System Freezes During Time Machine Backup

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System Freezes During Time Machine Backup

I have a 2011 iMac with the latest version of Mountain Lion & 12gb of RAM. I haven't had any problems doing TM backups until a couple days ago. Now the entire system becomes totally unrepsonsive during the backup. I have to hard-boot out of it. I'm a pretty experienced Mac user (25+ years). I've done all the regular maintenance, repair, and other options that you'd normally do when something like this occurs (safe boot, fix perms, fix disk, boot in repair mode, etc, on both the internal HDD and the TM backup disk). I've also deleted the .inProgress file from the backup drive and one previous backup before that. I've looked in the console logs and haven't found anything that stands out. Once the system freezes, it stops writing to the log, so it's not giving me any info.

It'll start the backup, then get to a certain point and freeze up. I'm fairly convinced (but not absolutely certain) it's a corrupted file on my internal HDD, but none of the normal utilities have helped me discover where/what that file is.

Anyone have any ideas how to fix this, or perhaps how to find the corrupted file if that's what it is?

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5), mid-2011 12GB RAM

Posted on Oct 31, 2013 12:15 PM

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Answer 1

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Randy Farnsworth Author

Level 1

47 points

Nov 1, 2013 3:58 PM in response to Randy Farnsworth

I may have solved it, but I'll have to give it a few days to make sure it keeps working. I booted up in safe mode and did the TM backup then. It was slow, but it worked, then I rebooted and changed a bunch of files and tried the backup again and it still worked. So hopefuully this fixed it.

Also, FYI for anyone with the same problem, I did a full virus scan because that's often a way to find corrupted files: the virus scanner won't detect a virus in the file if there isn't one, but if it's really corrupted then it can't scan it and it'll show up in the scan log. But that didn't show any bad files either. Not saying you should skip that step, because that can still find corrupted files. It just didn't work in my case.

Anyway, I still don't know what caused this, but backing up in safe mode finally did the trick.

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