Disk utility or time machine not discovering back up drives

Hi I'm new to Mac and before getting lost in all the benefits am looking to set up automatic back ups using my LaCie network space drives I previously used from my P/C. I have managed to discover the drive and copy required files in Finder. Next step was to re-format to Mac but Disk Utility does not discover the drive. Am using the same connection route as Finder. Have also tried finding via Time Machine without any luck. Your assistance appreciated

If I am correct on this, and I think I am, Disk Utility and Time Machine are all configured in OSX to find and communicate over only USB and Firewire, NOT ethernet. I talked to Apple Support once about employing a Buffalo Technology NAS over ethernet to backup my iMac using Time Machine and i was politely informed that this was NOT supported by Apple and likely not doable. So, we may not like it, but apparently those are the rules we must play by. As for Finder, it too primarily finds connections to devices using USB or Firewire. The exception to this is that you can connect using Finder over Wi-Fi or Ethernet to another computer, but this ability presumably involves Finder locating a device that has an IP address.
You just may be at the point where you need to consider obtaining a USB and/or Firewire based external drive. Keep us informed.
Hope this helps
Message was edited by: Radiation Mac

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Therefore I need to attempt to use my external hard drive with a machine that boasts OS X 10.6.5 or above and then it should work?
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Follow this guide using another Mac.
Insert your newly created Mavericks USB into you Mac, press the power button and then hold down 'option,' until it gives you an option to boot from the USB. You will then be able to erase the internal disk with Disk Utility and reinstall Mavericks straight after.
After that you should be able to use Migration Assistant to restore your applications and user data.

Time machine not seeing external hard drive in time line

can anyone help
time machine not seeing external hard drive in time line
before 2013
information say in 2009 is not accessable to view this
i must select external drive from finder
the time machine icon not recognising

thanks for reply
when i open time machine the time line on right side of page
has date ranging from 2014 back to 2010 but only highlight date from 2014 back to 2013
anything before 2013 is greyed out and cannot not be selected
when i touch the pages they only rush towards me a limited amount then stops
also why it shows date as 2014 is strange

Time machine not copying to new drive

running 10.6.8. I have two new hard drives and have them connected one at a time via USB cable to my MBP intel core i5.
I am using time machine to Backup my system drive. Time machine stopped the back up and displays an error. Here is the eventual error "The backup was not performed because an erorr occurred while copying files to the backup disk. The probem may be temporary. Try again later to back up. If the problem persists, use Disk Utility to repair your backup disk."
I used disk utility repair drive and the drive passes. I am not able to continue forward with time machine and receive the same error again.
Both drives experience this same behavior. Are both drives just bad and need to be replaced? Open to any suggestions on how to cure this issu.
Here is the log from disk utility:
--- snip ---
Verify and Repair volume “Untitled 1”
Verify and Repair volume “Untitled 1”
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Checking catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking catalog hierarchy.
Checking extended attributes file.
Checking multi-linked directories.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
The volume Untitled 1 appears to be OK.
Volume repair complete.Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
--- snip ----

Did you verify your MBP's HD, or the external HD's?
IMHO, Time Machine is great when it works, but it's not the most reliable backup. You may want to consider CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper instead.

Can Time Machine NOT backup USB exFAT drives?

Hi folks. So I partitioned my seagate freeagent drive using exFAT so I could swap it back and forth with Windows. I went to setup time machine and I see the drive is excluded and I cannot remove it from the exclude list. Can time machine not backup that partition type? If not, what can I use that will be usable with both windows and os x and allow me to back it up with Time Machine? Thanks.

For fat or ntfs, you have to use something like Winclone to clone those partitions as a backup, but I have not tested winclone in Lion to see if it still works

Time Machine NOT automatically backing up - Help

Running 10.5.2 on my MBP and MB. Have a TC 500 installed yesterday. Did the initial backup on both. Seems that Time Machine will not backup to TC unless I click on TC in my finder (to mount). If I restart or sleep the computer or switch networks (and come back to TC) TM doesn't backup. Been 3 hours since I've been back on the TC. Is there something I need to set up to get the computer to automatically back up without me having to tell the computer the TM designated disk is available. Thanks.
Sean

I hope this helps you...I just spent 3 hours on the phone with Apple Care and finally got the problem fixed. The problem was the NAME OF THE time capsule. I had used "Tony Ry*****'s Time Capsule" (I used xxxxx because I prefer not to use my whole last name on here). In any event, the name was too long! I changed it to "TimeCapsule" in Airport Utility. To do this, launch Airport Utility, click on "Manual Setup". Under the "Disks" section, you will see the name of your time capsule listed under "Time Capsule Disk" . Click on that, and to the right a white dialogue box will appear where you can change the name. Change it to something short with no spaces, or " ' " . After doing that you will need to go into the time machine preferences and select a new backup disk (since you changed the name). This worked perfect for me. Hope it helps you!

