My Time Machine stalls during initial backup on external hard drive even after several hours.

We have been using Time Machine and an external hard drive to back up our MacBook for almost a year now. Recently, the hard drive (using a USB) was removed without ejecting it properly. After that, the auto backups began stalling. We tried setting up Time Machine all over again but the initial back up stalls at different places (like 6MB of 87GB) even if it's left for several hours overnight. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this? If not, can anyone suggest another inexpensive way of backing up our files from our MacBook?
Thanks!
Shane

It might have created a new user and loaded under that.. new user being the old user. But if you have issues do it again, only this time pick where the backup will go.
http://pondini.org/TM/16.html
The other questions might also be relevant as a new hard disk will make the Mac appear to the TM backup as a new computer.
See 14-18 for restore info.

Similar Messages

HT3275 When I press "select backup location" in the Time Machine section of System Preferences, my external hard drive doesn't appear as an option. How do I change this?

When I press "select backup location" in the Time Machine section of System Preferences, my external hard drive doesn't appear as an option. How do I change this? My external hard drive is a FreeAgent GoFlex Drive.

Hi, what Format is the external Drive?
They usually come PC Formatted for Fat32/MSdos, or NTFS... is there anything on it now?
How to format your disks...
http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/partitioning_tiger.html
(To Install OSX on an IntelMac the Drive it needs the GUID Partitioning scheme mentioned at the bottom.)
Thanks to Pondini, Formatting, Partitioning, Verifying, and Repairing Disks...
http://Pondini.org/OSX/DU.html

I am trying to use Time Machine to back-up to an external hard drive and I get the following message.Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup folder. Does anyone know what I should do?

I am trying to use Time Machine to back-up to an external hard drive and I get the following message.Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup folder. Does anyone know what I should do?

Hello Drake, I suspect one or more of the Drives needs repairing, but...
Have you looked through Pondini's extensive TM help site?
http://Pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
Can't imaging something not being covered there.

I just backed up my mac to an external hard drive using Time Machine. What would happen if I turn Time Machine off and then plug the external hard drive back into my computer?

I just backed up my mac to an external hard drive using Time Machine. What would happen if I turn Time Machine off and then plug the external hard drive back into my computer?
What I am ultimately wanting to do is make more room on my computer by backing up all of my files onto the external hard drive and then deleting them off of my computer. However, neededing to be able to retrieve them from the external hard drive later down the road.
From what I have read and am trying to understand, is that I probably shouldn't have used time machine. I need to use the external hard drive like a basic flash drive where I can put things on and get things off without having it automatically update through time machine everytime I connect it to my computer.
Not tech savvy at all and barely understand basics. I need very simple and easy to understand explanations.

sydababy wrote:
and then deleting them off of my computer.
BIG BIG MISTAKE ..... youre making a linchpin deathtrap for your data trying to shove everything on a single fragile HD.
Dont suffer the tragedy other people make, buy another or 2 more HD, theyre cheap as dust.
The number of people who have experienced terror by having a single external HD backup is enormous. One failure that WILL HAPPEN, and kaput,......all gone!
Dont do it, its all about redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.
follow here:
Methodology to protect your data. Backups vs. Archives. Long-term data protection
Deleting them off your computer is fine....having only ONE copy is extremely BAD.
The Tragedy that will be, the tragedy that never should be
Always presume correctly that your data is priceless and takes a very long time to create and often is irreplaceable. Always presume accurately that hard drives are extremely cheap, and you have no excuse not to have multiple redundant copies of your data copied on hard drives and squirreled away several places, lockboxes, safes, fireboxes, offsite and otherwise.
Hard drives aren't prone to failure…hard drives are guaranteed to fail (the very same is true of SSD). Hard drives dont die when aged, hard drives die at any age, and peak in death when young and slowly increase in risk as they age.
Never practice at any time for any reason the false premise and unreal sense of security in thinking your data is safe on any single external hard drive. This is never the case and has proven to be the single most common horrible tragedy of data loss that exists.
Many 100s of millions of hours of lost work and data are lost each year due to this single common false security. This is an unnatural disaster that can avoid by making all data redundant and then redundant again. If you let a $60 additional redundant hard drive and 3 hours of copying stand between you and years of work, then you've made a fundamental mistake countless 1000s of people each year have come to regret.

If I deleted a file on my Mac would Time Machine delete its copy on my external hard drive when backing up?

I just finished backing everything up onto my new 2T WD My Book Essential because my Macbook Pro is absolutely full of Photoshop files. I want to delete them from my Mac (since they're backed up) but I'm too scared Time Machine will delete them from my external hard drive.
Thanks in advance.

