It's been a week for Time Machine in "Preparing Backup". How long is significantly longer?

Question

-scstraus- Author

Level 1

8 points

It's been a week for Time Machine in "Preparing Backup". How long is significantly longer?

When should I accept that it will never actually back up? A month? A year? And what should I do to fix it?

Posted on May 31, 2012 6:58 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

BDAqua

Level 10

238,997 points

May 31, 2012 10:20 AM in response to -scstraus-

Hello, something is greatly amiss.

Have you looked through Pondini's extensive TM help site?

http://Pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html

I can't imagine anything TMwise not covered.

Reply

Answer 2

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

May 31, 2012 6:34 PM in response to -scstraus-

No, that's clearly wayyyyyyy too long. 😟

It's rarely over an hour, unless you have a very large system, and/or are backing-up wirelessly.

Something is very wrong. Cancel the backup. If it won't cancel after a few moments, see #B6 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

One possibility is, something corrupted on your internal HD. Try Verifying it, per #A5 in the same article. If that shows errors, use the yellow box there to fix them.

If that finds and fixes things, and you're backing-up wirelessly, connect via Ethernet cable if at all possible before trying another backup.

Is this your first backup? If not, try repairing your prior backups, per the same article.

What are you backing-up to (external HD, Time Capsule, or what)?

What kind of Mac do you have?

Also, what version of OSX are you running (the article you found only lets you post in the Leopard forum).

Reply

Answer 3

BobHarris

Level 9

53,003 points

Jun 1, 2012 4:35 AM in response to -scstraus-

It could also be a corrupt backup. Using Application -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor, see if there is a process 'fsck' or with 'fsck' in the name running.

Reply

Answer 4

-scstraus- Author

Level 1

8 points

Jun 1, 2012 5:05 AM in response to Pondini

Thanks.

Reply

Answer 5

-scstraus- Author

Level 1

8 points

Jun 1, 2012 5:05 AM in response to BDAqua

That's a great resource. I will check it out when I get a chance and let you know how it goes. Still in "preparing backup" at the moment.. 😉.

Reply

Answer 6

-scstraus- Author

Level 1

8 points

Jun 13, 2012 11:24 AM in response to BobHarris

There is no FSCK process running.

Reply

Answer 7

-scstraus- Author

Level 1

8 points

Jun 13, 2012 11:30 AM in response to Pondini

Hey Pondini. So honored to be talking to the Time Machine god.

So here's the deal. I was having a ton of problems with my mac, so I decided to start clean. I bought a new SSD and installed OS X on it, and then pointed my home directory to my old hard disk on an external drive. For the most part there weren't many issues, except this. The time machine is backing up to a synology NAS and worked perfectly on the old computer which was running same OS X version and everything else.

I tried resetting time machine by deleting the plist, but that didn't help. Here's what I get from the time machine widget you suggest in your faq. Based on this I'm thinking it may be having a problem in that it can't delete or index the old files from the old backups. I don't really want to delete them in case I might need them, and I don't really have anywhere to copy them, but I might do it pretty soon if I don't have any other idea. If you've got any other ideas I'm ready to try.

Starting standard backup

Attempting to mount network destination URL: afp://xanadu@DiskStation.local/TimeMachine

Mounted network destination at mountpoint: /Volumes/TimeMachine using URL: afp://xanadu@DiskStation.local/TimeMachine

QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN

Disk image /Volumes/TimeMachine/Xanadu.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups

Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb

Error writing to backup log. NSFileHandleOperationException:*** -[NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:]: No space left on device

Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: User Data

Error writing to backup log. NSFileHandleOperationException:*** -[NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:]: No space left on device

Exception writing exclusions cache. NSFileHandleOperationException:*** -[NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:]: No space left on device

Unable to create exclusions cache data.

Failed to write exclusions cache. Continuing anyway.

Error writing to backup log. NSFileHandleOperationException:*** -[NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:]: No space left on device

Waiting for index to be ready (101)

Reply

Answer 8

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Jun 13, 2012 12:01 PM in response to -scstraus-

-scstraus- wrote:

. . .

Error writing to backup log. NSFileHandleOperationException:*** -[NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:]: No space left on device

It's completely out of room on the backup drive. 😟

Time Machine always leaves a small amount of space, so it can get started on the next backup. It creates a backup folder and starts the (hidden) log it keeps there, then figures out how much room the new backup will need, and whether there's enough space for it. But there's not even room for the log, so it never gets any farther. That may also be the reason it can't seem to index the backups.

That usually happens when there's other data on the drive, or there are a number of consecutive failed backups.

Your best bet is to delete the oldest few backups, per Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #12, then "compact" the sparsebundle per the pink box there. That should give it enough room to get started, but the next backup may be a lengthy process, if TM has to delete a lot more backups.

Reply

Answer 9

-scstraus- Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 1, 2012 2:39 PM in response to Pondini

Hi guys, just to give you an update on how this went. I was having a very hard time deleting backups, it deleted a couple but most of them it refused to delete. I compacted them but the space never came back. I ended up following the instructions on your site here http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html to do a full time machine reset and that ended up working in the end. Now everything is happily being backed up. Thanks for being so awesome Pondini. The world needs more people like you.

Reply

Answer 10

-scstraus- Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 3, 2012 3:28 AM in response to -scstraus-

Oops, one more thing. I just did this again (moved my home to a new hard drive) and had the same problem. I had to delete all the files off the time machine disk manually (I actually moved them to a new disk until I was sure I no longer needed them). Once I did that it worked. I probably did that the last time too and just forgot about it.

Reply

Answer 11

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Aug 3, 2012 8:10 AM in response to -scstraus-

-scstraus- wrote:

Oops, one more thing. I just did this again (moved my home to a new hard drive) and had the same problem. I had to delete all the files off the time machine disk manually

That's a different scenario/problem.

Did you move just your home folder? If so, yes, a new drive will be backed-up in full.

If you moved your entire OSX volume, depending on how you did it, Time Machine should have automatically "associated" the new drive with the old backups. If it didn't, you should be able to do that manually, via #B6 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

Reply

Answer 12

-scstraus- Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 4, 2012 5:36 AM in response to Pondini

Yes it probably is. It seemed like something permissions related. The first time I moved my home directory to a new disk after imaging my entire main disk over to a new disk. Then I reinstalled the system onto an SSD and used the copy of my old main disk as my user data disk. The second time I just copied my home directory to another drive, deleted the old user and created a new user with the same username and ID and pointed the home directory to the new drive. In both cases time machine complained about a full disk. It seems like it just couldn't access the old files to delete them. In both cases just moving the files off the disk and doing a full time machine reset worked.

Reply