External Drive attached to Time Capsule failing to work consistently

This problem has been occurring since we started using an external drive attached to our Time Capsule as a backup destination for Time Machine over a year ago:
Everything will be fine for a few days or weeks, but at some point backups stop working. This sometimes gives errors (Time Machine could not complete backup, I think) or sometimes it just looks like the backup has gotten stuck (reporting 235.32 MB of 22.86 GB for days). With the latter problem it seems to cause other issues with the OS like System Preferences not responding anymore and certain Save As... dialog boxes not appearing.
Every time this happens, what I do is disconnect all users through AirPort Utility and then plug the drive into one of the computers and run Disk Utility on it.
Each time, without fail, there is the error "Incorrect number of Access Control Lists" stating it should be 0 and it really is something in the thousands usually.
The volume is always repaired successfully, but then the cycle continues.
We've tried a couple of different drives and it always ends up happening.
I've seen other posts with similar problems, but nothing laid out exactly like my problem, and no real fix for it.

Yes, indeed. Let me give some background.
I have an old Gigabit AEBS (7.4.2) as my main router with a Gigabit connection to my Time Capsule (500GB, 7.4.2) running in bridge mode. Both run as wireless access points for my network "Hogwarts." I backup several machines to the TC's internal drive with absolutely no problems whatsoever. Practically bulletproof. I backup two media heavy machines to the external drive attached to the TC. The drive is a Western Digital My Book 1.5TB that before the TC came into our lives, ran flawlessly when attached to my iMac as a backup destination. The media machines are Dumbledore, my mini running as a HTPC, and Tonks, my wife's laptop busting with pics and video of our son. Once I started backups to this drive connected to the TCs, I started to have problems with backup. That's the situation. Here's what I've tried to correct it.
I had a year's worth of backups. Went to the Genius Bar who recommended starting over after they checked out my setup over Back to My Mac. They couldn't find anything wrong and supposed my backups were hopelessly corrupted. So I followed their advice with Dumbledore and archived those for Tonks. Trying to start over with Dumbledore fails within the first 75 of 500 GB to backup every time. I've redirected syslog reporting at Debug level from the TC to my iMac and formatted the external drive several times. I have done disk repairs on the drive, Dumbledore's sparse bundle, and the TM volume contained in the sparse bundle. I've only gotten the "too many ACL's" error. The WD drive comes with SmartWare software I've used to check the S.M.A.R.T. status (100% OK), test the drive (100% OK) and deactivate the Virtual CD partition used to, among other things, encrypt the drive. My drive is unencrypted and have made it as plain vanilla as I can: GUID with one 1.5 TB Mac OS Extended Journaled partition.
What I've noticed when I check the status of the TC when the bakcups fail is that the drive becomes unmounted with no logged error. The client computer either hangs Finder or reports the backup failed. My wife has become so frustrated with hard restarts that she has turned off Time Machine until I fix this. Airport Utility simply no longer sees the drive. The client computer can reconnect over AFP but the drive will not be accessible unless I restart the TC. Then if I do some Disk Utility repairs on the external drive and on the virtual volumes it contains, I can start backups again...until the next spontaneous unmounting of the drive. Which leaves me talking to you as a completely frustrated and disappointed Apple user. This is so not Apple quality experience.
The only shot in the dark I've seen is that the TC repeatedly updates its DHCP lease every 5 minutes or so despite having a 4 hour TTL. Weird.

Similar Messages

How to back up external drive attached to time capsule

How can I backup an external 1 TB drive containing my itunes library that I have attached to my time capsule usb port to my time capsule?
Over the weekend I purchased a timecapsule and I love it! I thought the idea of not having to mount and unmount my usb external drive from my laptop would help with my itunes library intergrity (keep loosing large chunks of music). I have now plugged the drive into the timecapsule usb port but the only configuration time machine allows that I can find is to tell it what not to back up on my laptop and now that the external drive is not attached to my mac it doesn't even appear. what now? I want to get this completed prior to upgrading to snow leopard.

go system preferences > time machine > options and make sure the external is not excluded from backups.
that's it. time machine should automatically backup any drive connected directly to your computer (unless it is told not to and given there's sufficient space on the TC).
JGG

Problems with USB external drive attached to time capsule

Hi,
I bought a WD 1 TB my book as a supplemental backup drive, as I've pretty much maxed out the space in my 500 GB TC with backups form two macbooks. It's attached to the TC via the USB 2.0. For the first few months everything worked fine. Now suddenly neither machine can access the WD drive. It shows up in the Aiport utility but not in the finder. When I plug it directly into one of the macbooks it accesses fine, but I bought it specifically to use as additional network backup drive.
Where have I gone wrong? I updated the firmware for the WD drive, and everything appears fine on the TC and the macbooks. I poked around on the forums and found many a complaint about the WD drives, but I couldn't find a solution to my particular problem.
Any ideas?
Thanks.

