Automatic backups stopped - no errors

Question

Sometime last week, I noticed that Time Machine was no longer backing up on a schedule. It works if I manually initiate the backup, but if I leave it alone, the set time will pass and nothing will happen.
I get no errors. It just never happens.
I verified:
1. Time Machine is enabled.
2. The interval is set to 3600. Yes, I played with TimeMachineEditor in the past, but I put it back to every hour (by telling TME to use the defaults.)
3. I looked at the hidden file (.001ff35a7920, in my case) on the drive and verified that it is writeable.
4. I saw someone else's suggestion about deleting the Spotlight index, and tried that, but no joy.
5. I've rebooted, to no avail.
About one minute before TM is supposed to do its thing, the external drive will spin up, but then nothing happens. Like I said, there's no errors anywhere. There's not even a record that it tried to backup.
I've left it on since 5:30 this morning, and it still hasn't done anything. the last backup was yesterday at 12:03 pm (which was the last manual backup).
Help please!
EDIT: I should add that I have verified all the launchd items are there and are loaded.
Message was edited by: Jon Baumgartner

Answer 1

Pondini wrote:
Jon Baumgartner wrote:
Oddly, the first backup took something like 4 hours to complete. I don't know why. The progress bar hit the end, and then the remaining size kept increasing. So at first it said something like "35.6 MBs of 35.6 MBs" and then later it would say "45.5 MBs of 45.5 MBs". It was up at 89 MBs a couple hours after I started the backup. I don't know what happened after because I went to bed.
TM may have been confused by deleting that file. If it thinks certain exclusions have been removed, it has to do a "deep traversal," looking at every file and folder on your system, to figure out what to back up.
There will be some messages in your logs that may explain it. Download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window. Navigate to that backup, then copy and post the messages here (be sure to get them all, as sometimes they overflow the small window).
March 4, 2:46:11am. It said it took almost 5 hours to run:
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/Jon Backup/Backups.backupdb
No pre-backup thinning needed: 1.35 GB requested (including padding), 21.79 GB available
Backup requested due to disk attach
Unable to rebuild path cache for source item. Partial source path:
Unable to rebuild path cache for source item. Partial source path:
Unable to rebuild path cache for source item. Partial source path:
Error: (-39) SrcErr:YES Copying (null) to (null)
Unable to rebuild path cache for source item. Partial source path:
Copied 116549 files (632.0 MB) from volume Hoth.
No pre-backup thinning needed: 1.92 GB requested (including padding), 21.13 GB available
Copied 103521 files (256.2 MB) from volume Hoth.
Starting post-backup thinning
Deleted backup /Volumes/Jon Backup/Backups.backupdb/baumjovi/2009-02-28-093447: 20.97 GB now available
Post-back up thinning complete: 1 expired backups removed
Backup completed successfully.
Then, at 5:33:28 am. It says this one took just over 2 hours:
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/Jon Backup/Backups.backupdb
No pre-backup thinning needed: 1.61 GB requested (including padding), 20.97 GB available
Copied 118784 files (288.9 MB) from volume Hoth.
No pre-backup thinning needed: 1.31 GB requested (including padding), 20.65 GB available
Copied 1004 files (7.6 MB) from volume Hoth.
Starting post-backup thinning
Deleted backup /Volumes/Jon Backup/Backups.backupdb/baumjovi/2009-03-01-222119: 20.71 GB now available
Post-back up thinning complete: 1 expired backups removed
Backup completed successfully.
Stopping backupd to allow ejection of backup destination disk!
Looking at the backups folder, it finished that first backup at 1:13 am, and then ran another at 5:24 am. I'm not sure why there weren't backups in between.
Could your Mac have been asleep?
Nope. It was not asleep.
So I woke it up at 10:25 tonight, and it said it would run at 11:24. 11:24 came and went, and nothing happened. And again, there's nothing in the logs. Time Machine Buddy comes up blank as well. Last backup was 5:24am today.