Time Machine backups extremely slow after hard drive replacement

I'm having trouble with Time Machine backups following a hard drive replacement. The Apple Store replaced my MacBook Pro's damaged hard drive three days ago and I successfully restored my system (OSX 10.6.8) using a Time Machine backup. The computer is running fine now, but ever since the repair my Time Machine back-ups take a very long time (>2 hours per backup, versus 30-60 seconds before the repair). I know that the intiial backup of a new computer can take a while but I'm now onto complete backup #10 since the repair and they are not getting quicker. I'm not adding/changing many files or software in between backups. The backups appear to be successful but the external hard drive and computer fan are running nearly constantly, which is concerning (and annoying). Any advice would be appreciated! Thanks.

Peruse Pondini's TM FAQs, for information.

Similar Messages

  • HT201250 How can I migrate a Time Machine backup from an external hard drive to a new TimeCapsuls?

    I just got a 2TB Time Capsule.  I want to migrate my time machine backups on an external hard drive to the new Time Capsule.  I have about 430Gb of files to back up; I don't want to wait 7-8 days for the backup, unless I have to.  I am using OS 10.7.5 (forget which cat that is).  I have mounted the TC drive as 10.0.1.1; I tried to drag and drop from old to "data" on TC, but I get the error "The volume is the wrong format for a backup."  Any ideas how I can move my old files to the new, and bypass creating a brand new backup file?
    Thanks.

    Rather than do that, which means starting over from scratch, losing all your edits, organisation and so on, why not simply use iPhoto Library Manager to revert the Library to the older version? Easier, less destructive.
    The instructions on that are here
    If you really want to start over: you can access the Originals folder simply by going to your Pictures Folder and finding the iPhoto Library there. Right (or Control-) Click on the icon and select 'Show Package Contents'. A finder window will open with the Library exposed.

  • I had to reformat my OSX 10.5.8 and i can't restore my emails from my time machine backup from an external hard drive - only the latest (post backup) time machine back ups are available to restore. Please can any help

    I had to reformat my OSX 10.5.8 and I can't restore my emails from my time machine backup from an external hard drive - only the latest (post backup) time machine back ups are available to restore. Please can any help? I can find the mail folder in my libraries, but the Restore Button is grayed out

    OSX treats the reformatted drive as a different one; it's the same as replacing it, and the old one is no longer connected.
    See #E3 in  Time Machine - Troubleshooting to see and restore from the "old" drive.
    And, you may not want to restore via the Finder; see the blue box in #15 of  Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions.

  • Is there any way to create a time machine backup to an external hard drive with content already on it?  I have a hard drive that i have used for pictures but when i try to run a backup it says i need to start from a blank drive. Can i get around it?

    Is there any way to create a time machine backup to an external hard drive with content already on it?  I have a hard drive that i have used for pictures but when i try to run a backup it says i need to start from a blank drive. Can i get around it?

    It would be much better if you had separate drives for the pictures and Time Machine backups.....but, if you want to use the same drive for both purposes, temporarily move the folder with the pictures to another location for safe storage.
    Run the Time Machine backup on the hard drive and verify that everything is working correctly. Time Machine will format the disk for you in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as part of the backup process.
    Then move the folder with the pictures back to the hard drive with the Time Machine backups.
    When you have tested to make sure that everything is working again, then and only then should you delete the folder with pictures from the temporary storage area.
    Again....it would be much better to keep Time Machine backups on a drive just for that purpose, and other data on another drive for that purpose. This is clearly one of those times when the fact that you can do something does not mean to imply that you should do it.

  • I threw out 24 time machine backups from an external hard drive into my desktop trash and now I can't empty my trash.

    I threw out 24 time machine backups from an external hard drive into my IMac desktop trash and now I can't empty my trash.

    Since you didn't mention what type of error message you were seeing, I'm going to guess on what is happening.
    I'm guessing that since you threw away Time Machine backups, that Time Machine is probably active on your Mac. There is a chance then that the files you tossed are marked as in use. You can't delete files that are in use.
    Try turning Time Machine off, then restart your Mac. Then try deleting them again.
    Once done, turn Time Machine back on.
    Tom

  • Is there a way to get my photos off an old time machine backup from an external hard drive?

    Is there a way to get my photos off an old time machine backup from an external hard drive?

