MacOS – Time Machine Backup Failed

backupmacmacostime-machine

Ive been using my Time Machine for almost 3 years without any problems. It's a 3 TB LaCie. This week it has decided to stop backing up my work. I tried repairing the disk and unmounting and remounting the disk a number of times but it's not working. After remounting the disk, it runs for about 10 minutes and then stops. Each time I then try to manually run a backup it immediately gives me an error message. The initial message I get is "Time Machine couldn't back up to 'LaCie'". When I click on the details it tells me that an error occurred whilst creating the 'backup folder'. It has suggested that I verify and repair the disk, but I have done this to no avail.

I'm currently still running Mavericks on my Mac.

Is there a solution to this?

Best Answer

I had an issue with backups not completing and I solved it by deleting the partially created backup folder.

First turn time machine off (System Preferences > Time Machine > Off)

Navigate to /Volumes/VOLUMENAME/Backups.backupdb/COMPUTERNAME/, where you will see a list of folders dated by when the backup was created. If you see a folder with .inProgress in the name, move it to the trash.

Turn time machine back on and complete a backup. If it fails again, I'd recommend taking a look at the resources here: http://pondini.org/TM/C10.html

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Things to check:

Software Update (read the description to see if it fixes the issue for your OS X 10.7 server)
Check if OS X 10.7 Server requires its Time Machine to be formatted using Case-sensitive, Journaled Mac OS X Extended. Anecdotally, I've always formatted my Time Machine backup as Mac OS X (Journaled) and Time Machines works fine.
Check the Permissions. Check that your OS X 10.7 Server user id has access to the USB partition.

Mac – Time Machine – multiple backup destinations for a “separate weekly”

Basically, I would recommend not trying to constrain time machine to only a weekly interval on the offsite drive.

That being said, you can have both drives work totally independently as that is how the software is engineered. If you really only want a weekly snapshot, only connect the weekly drive once a week and force a rotation of the destination:

 tmutil startbackup --rotation

Once you have a backup to the weekly drive, eject it and send it away. As long as all dives get reattached every 14 days or so, you won't get a warning dialog that any are out of date.

Again, you can certainly enforce a single weekly backup by the procedure you follow but two things make that practice less needed than you might expect:

The backup intervals are very low space overhead compared to the size of cheap backup disks.

On my worst Mac, the system averages 5 MB of overhead for system log files so in absence of user files changing, you have 24 daily and 31 monthly snapshots you would avoid storing 275 MB (or 0.0003 of a one TB drive) if you were on a strict one per week schedule.

Since the cleanup of old backups is so fast and the storage impact so low, most clients with offsite rotation end up just swapping disks each week and let the software cull the extra snapshots per the normal schedule, leaving weekly snapshots more than a month old.

Best Answer

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