Move the images over to an external drive that is connected to your Mac by USB or FireWire.
Then....Time Machine will backup both your Mac..and..the hard drive automatically.
Can you elaborate on this?
I have a 128GB McAir (mid 2011 model) with a 2GB TC for backup. I need another external hard drive to save pictures and home HD videos. I wanted to partition the TC but learned that is not recommended. So now I’m looking to get two external hard drives to store priceless files and back it up.
Your comment makes me think I only need one external hard drive and use the 2GB TC as backup. A good option since 2GB is an overkill for a 128GB notebook.
Can you please share the steps? Plug in a HDD to McAir and run Time Machine? Is that it?
Thanks.

I upgraded to Maverick and now Time Machine will not connect to the external hard drive to back up files. The external hard drive is a Western Digital "My Book Live" 2 TB. How do I solve problem?

I upgraded to Maverick and now Time Machine will not connect to the external hard drive to back up files. The external hard drive is a Western Digital "My Book Live" 2 TB. How do I solve problem?

I also had problem accessing my WD MyBookLive after upgrading to Maverick.
To resolve the problem, I used Connect To Server (Cmd K) to specify the IP address.
Then I enter a user id and password I created in the MyBookLive.
You can also verify that you have admin access to the MyBookLive using Safari or Chrome.
Just enter the MyBookLive IP address as the URL.

HT201250 I run time machine on my iMac using an external hard drive. I just bought a MacBook Pro and want to know if i can run time machine on it using my wireless network on to the iMac external hard drive

I run time machine on my iMac using an external hard drive. I just bought a MacBook Pro and want to know if i can run time machine on it using my wireless network on to the iMac external hard drive

How do I set up Time Machine to a shared drive on another Mac?

How to stop Time Machine backing up on a specific external hard drive?

I work on a iMac 2.66 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, with Mac OS X 10.6.8. I use two external hard drives that are the exact same model, 2 TB WD My Book 1110 Media: one is intended for back-up, the other for storing video editing files. They're both connected through USB 2.0.
I set the "back-up" hard drive as back-up disk for Time Machine, through the Time Machine preferences. Now, everytime I connect the "video" hard drive, Time Machine recognizes it as a back-up disk, and starts backing up on it. I could delete the "Backups.backupdb" file that Time Machine had created by connecting the "video" hard drive to another Mac and moving it to the Trash, but as soon as I reconnect the "video" hard drive to my iMac, Time Machine backs up on it again.
Is there a way to "de-select" a hard drive from Time Machine's list of back-up disks?
Note: I should mention another thing that might indicate a conflict. When both hard drives "back-up" and "video" are connected to my iMac, if I open Final Cut Pro X, I can only see my "back-up" hard drive. To access the files I am working on, I need to eject the "back-up" hard drive, and suddenly the "video" drive appears.
If you have any idea of how to solve this conflict... I am a bit lost.
Thank you!

Welcome to Apple Support Communities.
Give them unique volume names using Disk Utility.
Then set Time Machine back up to that unique volume name.
For example, I regularly use 4 external drives (though they're not all the same model).
The descriptions quickly tell me which drives I have connected to my MacBook when open Finder:
My Time Machine backup volume is named 'Time Machine 1TB'.
My iPhoto backup volume is named 'iPhoto Backup 320GB'
My iTunes backup volume is named 'iTunes Backup 120GB'
and the last is 'Windows 7 Backup 250Gb' but since it's a Windows volume, it is formatted NTFS.
This likely means that you will have to erase and repartition one of your drives to name it.
You MIGHT be able to rename it using Finder, right-clicking on the volume, and selecting Rename (current volume name).
WARNING: I can't be certain of what just renaming it that way could screw up in the way of permissions and file links.
Within Disk Utility, it seems it is absolutely not possible to change a volume name without clicking the Partition tab, and that involves erasing.
Given the choice, I'd probably choose to rename (erase and repartition) the Time Machine drive. A current backup or two on Time Machine, and I'm good. I don't really need to go 'way back' to recover files, because I really don't ever erase anything. I just keep buying bigger drives!
And I still burn the 'absolutely critical, priceless, can't ever be without this stuff' files to DVD or CD at least monthly or quarterly, in case one of my TM or backup drives fails at the same time as my primary hard drive. Call me paranoid, but I worked in Information Technology for many years: Murphy was an optimist!
Message was edited by: kostby

Time machine with 10.5 Server (+thrashing external hard drive)

