Q: mountain lion breaks time machine

BillPatsy wrote:

. . .

That's the answer!!  The Volumes folder on the failed 10.5.8 TM Mac was full of failed backup entires.  So, to clean out the bad Backup entries (there were a hundred - really!) and move them to the desktop, I used Terminal to move all the bad entries into a folder called "Back", and TM started working again!  (I subsequently deleted "Back".)

Yes, that happens sometimes, apparently when OSX loses track of a volume at just the wrong time, and creates a folder in the /Volumes folder instead of an alias to the external volume.  And it happens with local drives, too, and other backup apps, not just Time Machine.

You probably don't want or need Terminal, or to move the bogus folders to your Desktop.  You can just delete them via the Finder.  See the blue box in Where did my Disk Space go?

P.S.  If the mv command doesn't work , you may have to create the "Back" folder on the Desktop first.

--Bill

Pondini wrote:

 

BillPatsy wrote:

. . .

That's the answer!!  The Volumes folder on the failed 10.5.8 TM Mac was full of failed backup entries.  So, to clean out the bad Backup entries (there were a hundred - really!) and move them to the desktop, I used Terminal to move all the bad entries into a folder called "Back", and TM started working again!  (I subsequently deleted "Back".)

Yes, that happens sometimes, apparently when OSX loses track of a volume at just the wrong time, and creates a folder in the /Volumes folder instead of an alias to the external volume.  And it happens with local drives, too, and other backup apps, not just Time Machine.

 

You probably don't want or need Terminal, or to move the bogus folders to your Desktop.  You can just delete them via the Finder.  See the blue box in Where did my Disk Space go?

Thanks, Pondini.  I like it.  And it has the virtue that the bogus folders do not acquire Root ownership.

Bottom line: This fixed the problem.  After 2 months, the sparsebundle is now remotely mountable, and my Time Machine works again!

--Bill

OK, Pondini.  To make the Volumes folder permanently visible, so that I can easily track any new corruption, I issued the following Terminal command:

    sudo chflags nohidden /Volumes

Now it's really easy to manage.

And all my wi-fi connected TMs are working great!

--Bill

Note that it's probably not entirely permanent -- if it's handled the same as ~/Library, it will be changed back to invisible with each update of OSX. 

Over the last few months this has been driving me to distraction.  Nothing, nothing seems to stick and I've tried all the suggestions posted.  At best they provide a temporary fix, at worst they do nothing.  What I am dong now is swapping firmware levels on the Time Capsule whenever the disc is lost.  It does not matter which firmware level I use, the problem reappears in a matter of days.  I am finding that the backup disc tends to magically reappear after the firmware has been changed.  Currently I'm on 7.6.1 but switch to 7.5.2 when the disc gets lost.

Process:

From the Airport Utility (6.1):

• Click on your Time Capsule
• <Option> click the version number
• Choose the version you want to install from the list
• Continue

A few days pass before the disc is lost again, then repeat the process but load a different version and all is good again.  On occasion I have to reselect the disc.  I have a WD 2TB plugged into the 1TB version 1 Time Capsule.

There are no issues from my wife's iMac running Lion and backing up to the Time Capsule directly

Went through all the posts here and haven't seen my issue listed so here goes...

Got a new Mini just after Thanksgiving to replace my aging iMac.  I've been using TM on an external FW800 drive since the days of Leopard all the way up through 10.8.2 on the iMac and also using Time Machine Editor all that time to do TM backups only at 6AM and 6PM every day instead of every hour.  It's worked flawlessly for years.

Anyway, got the Mini (came with 10.8.1 installed on 1TB internal HDD about 300GB used) set up to do TM backups to a 2TB external HDD connected via FW800 using Time Machine Editor with the same 6AM/6PM schedule.  This week I notice on the TM disk icon on my desktop it keeps saying 1.6TB free of 2TB every day. I'm thinking the space used should keep increasing every day, so I look at the TM volume and it shows 2 backups (6AM and 6PM) every day from 2 Dec (when I first fired up TM) until 14 Dec (last Friday) and a "Latest" folder with a backup in it....nothing stored for the 15th thru 18th.

Yesterday when I look at TM in the menu bar it shows the last backup as 6AM on Dec 18th, which was correct - but where were the prior 4 days backups?  So, last night I turned off Time Machine Editor and enabled Time Machine to do its normal "every hour" backup....and it promptly kicked off a backup.

I wake up this morning and look at TM at about 5:30AM, and still the only backup on the disk prior to "Latest" is Dec 14th....but it says the last backup was performed today at 5:08AM.  If I actually call up Time Machine, there are no backups listed between latest and Dec 14th either.

So my question is it seems like TM is performing backups on schedule as it should (I don't get any errors), but it's not saving them properly...the last backup performed is wiping out the one before it instead of that previous one being pushed into its own folder.

Like I said, it worked fine for 12 days, and now this....any ideas?

It gets weirder....I rebooted the machine and opended the external HD TM volume and now it shows the "missing" backups from the last few days and the hourlys from yesterday.

So, obviously TM was making the backups properly and they were actually on the drive all along, but why couldn't TM or Finder "see" them until after a reboot?

Hi,

I had the same problem,

Time machine estimation to perform a backup was more than 30 days.

I tryied several changes, but only one solved this issue.

It seems ths problem is related with spotlight.

If you add the disk you are trying to backup with time machine in the exeption of spotlight (when the backup is been performed), you will see that performance will be back to a normal behaviour (do not forget after the beckup to remove this exeption from spotlight)

Best regards,

Joao

I updated to 10.8.2 on my 2010 MBP.  Following that TM would not back up.  I ended up reformatting the drive and trying for a clean back up figuring the updated OS just made too many changes.  I have a 500GB internal, and a 1TB external that I back up onto another 1.5TB drive.  TM would never complete the back up.  Odder still was the fact that incrementally the back up size kept increasing.

So, after a night of frustration I called Apple Tech.  The first guy just made no sense on the phone.  The second guy told me you cannot back up an external HD using TM...  Clearly Apple needs to educate their techs a bit better.

So I read a bit more, and came up with a theory.  I cannot prove this, but my "test" for the theory fixed my issue.

My theory is that TM is trying to make local snapshots of the external drive, and somewhere in all the code TM is getting confused and backingup their own temporary backup.  This is just a fun hunch based on the incremental increases in the size of the backup.  It at least appeared like a memory leak.

From that hunch I decided to disable local snapshots.  And with that TM became fast and functional again, in about 3 hours I backed up 250GBs off the internal HD and 400GB off the external HD.  All is good.

If you want to try this, run Terminal and type: sudo tmutil disablelocal

To reactivate it type: sudo tmutil enablelocal.

I'm most interested to hear whether turning that off helps others.

I just think Apple don't want you to use another drive other than theirs thats the crux of it.

I have a dlink dns 320 and Dlink have been very slow to update the firmware when lion/mountain lion changed things again. It's apparently fixed now, but sadly when I try to connect to my shared drive with time machine it just hangs until eventually I get an error 89.

Very frustrating but then again this MBP has been nothing but trouble with weird things not working, whereas my imac is sweet as despite being older and on the same iOS. Neither will connect to TM server on my NAS though.

The disabling of local has not fixed my problems connecting to backup file on Drobo-FS.

Thanks for sticking with this and letting us know how it turned out.  I'm having the same problem with a Free Agent GoFlex 500G external drive.  I'll give your solution a try.

For what it's worth: this problem stopped (on my CPU) after updating to Mavericks (it started in Lion and survived into Mt. Lion). It could be a coincidental fix, but it seems fixed. I wish you all the best!