Disk Utility and Time machine partition

Ran a Disk Utility check on my Time Machine volume (internal drive - and yes I stopped Time Machine first).
It Came back with error messages something like this:
Verifying volume “Leopard_2”
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Incorrect number of file hard links
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking multi-linked directories.
Incorrect owner flags for directory hard link (id = 998962)
(It should be 0x2 instead of 0x0)
Incorrect owner flags for directory hard link (id = 998964)
(It should be 0x2 instead of 0x0)
Incorrect owner flags for directory hard link (id = 998966)
(It should be 0x2 instead of 0x0)
Incorrect owner flags for directory hard link (id = 998970)
(It should be 0x2 instead of 0x0)
Incorrect owner flags for directory hard link (id = 998972)
(It should be 0x2 instead of 0x0)
Incorrect owner flags for directory hard link (id = 998974)
(It should be 0x2 instead of 0x0)
Incorrect owner flags for directory hard link (id = 998976)
(It should be 0x2 instead of 0x0)
Incorrect owner flags for directory hard link (id = 998978)
(It should be 0x2 instead of 0x0)
Incorrect owner flags for directory hard link (id = 998980)
(It should be 0x2 instead of 0x0)
Incorrect owner flags for directory hard link (id = 998982)
(It should be 0x2 instead of 0x0)
Incorrect owner flags for directory hard link (id = 998986)
(It should be 0x2 instead of 0x0)
Incorrect owner flags for directory hard link (id = 998988)
(It should be 0x2 instead of 0x0)
{ Edited for Brevity }
Stopped by user
Well, the first time I Used repair mode and it wrecked my backup. I had to reformat the partition. Even disk warrior couldn't undo the directory damage Leopard's disk utility reeked on my partition. The irony of it is, I doubt very seriously that anything was wrong with the backup partition before Disk Utility assaulted it.
I ran time machine again and checked (verified this time) the partition after it completed and Leopard's DU reported the same errors as before.
Then I checked the backup partition with Tiger's DU:
Verifying volume “Leopard_2”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
The volume Leopard_2 appears to be OK.
Mounting Disk
1 HFS volume checked
Volume passed verification
Tiger found no problems.
I also checked the partition with Disk Warrior and got a good report.
If I'm not the only one that has this problem then it looks like Leopards DU is an accident waiting to happen when someone uses it to "repair" their Time Machine partition.
Has anyone else experienced this?

FYI, I have a TM partition sharing an internal HD with a FAT32 formatted partition. Here's my Verify output. I did not stop TM while running Verify
Verifying volume “MacTimeMachine”
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking multi-linked directories.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
The volume MacTimeMachine appears to be OK.

Time Machine not automaticaly backing up

I have googled and googled, and cannot find ANYTHING about this. My time machine is a 1TB HD from Costco. Was working wonderful. But now it won't back up on its own. I have to manually do it. I didn't realize this for a while, and went 2 weeks without a single back up.
I would just like my Time Machine to back up on its own. Thank you for your time.
-Matt

Try turning off TM in TM preferences, then re-enable it and re-select your backup drive.
BTW, since you purchased this drive at CostCo it may have been pre-formatted for Windows. Did you re-prep the drive for use with OS X? If not, then you need to do the following:
Extended Hard Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Set the number of partitions from the drop down menu one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (only required for Intel Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.

