Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
hi. wife's computer is having problems backing up to time capsule using time machine. this has always worked fine before, but now just stalls at 'looking for backup disk...'. she has a macbook pro (15-inch early 2008) running mountain lion. thanks.
Try re-selecting it via the Time Machine Preferences window.
If that doesn't help, try a "full reset" of Time Machine, per #A4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
Well, I woke the Mac up this morning and low and behold, I'm getting the "Looking for backup disk..." message again. I was able to run a full backup last night before I went to bed (I see a 388GB sparsebundle file sitting on the time capsule disk).
Pondini, I will have to look through your webpage for some more ideas. I'm pretty sure I'm on the latest firmware and such. I've rebooted the Mac and the time capsule several times (unplugged, waited 2 or 3 minutes). I'll also look at some of the other forums posts to see what I can dig up.
Chris
smitty25 wrote:
Well, I woke the Mac up this morning and low and behold, I'm getting the "Looking for backup disk..." message again. I was able to run a full backup last night before I went to bed (I see a 388GB sparsebundle file sitting on the time capsule disk).
See if just re-selecting the TC in TM Preferences works.
I've just had a similar story.
I have a 5-year old WD My Book, and it started misbehaving after I got a new MacBook Pro w/Retina Display about a month ago. I usually connect it to the MBP about once a week, and today it got into the "Looking for backup disk" and hung there. The disk was accessible and I could examine it in Terminal, but Time Machine couldn't.
First, I tried to power-cycle the WD ... that didn't help.
I removed the com.apple.TimeMachine.plist ... didn't help.
Then, I power-cycled the WD again, and also restarted the MBP, and let them sit for a few minutes... And this time it worked!
As I mentioned above, this is not the first problem I had with this WD drive. Right after I bought the new MBP, and after I used TM to transfer all my files to it (which worked great), it died on me and I had to reformat it, losing a lot of old backups in the process. Since it's 5 years old, it may be time to replace it; but in fact, it seems like it's working fine for non-TimeMachine access.
Does anyone have suggestions on good, reliable external hard drives? I only need 300-500GB.
gidiav__ wrote:
. . .
Does anyone have suggestions on good, reliable external hard drives? I only need 300-500GB.
OWC Sales has a good reputation here, for service as well as quality. I got one of their Mercury Elite Pros several months ago, as many folks have, with good results. Their 3-year warranty is more than many these days.
Pondini, it looks like it just started working again. I guess erasing the disk really did fix the issue. It has been backing up fine for several days now.
Chris
'looking for backup disk...'
