disk.

Unless of course your disk is already using a GUID Partition Table, and you have something like 100Gig of backup files already not a mere 10Gig. In which case that article, while simple and clear, does nothing to solve your problem.

So what's your suggestion?

Or do you mean you're having a similar problem? If so, please supply full details, per #A9 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

What I see described in this thread is

a) 'working perviously, broken with upgrade to 10.7'

b) symptoms relieved by various means (cycling various things on/off or resetting time-machine at various levels)

c) symptoms repeat at seemingly random intervals.

d) theory that it may be related to drives sleeping, along with brute force methods to prevent drives from sleeping via chron jobs that access drive every 5 minutes.

e) concensus that the error messages could stand to be a lot better, that your troubleshooting tools are useful and thanks for all the work on the troubleshooting pages,

f) the issue is further confused because multiple things can cause the same error (such as an external drive with the wrong type of partition table) so that you may address source of this error, only to have the error re-occur later potentially due to a different cause.

Personally, at the moment I'm in a wait and see mode. I've repaired the drive (didn't notice that it found anything wrong) shut down time-machine, forced an 'eject' on the drive, popped it's firewire plug out, waited a few seconds, reconnected, and turned time machine back on, and watched it resume doing backups, and make a couple of backups since that point. If it fails again, (which I am pretty sure it will, since this is the second time I have 'fixed' the issue) I will gather more info per your excellent troubleshooting guide and present it.

If the problem is sleeping of the drive (which seems to be one potential cause) then the brute force (aka screw being green I just want my backups) approach of tickling the drive every 5 minutes is a not unreasonable geek equivant to a duct-tape & bailing wire fix, but does not address the underlying cause of the issue (which based on other comments was introduced in 10.7 and was not present in 10.6) but perhaps it is a step forward in at least being better able to describe the nature of the problem to apple (presuming we can find someone who cares) so that it can be fixed.

Also do let me say it's good to see some real honest efforts at troubleshooting that go beyond the "Three R's" (Restart the app, Reboot the system, Reinstall the software) that seem to be the limit of proficiency among many supposed tech support folks.

Sorry for the snarky tone, I know folks where just trying to help, but if they had read the thread, I would think it would have been obvious that the issue was not related to the type of partition table (not that such could not cause this error, but that in this case it didn't apply)

ChuckvdL wrote:

. . .

Personally, at the moment I'm in a wait and see mode. I've repaired the drive (didn't notice that it found anything wrong) shut down time-machine, forced an 'eject' on the drive, popped it's firewire plug out, waited a few seconds, reconnected, and turned time machine back on, and watched it resume doing backups, and make a couple of backups since that point. If it fails again, (which I am pretty sure it will, since this is the second time I have 'fixed' the issue) I will gather more info per your excellent troubleshooting guide and present it.

If you do, since you're backing-up to an external HD, kindly start a new thread in the forum for the version of OSX you're running, and supply full particulars of your setup and problems.

This is the Time Capsule forum. There are a number of differences in Time Machine's handling of backups via a network; similarly, different problems with different causes.

I now have this problem. I upgraded to Mountain Lion and ran TM on my EXHD and now this error. But I see I only have 120mb avalable after one succseful ML TM backup. Now the error is every try. I tried A4 in the pondini guide web site and did not work.

Ken30 wrote:

I now have this problem. I upgraded to Mountain Lion and ran TM on my EXHD and now this error. But I see I only have 120mb avalable after one succseful ML TM backup. Now the error is every try. I tried A4 in the pondini guide web site and did not work.

The first thing to try for the "error ... while creating the backup folder" message is #C10 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

I also tried a brand new HD today. I wanted more storage so I set up a new 2TB drive, partitioned in half ran TM. Looks like the initial backup worked but get the error again on the one hour later try. Running repair disk now but taking alog time.

I got TM to do another backup. Not sure how but when doing step A5 this is what shows for my new HD just partitioned today with 3 TM files on it. What does it mean?

Doesn't look good. 😟 There's some sort of problem with the partition map. I've never see that before.

You should get several messsages and an "OK" at the end, like the sample in #A5:

All I can suggest is re-partitioning it. Erase the entire disk first, just to be sure nothing is leftover.