Time machine not completely backing up certain folders

Has anyone run into a problem with their Time Machine continually neglecting to backup one or two of their folders? I know some people have problems with TM not backing up items on their desktop, but my desktop data is fine. There are just two folders (as far as I know) that TM refuses to back up (unless there are new items, then it will backup only those items). One is my 'documents' folder. And another folder I created called 'OS media'.
About my setup:
I recently set up Time Machine with my Macbook Pro (running Mavericks). TM is backing up the internal SSD along with an external hard drive that is always attached via USB. The drive they are being backed up onto is a Western Digital My Book Live via wifi--which I know is not advised as it is not officially approved by Apple, but I'm hoping that's not the cause of this particular problem. Because otherwise the MBL has been working pretty well.
More details:
Both of the problem folders happen to be from the external hard drive (not internal SSD), and in the first tier of folders. But the other folders on that tier (about five other folders) are fully entact in TM, so I don't think it's an issue with the external HD. And the missing files are not a certain file type, they are all the sub-folders and files under the problem folders.
I went into the Western Digital (Time Machine) drive itself via Finder and verified that the files are indeed missing, so it wasn't a lag issue. And I have nothing excluded from backups in TM preferences.
I noticed that within those two problem folders, if any file was modified or created within that folder since my initial TM full backup (about two weeks ago), even if it was just a modified .ds_store file, TM would begin to include that file in the backup. This make me guess the problem was something that happened during the initial TM backup. The folders were somehow missed, and subsequent TM incremental backups aren't able to detect that it's missing. So unless anyone has any other suggestions, I'm just going to try to redo a full backup. I'm reluctant though, because it's going to take about two days to complete, and I really have no idea if it's even going to help.
And I don't know if this is related, but when I'm in Time Machine and I do a search for any of my files, I always get zero results.
Important sidenote:
While browsing my folders in Time Machine (Star Wars view), I found that clicking on an alias to a folder would open up that folder, but it didn't show the contents of the folder as they were in that particular backup version; instead, it showed the contents of that folder as they appeared in my computer currently. In other words, it appeared that I was looking at an old backup version of the folder, but it was actually the present time folder. This could easily mislead someone into thinking that their current data is backed up, when it is not.

oregonjoe wrote:
Am I to understand people should not post questions that involve any 3rd party products that are not officially supported by Apple?
No, but you must understand that Time Machine does not support the configuration you are using.
The exhaustive list of devices supported by Time Machine amounts to the following:
AirPort Time Capsule's built-in hard disk (any model)
External USB hard disk drive connected to a Time Capsule (any model)
External USB hard disk drive connected to an AirPort Extreme (current model only)
A hard disk drive directly connected either to the source Mac, or a Mac on your local network.
That is all.
Use whatever backup device you want, but you should be aware that this site is full of reports of misery from hapless individuals who had been using third party NAS devices for Time Machine backups, only to find that they were incomplete, corrupted, or useless in the dire circumstances in which they were required. Apple won't care if you lose your data while using a Time Machine configuration specifically excluded from their technical support documents.

Time Machine Not Auto Backing Up

Hey guys, I'm having some issues with my Time Machine. Its no longer auto backing up. It will backup fine if I manually start it but it won't do it on its own anymore, it hasn't for the past 2 days on 2 of my computers. I've tried repairing permissions and disable and re-enabling, **** even switch drives and then switch back. There are no error messages in console literally nothing happens. When it changes to the time its supposed to do a backup it will just jump ahead an hour without even preparing a backup without doing anything. One of my friends suggested I format the drive and start fresh and as much as that may work, it really defeats the purpose of having backups if I wipe them all out. I need them so can someone shed some light on this for me its driving me insane.
This all started to happen after the latest Time Machine update.

I think I might have solved it. When messing around in Terminal I noticed the permissions for the backups auto plist were different than the others. Repairing permissions with disk utility didn't do anything so I manually changed it with the Terminal command below. I'll post back later if I can confirm it worked. For anyone else with the same problem here are the commands you need to do in Terminal.
ls -la /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd*
Copy that entire line including the * at the end. That will give you the details on your backup plists, permissions and dates modified. They should all match, if they don't this next command will fix that.
sudo chown root:wheel /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto.plist
After you copy and paste that, it will ask for your password. From there I suggest you reboot for safe measure and you can double check by running the first Terminal command again to make sure the permissions were actually changed. This should fix it for anyone else experiencing the same problems as I was.

