Time machine cannot complete my backup

David,

In my case, it fails every few months. I guess you can say "It just works.... until it doesn't".

I'm suspecting that the problem starts when a backup begins while a file is open or being edited, or in the case with DropBox, when a file is being sync'd. The latest incident "appeared" to happen while DropBox was syncing.

All I know is that "normally" the ".inProgress" file is NOT in the database. It gets left there when a backup fails and while some times the backups resume after a while, in my case if it doesn't resume within the next few attempts, it never resumes.

Next time I will try a shortened procedure ot excluding DropBox and MyDocuement, backing up, then re-adding them.

APPLE, there needs to be a Time Machine database tool to debug and repair the database. Having to start a new database every few months (or days) defeats the purpose of Time Machine.

I've been having the same issue for a long time now. I gave up for a few months and just lived without an external hard drive. Thought I found something tha would help: I reformated the drive using a PC running Winows XP (the drive was originally windows based). It semed to work at first but just ended up back where I started. And now for some reason there is nothing saved on the drie yet half the space is gone. At one point (months ago) I was getting errors related to S.M.A.R.T. but I can't remember the exact error message. Disk utility verification is telling me to repair but the disk cannot be unmounted.