    You will have to connect the Time Machine HDD and click on the Icon.  You will see one folder called Backups.backupdb.  Click on that and you will have to continue until you find the home folder.  The iPhoto library (where the pictures are, not the application) will probably be in your pictures folder.  You will have to drag that to your desk top.  Then you will have access to individual images.
    Ciao.

  • Time Machine backups corrupt or external hard drive failure?

    My goal today was to upgrade my MacBook Pro's HD, and to restore my system from my latest Time Machine backup which resides on an external hard drive. I installed the new hard drive, formatted it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and selected Restore System From Backup from Utilities. The system restore was five minutes form finishing when I received an error that the system restore could not be completed, and that I should restart my machine and try again. I did as instructed, but once the system restore process began, the screen went gray, and I was told that the Snow Leopard install could not be completed.
    Before beginning the process a third time, I ran Disk Utility from the Snow Leopard install disc and attempted to verify and repair the external (Time Machine) hard drive. The Time Machine hard drive could not be verified, nor could it be repaired. I popped in the old hard drive into my MacBook Pro, booted Snow Leopard, and ran Disk Utility, and tried again repairing the Time Machine hard drive. Here is the log of the error I received:
    2010-12-29 21:14:30 -0800: Verify and Repair volume “Time Machine”
    2010-12-29 21:14:30 -0800: Starting repair tool:
    2010-12-29 21:14:31 -0800: Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
    2010-12-29 21:14:31 -0800: Checking extents overflow file.
    2010-12-29 21:14:31 -0800: Checking catalog file.
    2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800: Invalid node structure
    2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800: The volume Time Machine could not be verified completely.
    2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800: Volume repair complete.
    2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800: Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
    2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800: Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
    2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800:
    2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800: Disk Utility stopped repairing “Time Machine”: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
    Do these errors indicate that my Time Machine backups located in the Backups.backupdb are corrupt, or is the external hard drive corrupt and failing?
    The Time Machine backups are on a Maxtor OneTouch, and from what I've read, they're prone to an early demise. I've also recently noticed that my Time Machine backups started slowing. For example, I would plug in my external hard drive and if 1.3GB needed to be backed up, it would stall at 300 MB before jumping to 700 MB, stall again, then jump to 900 MB. That could be a sign of a failing hard drive, correct? If the external hard drive is failing, I can purchase a new eternal hard drive then copy the Backups.backupdb to the new hard drive, correct?
    However, if Backups.backupdb is corrupt, then from what I understand, I would have to start fresh. I would prefer to not start fresh unless there's no other option, as I would be losing almost three years worth of Time Machine backups.
    Any guidance is appreciated. Thanks!

    ali_baba7 wrote:
    2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800: Invalid node structure
    2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800: Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
    It's possible a heavy-duty 3rd-party utility such as +Disk Warrior+ can fix that. It's about $100, and there's no guarantee, but it's probably a good investment for the future.
    Do these errors indicate that my Time Machine backups located in the Backups.backupdb are corrupt, or is the external hard drive corrupt and failing?
    The structure of the file system is damaged.
    That may have been caused by the disk beginning to fail, but there's no way to tell for sure until you erase and reformat the disk and try to use it.
    I've also recently noticed that my Time Machine backups started slowing. For example, I would plug in my external hard drive and if 1.3GB needed to be backed up, it would stall at 300 MB before jumping to 700 MB, stall again, then jump to 900 MB. That could be a sign of a failing hard drive, correct?
    It could, but it could also be whatever's wrong with the file structure.
    If the external hard drive is failing, I can purchase a new eternal hard drive then copy the Backups.backupdb to the new hard drive, correct?
    No. You can't copy corrupted backups. They're all linked together, like a database, so if anything's damaged, the whole set is suspect, and can't be copied.
    There are a couple of options:
    If the disk is physically ok, and the directory damage was recent, you might be able to restore from an earlier backup. But since you noticed problems some time ago, the damage may not be recent.
    Or, you might be able to get up and running by just installing OSX from your SL Install disk (and the 10.6.5 "combo" update). You'll be missing whatever wasn't restored in that last 5 minutes or so. Things are restored in the same order they're listed by the Finder, so it will be the last things in the last user account. You should be able to figure out where it stopped, check or delete the very last file (likely incomplete) and selectively restore as many of the remaining things as you can, via the "Star Wars" display.
    Just to make things more difficult, if the disk is failing, the more you use it, the more likely it is to get worse or fail completely.
    So your safest bet may be to install OSX, then download and install the 10.6.5 "combo" update. Info and download available at: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1324 Be sure to do a +Repair Permissions+ via Disk Utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder) afterwards. Then recover what you can.

