Time Machine hangs on Time Capsule and external HDD

Thanks VERY much!

A ton of useful information and education.

So I followed your directions in A4 but I made a mistake so I stopped in my tracks to avoid making it worse.

Here's what happened: I copied the Exclusions list to my clipboard. After I deleted the plist and re-started, there is nothing to paste back into the Exclusions window.... I guess the clipboard got erased on the restart (?).

At any rate, I have done nothing else but I turned off backups so I could wait to hear back from you. What do I do about the missing Exclusion list?

Thanks

Eric

i have invested followed your checklist as best i could; still not working.

The problem is that the backup stops at about 45% in all three situations:

wireless to Time capsule

ethernet to Time Capsule

USB to external hard drive attached to my MacBook Pro.

My wife’s MacBook continues to backup over the same network flawlessly to the same Time Capsule.

i have reinstalled OSX on my laptop and run disk utility First Aid successfully on the MacBook, the external usb drive and on the sparse bundle. I have left the backup running for 24 hours and it still stalls

But if I go into the backup file and delete the In Progtess item, it restart backup it does great on any of the three destinations, running initially at less than two minutes per GB of data until it gets to about 45% and then it stalls.

Ive noticed that the available space on the destination drive decrements down by about the same amount as has been transferred before the stall, so I’m guessing a partial backup is being written but the Preferences pane shows no backup.

It looks like the next step is to delete the sparse bundle entirely but that makes me a little nervous so I thought I’d check with you to see if you have another suggestion.

Thanks in advance.

Eric

Before I received your last message I read on the web that some Mac users had trouble with the model of WD external drive I was using, so I tried another USB drive and it worked.... Time Machine ran a full backup overnight to this USB drive. Hooray and a sigh of relief.

So then I thought I'd see if that meant my Time Capsule would now recover and when I tried I got the warning message you showed and I elected to have it write a new backup from scratch. It immediately started, writing a GB every 45 seconds. Just before I went to bed I saw that it had slowed to a crawl after about 150GB.

So I waited overnight and it did increment up about 1 GB more but the total was about 40% of a full backup.

So I followed your trouble shooting into my Console logs... and there were two error messages labeled "spindump" at about 8:30 last night... which fits the time line I experienced.

There are no backup logs at all. The "All Messages" area was full of, well, messages. I'd be happy to send you a copy of that log but I'm too shy to post it publicly on the forum.

So my biggest problem is solved.... I have a current time machine backup on an external USB drive. Meanwhile my wife's computer continues to back up to our shared Time Capsule without problem.

Any more hints?

Thanks

tom

I should do that but the Time Capsule backup is continuing. Very slowly like 1 hour per GB.

I hope that the TC backup is real but I assume I can’t really test the USB HDD until the TC completes or fails.

So after 6 more hours I checked and it showed a completed TC backup, and another scheduled in an hour. If that's true it backed up 150GB in 6-7 hours.

The sparse bundle on the TC looks to be the correct size. It's 40gb bigger than it used to be before all this trouble but that's probably due to my accidental deletion of the Exceptions list.

Thanks for the incredibly helpful checklists you provided..... I can hardly imagine the work that went into them.

Forgot: Time Machine Buddy shows No Backups.