The first thing to try is a nice long power cycle of the network if you have not already done this.
Power everything down, order is not important. Wait 5-10 minutes.
Start the modem first and let it run 4-5 minutes by itself. Then start the next device connected to the modem the same way. Keep powering up each device the same way until all devices are powered on.
Any help?
If no luck, the next thing to try is connect the WD drive directly to your computer and "Verify Disk" using Disk Utility.
Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility
Then click "Repair disk"
If indicated, "Repair Permissions" on the disk.
Eject the disk and then you'll have to do the power cycle all over again and plug the device back into the USB port on the Time Capsule.

Best practices with external drives connected to Time Capsule?

I'm enjoying my new MBP but the storage limitations are a challenge with twenty+ years of data. I know it's not technically sanctioned by Apple but in another forum I found a discussion about successfully connecting an external drive to the Time Capsule. I tried this for a few months and had some problems, so I wonder if anyone here might have some insight into which of my drives would be best to use in this way and what, if anything, I must do to bless it for the task.
The drive most highly recommended in the forums at the time is the WD My Book. After buying it I learned that is Windows users install a package and update the driver for use with Time Machine, which Mac users are not able to do. The driver is available on the web but it's said to cause problems with Mountain Lion, which I can confirm. It's USB 3.0 and powered, though, which my two alternatives are not. It's also 2 TB and presently in two partitions. I also have a Seagate Free Agent GoFlex 500 which gets extremely hot with any use and an Iomega eGo Helium 500 I've been using for backups. Both are USB 2.0.
My goal is to put my iTunes Library and Time Capsule on the net (running 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz, averages 50Mbs). When I did this for a few months with the WD both its shares frequently dropped off my Desktop, as if powered down or something. Also there were the issues with Time Machine many others are having. Right now our video collection sits on the Time Capsule. Would it make sense to move our video to the WD and run iTunes and Time Machine on it? If so, do you have any tips for formatting, petitioning, or drivers (or anything else) to help this run smoothly? The WD works fine when hard-wired and the TC, too is fine without the WD at the party.
With apologies for the tome.

kevlee64 wrote:
Thanks, but the drive is connected directly to the back of the Time Capsule by an ethernet cable.
Ah, that's a different colored horse.
You have a NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive, not a USB external drive connected to the USB port.
Many of those need software/firmware updates to work with Lion. Check with Iomega.

I have an external hard drive from my time capsule that stopped working on me. I am attempting to access the data with a hard drive reader on my MAC. I am able to see the drive in disk utility and under system info USB. But I am unable to access the data.

I have an external hard drive from my time capsule that stopped working on me. I am attempting to access the data with a hard drive reader on my MAC. I am able to see the drive in disk utility and under system info USB. But I am unable to access the data and it does not show on the desktop when connected.

Ok if disk utility was able to verify the drive I doubt there is any problem.. are you trying to open a TM backup??
You need to mount the sparsebundle then check the actual info inside the bundle.
Don't use disk warrior.. if the disk has verified then unless you deliberately deleted files there is nothing that is going to do.
Pondini has a lot of stuff about getting access to the sparsebundle.
http://pondini.org/TM/17.html
But if you have copied info to the TC that is now gone.. and the disk is ok.. I am not sure.. the TC will not have deleted the files itself.

I want to add more capacity on hard drive of time capsule. Can i add a normal usb driver? I will see it as an external drive in the time capsule network? It will work as fast than time capsule? Thanks

I want to add more capacity on hard drive of time capsule. Can i add a normal usb driver? I will see it as an external drive in the time capsule network? It will work as fast than time capsule? Thanks

Can i add a normal usb driver?
Yes, but be sure that the drive is formatted correctly for Mac in Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
I will see it as an external drive in the time capsule network?
The drive will appear as a shared network drive, like the Time Capsule.
It will work as fast than time capsule?
No, the drive will operate at about half or 50% of the speed of the Time Capsule.

Is there way to store my movies on my Time Capsule instead of laptop drive? I will then run an external drive to backup Time Capsule.

Is there way to store and run my iMovies on my Time Capsule instead of laptop drive? I will then run an external drive to backup Time Capsule as my backup. I want to dothis because my hard drive is full and I still have many movies to import form camcorder.

I do not know about iMovie, but the experts in the iPhoto and Aperture support areas strongly advise against trying to install your "working" image library on the Time Capsule.
You might want to ask about this in the iMovie support area.
iMovie for Mac
It would be much easier and much better if you use the external drive to connect to your Mac via USB or FireWire and then store the movies there.
Then, Time Machine will back up both your Mac and the external hard drive automatically once you tell it to do so.