I run MacOS server to provide support for a small group of collaborators -- mainly via SVN and Wikis, as well as a static website that is publicly accessible, all running off a Mac Mini.
I want to use Time Machine to keep a backup, so I can quickly get up and running if anything goes wrong.
However, when Time Machine is switched on, it seems to spend an inordinate amount of time thrashing the external hard drive (a 1GB in a separate enclosure, connected via Firewire). Looking at top shows du using ~70% of one of the cores on the Mini, and the thrashing lasts for 20 or 30 minutes at a time, even though very little has changed on the server (the wikis get updated at most once a day, and the website gets visit a 10s of times in 24 hours).
Turning off time machine silences du (and the somewhat noisy hard drive)
Any suggestions (or tips for using Time Machine to back up a server in general -- once I get this sorted I plan to test that I can actually recover the server from the backup and install on a new machine)

Turns out that the thrashing was due to Sharepoint; but it was only an issue when time machine was running (so far as I can see). Am still checking that the problem does not come back, but will mark this as solved.

Time machine won't let me include external hard drive in backup

My memory was full on our computer so I got an external hard drive to move over our iphoto library to (I have a large iphoto library ~22,000 pictures that continues to grow). For discussion purposes I'll call this - IPhoto HD.
I also have another external hard drive that we've had for quite some time that I use as our time machine backups. (Time Machine HD).
I copied over my iphoto library to the new external HD (IPhoto HD).
I then went into my time machine under settings and wanted to make sure that the IPhoto HD was being backed up on the Time Machine HD. (after I got verification of this I was going to delete the iphoto library from our computer to free up some space).
When I go into time machine under options - the Iphoto HD is greyed out - and it won't allow me to delete it from the "do not back up" list. (however the Time Machine HD is not greyed out - I could delete it if I wanted to).
I tried searching for the answer in the forums and couldn't figure it out. I did verify that the format of the IPhoto HD is Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
I should note that both external Hard drives are WD My Book for Mac 2TB. Not sure if that makes a difference.
Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Sorry, but Time Machine does not back up reliably, if at all, to most network drives, except Time Capsules or a shared drive on another Mac running Leopard or Snow Leopard on the same local network.
Here's the criteria they must meet: Disks that can be used with Time Machine. And be careful here: just because some 3rd-party hardware claims to support Time Machine doesn't necessarily mean that Apple supports it, or that it will work in all circumstances.
The messages indicate that Time Machine found the volume, but couldn't write to it. That may be some sort of sharing or permissions error, or it may be that the device doesn't support all the things Time Machine requires, per the link above.
Are you sure that it's compatible with Snow Leopard? Some NAS devices that worked with Leopard didn't seem to work with Snow Leopard, at least when it first came out.
You may need to check with LaCie or the place you got it.

Time Machine Not Backing Up to an External Hard Drive - Error 11

Hi!
I am unable to backup my MacBook with my external Hard Drive. My Mac is a fairly new machine (September 2009) and I have backed up since upgrading to Snow Leopard previously but I cannot backup at all at the moment.
I have run disk utility and repair completed without any issues, in fact it told me that the drive was running ok. I have also reformatted my drive (mac os extended (journaled) ) and made sure the partition is GUID. The following is the message that appears when the backup fails:
"The backup was not performed because an error occured while copying the files to the backup disk. The problem may be temporary. Try again later to back up. If the problem persists, use disk utility to repair your backup disk."
I have had a look at the log using the Time Machine Widget and the following is what has been generated:
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/MAC/Backups.backupdb
Ownership is disabled on the backup destination volume. Enabling.
Error parsing SystemMigration.log to determine source volume of system migration.
Backup content size: 100.2 GB excluded items size: 85.9 GB for volume Macintosh HD
No pre-backup thinning needed: 17.11 GB requested (including padding), 148.45 GB available
Waiting for index to be ready (101)
Indexing a file failed. Returned 200 for: /usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic/crox3tbo.pcf.gz, /Volumes/MAC/Backups.backupdb/Eric O'Mahony’s MacBook/2010-05-02-210743.inProgress/E450C379-52F6-48A3-99D7-F45043074122/Macin tosh HD/usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic/crox3tbo.pcf.gz
Aborting backup because indexing of file failed.
Stopping backup.
Copied 158300 files (12.5 GB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Copy stage failed with error:11
Backup failed with error: 11
The problems seems to be with indexing a file....a font?? Can anyone help me? It is driving me crazy and I need to backup my files.
Thank you for your help!

ericomahony wrote:
Indexing a file failed. Returned 200 for: /usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic/crox3tbo.pcf.gz,
The problems seems to be with indexing a file....a font??
Yes, indeed. Start by just excluding it, per the blue box in #C3 in the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
If the backup then runs ok, you'll need to figure out what's wrong with that file.
If you get another error, see the rest of #C3.

