Never-ending Time Machine backup to Time Capsule

But it then did continue like this:

16/10/12 5:27:13.850 PM com.apple.backupd[37537]: Copied 4673 files (25.39 GB) from volume Macintosh HD.

16/10/12 5:27:14.427 PM com.apple.backupd[37537]: Using file event preflight for Macintosh HD

16/10/12 5:27:14.686 PM com.apple.backupd[37537]: Will copy (13.6 MB) from Macintosh HD

16/10/12 5:27:14.688 PM com.apple.backupd[37537]: Found 46 files (13.6 MB) needing backup

16/10/12 5:27:14.688 PM com.apple.backupd[37537]: 10.53 GB required (including padding), 1.1 TB available

16/10/12 5:28:58.918 PM com.apple.backupd[37537]: Copied 1767 files (2.22 GB) from volume Macintosh HD.

16/10/12 5:29:00.477 PM com.apple.backupd[37537]: Created new backup: 2012-10-16-172859

and at the end it was at ca 25GB and the 'backing up xxx of xxx' numbers had caught up but both sides increased the same for another 2GB or so until it stopped at 27.xx GB...

But it did finally stop..

I guess it will be like this from now on.

I had similar Time Machine/Wi Fi problems, amongst others after upgrading to ML. I followed the advice provided by these two websites and now my MBP is behaving like it used to. Good luck.

• http://www.macattorney.com/rbb.html
• http://allthingsapple.me/got-os-x-mountain-lion-wifi-problems-heres-the-solution /

Robin.

This same behavior reared it head on my MBP immediately after I switched from my symlinked SSD/HDD environment to a BYO Fusion Drive. Each incremental TM backup would start at anywhere from a couple hundred KBs to a Gig or so, but when reaching about 90% or so complete, the target would start to escalate eventually reaching 17-20GB before the TM backup would complete.

It was looking in my backup logs that I spotted the culprit. In my pre-Fusion setup, I had a totally separate partition on my HDD containing both swap and hibernation. TM ignored it. In my Fusion setup, I first joined the entire SSD and HDD into a single volume and then partitioned that into two logical partitions using core storage. As the two partitions showed up as separate volumes it never occurred to me that TM would looked at the top level fused drive, but that is EXACTLY what happened (ie it was backing up both partitions). It was the backup of the volume contain swap and hibernation files that was causing my creeping TM backups.

Once I went into TM options and excluded /Volumes/swap (the 2nd volume on my Fusion Drive), TM went back to working perfectly

Now it may be something other than swap that is causing your problems, but it certainly would not hurt to go in and exclude it from TM. Assuming that you have a vanilla OSX install, you want to exclude /private/var/vm. I was a bit surprised that swap was causing my issues as my MBP has 8GB of RAM and as such uses swap very sparingly but regardless, attempting to backup the swap files was the culprit in my case.

Good luck and hope this points to a solutions for those having issues

David

Had the same problem on a 2009 MBP running 10.8.2, trying to do a first TM backup of data totalling 450Gb. After the first 10 hours, I needed to pause the backup to transport the computer home. Then I restarted the backup, and it would run for 4-5 hours backing up an ever increasing number of files. Each time it ran, when I returned to the computer, my user account was logged out -- must be a Time Machine setting? And every time I logged back in to check progress, Time Machine reported that the backup was incomplete. Repeated this 5 times with no success. The size of these "remaining" files started at 110Mb or so, but it was 20,000+ files. The backup got to 90% complete, but with 10,000 files remaining, and it started to grow: the remaining files increased, and the data kept growing, up to 3, 5, 7, 10Gb. Never seemed like it would finish. Ultimately, the size of the TM backup grew to over 100Gb larger than the 450Gb that I was trying to backup.

So I started excluding items from the backup list using the Options setting in Time Machine. The first files I excluded were my two Parallels virtual machines, one Windows XP and one Windows 7 vm, which totalled about 150Gb together. That did it; the backup completed the next time I came back, and the back up size was around 300Gb, which is about right. This last successful backup took about 5 hours, and it logged me out on its own again.

Note: in the middle of these repetitive attempts to complete the backup, I booted the computer from the Mac OS CD, ran disk utility to repair permissions and verify/repair. No problems were found.

This doesn't actually make sense to me, as I hadn't used these vm's in a while, so they weren't changing in the middle of the TM backup attempts. Might be a coincidence, but I recommend excluding some large folders or items from the TM list, and seeing if you can isolate the problem that way. As long as you don't exclude System or User Settings files, if this works, then you just copy the missing files manually.

Good luck...

P.S. Thanks to Darkside Escapee for clueing me into this. BTW, I was not using Time Capsule, I was just using a 2Tb external drive that was configured as a TM volume.

The same problem occured now during the update of 10.8.2 to 10.8.3. The Time Machine increased the amount of data to unlimited.

So I thought this might be related to the upgrade, so I went into the Disk Utility and Verified my HDD (the source, not the backup media) as also repaired disk permissions. After a restart, the backups seem to work as expected again.