  • 6th Generation Airport Extreme Freezing During Time Machine Backups using LaCie 1TB Hard Drive

    I recently upgraded from a 4th generation Airport Extreme (short, dual band n) to a new 6th generation Airport Extreme (tall, dual-band ac) in the hopes of having quicker backups and better WiFi performance (I also just got a 13" retina MacBook Pro).
    The upgrade has gone poorly, to say the least. Initially, I set up the new Airport Extreme as I had for the old one. Then I plugged in the same hard drive I was using (a LaCie 1 TB d2 Quadra USB2 drive that I bought in June of 2009). I decided to setup my wife's Time Machine backup first (she has a 2010 MacBook Air). I removed the "old" disk (the one associated with the old base station) from her Time Machine configuration, and set up her Time Machine configuration to backup to the same disk on the new Airport Extreme. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it picked up her existing Time Machine backup and incrementally synchronized to it (the backup size was about 300 MB). A few days later, she warned me that Time Machine told her that backups were not working. When I went to look, it was indeed failing.
    I tried a few things that didn't work, and I suspected that maybe the backup "transfer" hadn't gone so smoothly as it seemed, so I decided to erase the drive using Disk Utility and start the backup over again. To my disappointment, I found that the backup got about 200MB-1.5GB into the backup and "froze." I left it overnight, and it was at exactly the same place the next morning. The light on the disk connected to the Airport Extreme flashed constantly all the time, and I could hear it spinning, but nothing happened at all.
    When I tried to stop the backup, it took a very long time. In the logs, I would see a message like this (this log is from my machine, not my wife's, but it looks the same):
    11/19/13 9:40:59.276 PM com.apple.backupd[93334]: Forcing deep traversal on source: "***-mpbr" (device: /dev/disk0s2 mount: '/' fsUUID: 7356274E-D28F-3BC0-9CA8-7F1AA21830B4 eventDBUUID: 99941F9A-AD5F-4FAF-94D2-701C94CA9581)
    11/19/13 9:41:57.609 PM com.apple.backupd[93334]: Total content size: 148.2 GB excluded items size: 17.16 GB for volume ***-mpbr
    11/19/13 9:41:57.610 PM com.apple.backupd[93334]: Found 674166 files (131.05 GB) needing backup
    11/19/13 9:41:57.611 PM com.apple.backupd[93334]: 152.52 GB required (including padding), 498.67 GB available
    11/19/13 9:41:57.625 PM com.apple.backupd[93334]: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
    11/19/13 9:59:22.407 PM UserEventAgent[11]: com.apple.backupd-auto launchd job disabled
    11/19/13 10:00:15.103 PM com.apple.backupd[93334]: Cancellation timed out - exiting
    Looking at the Airport Extreme in Finder, I saw that it got stuck, either "Connected as" me, or "Connecting...". The Airport Extreme wouldn't respond to the "Disconnect" or "Connect As..." buttons (depending on the context), and the eject button for the Airport Extreme itself in the sidebar was also unresponsive. Eventually, after 2+ minutes, I got a dialog saying "Couldn't connect to [my base station name]" with instructions to "check its IP" and contact my system administrator if the problem persists. During this time, Finder can seem frozen and unstable.
    Through all of the above, the hard disk kept spinning and the light flashed constantly. The drive was warm to the touch in the morning.
    I also found that when all this happened, I was unable to connect to the Airport device using Airport Utility. I I couldn't administer it, but the Internet continued to work for all connected devices. Unplugging the disk and plugging it back in worked immediately to bring the system back to a working state. I didn;t even have to power-cycle or reset the Airport Extreme.
    I tried a number of things to correct this behavior:
    Disabled Time Machine, removed disk, restarted machine, reconfigured Time Machine, and retried.
    Tried backup on my 13" Retina MacBook Pro and my wife's MacBook Air.
    I actually tried with TWO new 6th Generation Airport Extremes. The first one was a refurbished one. I returned it to Apple and purchased a brand new one. Both of them exhibited the behavior I described above.
    Workaround:
    Finally, I switched the drive out for a spare that I have (an older Western Digital MyBook and used it for a backup. This drive "Just worked."
    So, I have switched to that for backup for now, and re-purposed the LaCie as a drive that I use for making periodic images of my hard drive using SuperDuper. The drive seems to work perfectly (and worked perfectly for several years with older Airport Extreme base stations), so I can only assume there's a bug in the USB driver of the current 6th-generation Airport Extreme.
    I hope this helps someone else who's as confused as I was. If anyone has had a similar experience, I would very much like to read about it. I will be reporting this problem to apple right after I post this topic. Please do the same if you experience this issue.