Time Machine back up made from an external hard drive

Hi...to all
Last week i bought a Macbook. I pluged in my external hard drive Maxtor OneTOuch 4 Plus and it did a time machine backup on the Maxtor OneTOuch 4 Plus. The folder that was generated by the time machine on my external hard drive has the name backups.backupdb.
Then, i decided to return the Macbook and bought a Macbook Pro.
When I pluged the same external hard drive, Maxtor OneTOuch 4 Plus, although I am able to access and open individual files and folders, I am not able to copy neither any nor all the folders from my external hard drive to my new Macbook Pro. Moreover, I am able to access/open the files located in my external hard drive but when try to copy specific files from this drive to my Macbook Pro I get the following error message: Sorry the operation could not be completed because an unexpected error ocurred (Error code -50). Now, here is where it gets interesting: after 2 failed attempts to copy files from my external hard drive to my Macbook Pro desktop and receiving the above error message I am then able to copy the specific file (singular). This would mean that to copy the files and folders in the external hard drive i would need to do it on a one by one basis? If so, it would take forever...
Can someone please kindly help out.
Thanks on advance

Hi Sunny Beach 1024;
Since your question deals primary with Time Machine, you might get more results if you post over in the Time Machine Forum.
Allan

Can I use Time Machine to back files on an External Hard Drive

My MacBook Pro hard drive filled up with movies, pictures, and music, so I bought a 2TB Time Capsule. I have a external hard drive that is about the same capacity as my MacBook hard drive. Sine the Time Capsule is by far the largest drive I have, I moved all my movies, music, and pictures to the Time Capsule and am using it as an external hard drive. I attached a 500GB external hard drive to the Time Capsule and I use that as the backup drive for Time Machine. However, the problem I am encountering is that I can't seem to direct Time Machine to include all of my files on my Time Capsule in the back up on to the other external hard drive.
Can I use Time Machine to backup data that I store on my Time Capsule to a external hard drive? If not, what is hte best method for backing up my files that are on my Time Capsule?
Thanks,
David

You need to use a different utility .. eg CCC or Chronosync to backup from the TC to yet another drive.. the problem is, that drive should be connected to the computer.. if you use a USB drive on the TC.. the file copying will be slow as slow as you will not believe.. all files are copied to the computer, then back to the TC.. it cannot copy directly to the TC..
As Neil said.. one way or another you need to use an external drive on the computer, even if you don't use it all the time.. the danger of course is not doing regular backups.. and forgetting their importance.
A true NAS will have automated backup incrementally of the files stored.. The TC is not a NAS in that sense.. it is a backup target for TM above and beyond anything else.

Time Machine: Can I use a smaller external hard drive with larger internal?

Can I use a 250G external hard drive with and 500G unfilled internal drive with time machine? Or will time machine require I a 500G? I don't plan on filling the internal drive for a long time and don't want to buy a new external drive right now.

Yes, but you are very likely to get in trouble very quickly.
The problem is that TimeMachine saves multiple versions of any file modified, and if that file happens to be large, you can quickly fill up your TimeMachine drive such that it is throwing away older versions faster than you would desire.
Also if your boot drive's storage usage gets even close to the 250GB external drive's capacity, TimeMachine is likely to stop working.
If possible, I would suggest an external drive that is twice as large as your boot drive, or at least 1.5 times larger.
I guess you could repartition your boot drive so it is smaller than your external disk so you would be less likely to use more space than could fit on the external.
Personally, my opinion about backups is that much of my data is impossible to replace (family pictures, etc...), and spending money on backup hardware is a small price to pay for securing those memories. I also try to have it backup in more than one location in more than one way.

HT1338 I was backing up my MacBook with Time Machine on my new (correctly formatted) external hard drive. It was going fine when my 2 yo knocked the hard drive. Now TM said "failed" and the Mac refuses to recognize the external hard drive. Help please?

I was backing up my MacBook with Time Machine and using my new (correctly formatted) external hard drive. All was going well when my 2 yo knocked the disk leading to a "failure" by time machine (Latest Backup: Failed). Now the MacBook will not even recognize the hard drive. I have rebooted, tried all I can think of, but no acknowledgement of the drive. The drive itself makes noise and vibrates as if working, but nothing from the Mac. Please help or $100 down the drain... Thank you.

You may have already done these resets in the "tried all I can think of " portion of your post.....if not then here they are.....
PRAM
support.apple.com/kb/HT1379
SMC
support.apple.com/kb/HT3964
.....hopefully that is all that is required.....

My Time Machine stalls during initial backup on external hard drive even after several hours.

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