Time machine not automatically backing up to sparsebundle

Used TimeTamer to create sparsebundle.
Manual backups work fine.
Receive message that "time machine destination not resolvable" when automatic backups are tried.
Is this issue correctable?
Thank you

jjs01 wrote:
I am backing up to a 1st generation Drobo.
All I know about Drobos is what I read on their site and some threads here.
How is it connected? Network (Ethernet or WIFI) or direct (USB, Firewire, eSATA)?
The reason for doing so is to limit the amount of space my Time Machine backups will take up.
Depending on how you're connected, there may be a better way. Are you still running 10.6.8? Note that on some models, Drobo says not to use that with Leopard or Snow Leopard (http://support.drobo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/610/session/L2F2LzEvdGltZS8xMzI 2NzcyMDg3L3NpZC9NZFN1TWtPaw%3D%3D).
According to this page: http://support.drobo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/609/~/how-do-i-make-time-machin e-work-with-drobo%3F, some models of Drobo allow you to create partitions. If yours will, that's the way to go.
Then let Time Machine create a Backups.backupdb folder at the top level of the volume if you're connected directly, or it's own sparse bundle if you're connected via network.
If not, and if you're connected via network, you may be able to let Time Machine create the sparse bundle, then limit the maximum size via #A8 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
hdiutil create -size 8192g -fs HFS+J -volname "TM-backup-of-****-*****-mac-pro" /Volumes/Drobo/****-*****-mac-pro_001f5b32e8e4.sparsebundle
Some possible problems with that (I can't tell since you substituted ***s):
Check the names (of all odd things) of your Mac, network, and Drobo per #C9 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting. The names may be a problem even if you let Time Machine create the sparse bundle.
As I read the man page for hdiutil, that command will not create a sparse bundle disk image with a maximum size of 8 TB; it will create a fixed-size disk image of 8 TB.
Since 10.6.0, Time Machine no longer includes the source Mac's MAC address in the name of the sparse bundle. I don't know if having it there is a problem in your setup.
Have you used any other 3rd-party apps (such as Time Machine Editor, or Time Machine Scheduler) to alter Time Machine's default behavior?

Time Machine - not "fully" backing up?

OK, I know that I should know this, but...
I'm a bit confused as how Time Machine is working right now. Tonight I updated my version of OS X to the latest developer release, updated Xcode, etc. Should have been about an 8.5GB 'change' to my internal drive - which it was when I backed up two of my internal drive clones. However, my hourly TM backups (I have two) don't seem to be recognizing the changes to the OS X or Xcode files as they only backed up about 380MB each.
I know that I should know the answer to this - and I've scoured Pondoni's site looking for an answer, but I can't seem to find one.
Can anyone shed some light on this for me? I know that I'm just stupid...
Thanks,
Clinton

Do you see the folders "Applications" and "System" at the top level of your snapshots?

How do I make Time Machine NOT access my external drive?!?!?

Even though Time Machine is turned off it keeps accessing my external HD. About every 10 minutes it will run the drive for a short time, the drive used to just sit nice & quiet until I wanted to read/write to it, now the constant on/off cycle is driving me nuts.
Is there any way to stop OSX 10.5 from doing what it's doing??

Because something keeps spooling up the drive @ every 10-20 minutes. Before I upgraded to 10.5 everything worked normally. The drive would just sit nice & quiet & idle until I wanted to read/write to it. Then it would become active, as expected.
Now, however, something in 10.5 is accessing the drive, and running it, for some mysterious reason. Like I said, this happens about every ten minutes or so and it's very annoying.
I realize that I haven't set-up Time Machine, I don't want to use it, this is a work computer that already has several layers of redundant back-up, so I really have no interest in using Time Machine right now.
So if it's not Time Machine activating the drive does anyone have any other ideas? This never occurred before installing 10.5, which leads me to believe that there's something in the OS responsible for this.

Time machine with 2 back up drives

Can I have more then one usb drive to use for back ups in time machine?
I have 2 usb drives i'd like to use for back up. Time machine doesn't seem to allow you to have 2 separate drives at the same time for back up so I'm manually using 1 usb back up drive for some drives and the other usb back up drive for the other drives.
thanks
Jason

ok that's what I thought.
I'm doing it manually which seems to work ok, but it would be nice to have TM do it.
I guess TM isn't designed for people doing video work.
Unless I can some how join my 2 usb drives together in a Raid so TM sees it as one drive?
Ever heard of that?
thanks

Disk utility or time machine not discovering back up drives

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