    As Bob says, backing-up that way isn't supported.
    It's also unreliable. It may work for a while, but this forum, and the Time Machine forums, have many, many posts like this:
    *"I've been backing-up via an Airport Extreme for* <some number of days, weeks, or months> *and all of a sudden my backups are corrupted beyond repair."*
    In my case, it's happened about 4 times in a year. And that's with a desktop Mac, about 12 feet from the Airport, with the exact same hardware in exactly the same place and no interference.
    It is very convenient, especially with laptops. If you want to take the risk, see [Using Time Machine with an Airport Extreme Air Disk|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Airport.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
    But do yourself a LARGE favor and take the prominent advice to keep secondary backups, and update them frequently. Sooner or later, you're probably going to need them.

  • Time Machine Backup EXTREMELY SLOW

    I've recently noticed that my Time Machine backups from my Mid 2009 iMac 3.06 to a WD 1tb MYBook take an incredibly long time.  For example, an hourly backup where nothing has really changed (350k according to a TM log) takes over 30 minutes.  I've been working with applecare and they can't pin it down.  I've tried the following and nothing has changed-
    - creating a back to a brand new drive
    - disabling or deleting every startup program and launch agent
    - Created another new user and backed up from there
    - Reinstalled OSX to repair Time Machine
    - Created a new boot partition on my HD and installed OSX
    - I used the same backup disc on my laptop and it worked fine
    The strange thing is hat everything seems to work fine.  I ran a verify on my disks.  I Boot my original OS disc in and ran the hardware test.  NOthing finds a problem.  I tried writing large files to and from my HD to see if that could be the problem.  MY HD reads and writes quickly (2.5gb copies to/from an external drive in less than 2 minutes).
    The only thing that has changed in the past 6 month s is that I updated my ram from 4 to 8GB with Kingston ram.  Could it be a bad piece of RAM or my logic board?  Everything else seems to be working fine.
    Anybody experience anything likes this???

    kieranroy wrote:
    Hey - apologize if this has been covered, but despite much searching, I haven't found a solution to my problem...
    After a hard drive crash, I restored using a Time Machine backup. I figured it would be a good idea to start a fresh Time Machine backup going forward.
    Does that mean you erased or reformatted the drive?
    If you deleted some or all of the backups via the Finder, cancel the backup, reformat the drive, and start over.
    Using a LaCie 500GB Firewire 800 drive (formatted MacOS Extended Journaled), after one hour, only 5GB has been backed up. As my MacBook Pro has 165GB of data, at this rate, it will take almost two days.
    Does that hour include the "Preparing" phase? If so, nothing at all was backed-up during that time, so the actual rate is probably much faster.
    Also note that the first items backed-up contain a very large number of mostly small files; there are things that must be done for each item, so that sort of backup will be longer than saving a few large files that total the same amount of space. The speed of the backup will increase and decrease during the backup; initial estimates are almost always quite high.
    I've removed the Time Machine drive from Spotlight indexing. I have ensured Norton AntiVirus is not running. What else can I do to speed this up? It seems extremely slow by all comparisons I've read.
    First, be sure the *Partition Map Scheme* of the LaCie is correct. Use the procedure in item #C1 of the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip* at the top of this forum.
    Also see item #D2 of the same post (you've already done the first two things). Don't try the +*Repair Disk+* while the backup is running, or if you erased or reformatted it before starting this backup.

