Time Machine Backup fails

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Level 3

810 points

Time Machine Backup fails

After working fine for several years, my Time Machine backup suddenly started consistently failing about a week ago. It spends a very long time "preparing backup", then gives the error something like "Backup could not be completed. There was an error copying files. Try again later. If the problem persists, use the Disk Utility to repair the disk". I've repaired the disk (several times) as well as all the other disks in my system, but the problem keeps occuring. Restarting the system also did not help. I can still access backups on the disk and in in fact went in a deleted a bunch of old stuff to insure there was plenty of disk space.

I have a 2011 iMac backing up to a 2 TByte Hitachi drive. I backup files from both the local hard disk and an external Seagate drive.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Posted on Apr 11, 2014 6:39 AM

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Answer 1

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ivansky

Level 2

284 points

Apr 11, 2014 3:04 PM in response to ejpre

I took a look at the excellent Time Machine resource at http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html and it looks like you may need to work through http://pondini.org/TM/C3.html. If that item in particular doesn't solve your problem there is lots of information on the site to help you with Time Machine issues.

Hope that helps.

Ivan

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Answer 2

ejpre Author

Level 3

810 points

Apr 12, 2014 12:51 PM in response to ivansky

Thanks. In the end it turned out that it was failing to copy the directory of my newly installed X11 libraries, and that caused the entire backup to terminate (which strikes me as kind of crazy).

Following the advice on your link, I excluded that directory, did a backup, then reincluded it and it backed up fine. It must be a very subtle bug in the Time Machine code.

I find it profoundly annoying that Time Machine didn't simply tell me what the error was, rather than make me search through the system logs to find it. That would have saved a great deal of time.

Thanks for your help.

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