  • Time Machine back-up/restore after hard drive failure - lost data

    Our iMac was subject to a hard drive recall.  So before getting the hard drive replaced, I did a full Time Machine backup (over wifi to a HD connected to Airport Extreme).  Once done, I took the iMac to the Genius Bar and they sent me home with a machine with a new copy of the OS installed.
    Came home and upon setting up OSX, I selected something like "restore from Time Machine backup."  Told it where the drive was.
    I now realize that the most recent back-up that is on that drive is from January 2012.  So I lost ten months of data.  When I look at Finder at the external drive, in the Backups.backupdb folder, all of the dates there are 2012-01-10-XXXXXXX.  There is also a "latest" folder in there, but that also looks old.
    So first, does anyone have any suggestions on where to look for this full backup I did?  When I enter Time Machine, the time bar on the right only shows "latest" and "January 2012."  Interestingly, it does not have older backups either.
    Note - the backup I did was a manual one.  I stopped having Time Machine do automatic backups because they took way too long over the air.  So I would start manual backups about once per month.  I never thought to check the hard drive to see if they were there.
    Thanks for any help.

    I think I have solved half of this.  Upon starting the Mac after the disk swap, when I went to restore from Time Machine, I disconnected the drive from Airport Extreme and connected it directly to the Mac via USB.  Apparently, this is not ok.
    I reconnected the drive to Airport Extreme and now can see all of the backups. 
    So my question now is whether (1) do I revert to the week-old Time Machine (I want to do this) and (2) do I have to do it over wifi or is there a way for me to access this backup via a direct connection?  I'm worried that over wifi, it will take days to restore (it's only 100 GB, but it seems to take forever).
    Thanks in advance.

  • Can I migrate my data from a regular hard drive to a solid state drive using only a Time Machine backup from an external hard drive?

    I just bought a Samsung 830 256GB solid state drive which I will use to replace my 15-inch, 2.53 GHz, Mid 2009 MacBook Pro's stock hard drive. I also keep an external hard drive in which I keep my regular Time Machine backups via FireWire. Would I be able to migrate all my data from it after putting in the solid state drive? I prefer not to use any third-party applications and I do not plan on replacing the SuperDrive with the hard drive that I'm going to remove from my laptop.

    chinodelarosa wrote:
    Would I be able to migrate all my data from it after putting in the solid state drive?
    Yes.

  • I need to create a new iPhoto library and import 'ORIGINALS' from a time machine backup on an external hard drive.

    I made the mistake of installing OS 10.9 on my older MacBook Air and the machine has become horribly slow and unpredictable. I visited the Apple store and questioned a 'Genius' about getting rid of 10.9 and reinstalling the previous OS 10.6 for which I have the disks. He advised that I should reformat the Air, reinstall 10.6 and then restore from the Time Machine backup that I have.
    He explained that of course, after I reinsatll 10.6,  I couldn't import the iPhoto Library from the backup drive complete because it had been recreated using the OS 10.9 and wouldn't work with 10.6.  I would have to create a new 10.6 iPhoto Library and move the actual ORIGINALS, from the backup into it.   He actually had the path to the iPhoto library shown on my Air to the point of >Pictures >iPhoto Library > ORIGINALS.
    I didn't question how he got the path to the point of > ORIGINALS and figured that it wouldn't take too much to do what he suggested. Now I can't find how to get to point of seeing the ORIGINALS in the path. When I go through the path >Pictures >iPhoto Library, the next column shows me the iPhoto Library icon and the info re size, creation date etc.
    Can anyone advise how to get to the 'ORIGINALS' in order to import them and does anyone have any further suggestions that might help in completing this procedure ?
    Thanks, in advance, for any assistance available.
    p.s. is there any way of looking at a Time Machine backup and finding what O.S. was present when the backup was produced ?

    Rather than do that, which means starting over from scratch, losing all your edits, organisation and so on, why not simply use iPhoto Library Manager to revert the Library to the older version? Easier, less destructive.
    The instructions on that are here
    If you really want to start over: you can access the Originals folder simply by going to your Pictures Folder and finding the iPhoto Library there. Right (or Control-) Click on the icon and select 'Show Package Contents'. A finder window will open with the Library exposed.

  • Importing Time Machine backup  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/files 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 any single file 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

    Are you referring to the files in Time Machine's backup directory on your hard drive? If so, and if what you are trying to do is to recover those from the backup to your working volume on the Macbook Pro (which is not what your title says you want to do but seems to be implied by the body of the question) then you need to have the computer name of the Macbook Pro the same as the computer name of the original Macbook (I think that step is required), then on the Macbook Pro choose "Browse Other Time Machine Disks" from the Time Machine menu in Dock. This will allow you to recover files or folder in the usual way.
    Alternatively, if you wanted to transfer all your user data in one go, you could fire up Migration Assistant and choose the Time Machine backup as the source to transfer the user data from (again I think the computer names have to be the same but I'm not totally sure).

  • Time Machine backup to AEBS external hard drive

    Buy in haste, repent at leisure they say. I needed a new wireless router and thought the AEBS looked just the thing - and a quick look on the spec page showed you could connect an external hard drive via USB - great, I could back up all our computers wirelessly I thought, using Time Machine. Didn't see the small print that says you cannot do this, tho' can't see why Apple couldn't make it work.
    I have had a whole string of hard drives go down in the past year, LaCie, Maxtor, WD, and two internal hard drives from a MacBook and a MacBook Pro. The only ones that seem bullet proof are the Gtech drives I have for editing in Final Cut so I bought one of those for our communal Time Machine drive.
    To begin with everything worked fine despite Apple not supporting this set up. Then with a regular Software update I must have upped the firmware to 7.4.2 and the system stopped working. I discovered the problem and went back to 7.4.1 but no joy. Then, inexplicably, it began to work again later that day so I just breathed a sigh of relief. Now it's happened again - I realised that I had updated to 7.4.2 again - presumably from a Snow Leopard update, and I am now unable to get it going again even after going back to 7.4.1.
    I can select the external HD so that it appears on the desk top as a wireless drive, it appears in the list of available disks in TM, but if you ask it to back up it takes an age to return a message saying it 'could not access the sparsebundle (error 109).
    It seems to me I have invested heavily in a system that is never going to work but I wondered if there was some way of backing up manually over the wireless link using another type of back up system? Or are there other things I should try? I know some people seem to have this set up working fine...

    The problem here is the way Apple chooses to implement Time Machine Backup in 10.6.x to a Network volume. When TM first came out myself and a bunch of similarly naive Unix hackers figured we could get the best of both worlds by backing up with Time Machine to a backed up or otherwise redundant network volume using Time Machine. But in the beginning TM didn't backup to network volumes. It does now by creating a sparse bundle on the network volume and backing up to the Sparse bundle as if it were a physical, local, disk drive. I seems logical to infer that Time Machine was written to backup to locally connected disk drives which differ from network disk drives in one very important respect: You can tell a local, physical disk drive that you need to know the status of any given write operation and you can trust that result with a reasonably high degree of confidence. That same can't be said for a write to network drive so Apple fakes it by creating a Pseudo Drive or Disk Image Drive on the network volume and writing way. The Sparse Bundle Error comes up when the Pseudo Drive wasn't put away correctly. There are filesystem repair programs to fix this condition which are described in other threads. Dig around for "fsck sparse bundle" on Google the next time this happens and you may be able to rescue things.

  • Unable to restore time machine backup onto a new hard drive

    I recently bought a new hard drive for my mid-2010 white Macbook. I have kept this computer regularly backed up with time machine, but just to be sure I made sure I hooked up my external hard drive prior to changing the hard drive and made sure it was fully backed up. I checked my exceptions and saw that my system files and applications were listed, so I removed them from the exceptions list and let it back up again (it only backed up a further 60MB though, so that made me a little uneasy).
    I successfully switched over the hard drive and then plugged in my external hard drive so I could do a restore from Time Machine. My external hard drive has 3 partitions: 2 time machine backups for each of my computers, and one partition for storing files that also has an old copy of 10.6 on it.
    When I booted the computer, I held option, then selected Macbook TM. When it came to the window with 4 options, including disk utility and restore from time machine backup, I selected restore from Time Machine backup. When I did so it said "No OS X Backups Were Found." Why wouldn't it have backups listed if I have been consistently backing it up? How else do I do a full system backup?
    Also, how can I be sure that I'm restoring this backup onto the new hard drive? It didn't prompt me to select that drive at any point, and I want to make sure I'm not overwriting the middle partition on the backup drive (or anything else).

    Please visit Pondini's Time Machine FAQ for help with all things Time Machine.
    You will find that Mountain Lion stores an invisible copy of the Recovery HD. You can boot from your Time Machine backup drive by restarting with OPTION boot:
    Boot Using OPTION key:
      1. Restart the computer.
      2. Immediately after the chime press and hold down the "OPTION" key.
      3. Release the key when the boot manager appears.
      4. Select the disk icon for your Time Machine backup drive.
      5. Click on the arrow button below the icon.
    Your computer should boot into the Recovery HD. You will be presented with a main window of options. Select the option to restore from a Time Machine backup then click on the Continue button.

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