Searching external hard drive attached to Time Capsule

I have a 1 TB Time Capsule which I use for backing up my 2011 MacBook Pro and for providing my WiFi. I also have a 1 TB external hard drive plugged into my Time Capsule which I can access via WiFi. I can go to Finder on my laptop and browse the folders/files on my external hard drive. It appears under Shared in the sidebar of the Finder window. I can open files from it and I can save files to the drive, so it appears to be working fine. I have hundreds of gigs of files on the drive. But when I was recently hunting for a specific file, I noticed that my Spotlight wasn't doing a very good job at finding files on my external hard drive. I tried many different searches - by name, by type, by date - and had no luck. But as I was searching, I realized that I had more files of certain file types than Spotlight was showing me. So I tried searching for files I first confirmed were actually on the external drive. And again Spotlight failed to find them. If I used a partial filename search, it would find some files that matched but not the ones I was looking for.
So, this led me to think the index is corrupt. I'm not sure if this problem is related to my recently upgrading to Lion or not, since I haven't had to search the drive in awhile. I tried to force Spotlight to recreate the index on the drive by using the Privacy panel trick (of the Spotlight Preferences) but that didn't work. I then tried to get Spotlight to recreate its entire index and I think all that did was recreate the index for my internal harddrive.
So, are there things I need to know about attaching an external hard drive to a Time Capsule that I perhaps forgot to do? Should I be able to search the drive with Spotlight? Do I have to somehow force Spotlight to look in external drive when doing a search or is it supposed to search everything it can?
I should mention I have been having a little trouble with my Time Capsule as well. I recently had to erase the drive and set up a whole new backup since the backup was failing - not sure what happened to it, but it seems to be working again now. But I did notice yesterday that my Time Machine hadn't backed up all day but it was not giving me a warning message. It was just sitting there not backing up. I had tried resetting my PRAM and after doing so, my Time Machine was back to backing up. I'm not sure if the PRAM reset helped with that or if it was just the restart of the laptiop.
One more thing - I feel like since upgrading to Lion I have had to restart my laptop more than ever. Things just start acting funny, especially when I am using Safari and I find myself resetting Safari and then restarting my laptop all the time. Odd.

It should be HFS+.. it may work with fat32 but that is a lousy format.
The actual format of the drive is irrelevant to the PC.. the TC offers SMB connection.. so it is a true file sharing device.. the format used to store the files cannot be directly read by windows but is "interpreted, translated" via the firmware of the TC.
BTW this is true of all network storage.. A NAS can store files in whatever format its OS requires.. freebsd like freenas might use XFS.. or linux use EXT2 or REISFS.. it makes no difference as long as it offers that store to the windows (and apple) network as SMB.. then windows can handle it.

New External Drive connected to Time Capsule moving files problem

I have a late 2009 13" unibody MacBook Pro, that I primarily use for video editing/converting. I use my Time Capsule as a network through which I can connect to my external hard drives via USB for videos and such. I've used at least two other external hard drives along with my Time Capsule for a year and a half with very few problems, aside from the inevitable crash of one. Before yesterday, I had a 1TB Western Digital MyBook (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=210) and a 2TB Verbatim Desktop HD (http://www.verbatim.com/prod/hard-drives/desktop/usb-2.0/) connected through my 1TB Time Capsule and aside from the Verbatim drive being rather sluggish most of the time, everything was working fine.
Yesterday, I got a new external drive, an iOmega MiniMax 2TB (http://go.iomega.com/en-us/products/external-hard-drive-desktop/ultramax-minimax /minimax800/?partner=4760). I spent yesterday and most of today moving files around and whatnot through a wired connection (iOmega via firewire 800, Verbatim via USB, MyBook via USB, and Time Capsule via Ethernet), and everything moved quickly and without any problems.
I hooked my Time Capsule up to my modem, plugged in the iOmega and Verbatim drives via USB to the TC, and started my laptop. When I opened the drives, everything was working fine... And then I tried to move a file to the iOmega drive... I was moving an episode of The Killing. I dragged it into the folder and went to Safari to look something up and suddenly realized ten minutes later that I still hadn't heard the noise telling me that the file had finished. I looked at the move dialogue box and it said "156.8 MB of 323.8 MB - About 10 Seconds". I watched it for another ten minutes and it didn't move. So I clicked cancel move and the rainbow wheel of death came up and I had to force reboot my computer.
When I restarted, I opened up finder to access the drives through my Time Capsule, and it "failed to connect" to my Time Capsule. So I went back into my office to flip the switch on the surge protector in order to restart the process. I turned on my computer and I had no problem accessing my hard drives... Until I tried to move an episode of United States of Tara into the iOmega hard drive. This time, it said, "192.5 MB of 202.6 MB - About 5 Seconds" and completely stopped moving again. And the same thing happened when I clicked the little grey "x" to cancel the move.
I repeated the process several more times with no luck. Then I thought it might help to see if it does the same thing with documents. So I dragged just a random document to the iOmega and it took about 30 seconds, but it did it successfully. So I tried to move the episode of The Killing again and I let it go for, like, 25-30 minutes. After this time, I got a notification from finder saying, "Finder cannot complete the operation because some data in "[the file]" can't be read or written. (Error Code -36)". Then when I went back into the "Shared" part of the sidebar to go back into my Time Capsule folder, it said "Connection Failed"
So what exactly does this mean? Are the Time Capsule and iOmega not compatible? Can I only move the files through a wired connection [which would be unfortunate]? Do I need to rejigger the USB configuration? Is the error code just for these two episodes and it's just a random coincidence that it happened the day after I got a new drive?
Thanks for any help anyone can give me!
- Alex

I have attached the macbook to the tc via ethernet cable. Should I turn off my wireless connection or will itunes recognize to go with the faster connection on it's own?
You MBP will try to connect based on the order of the list of network devices on the System Preferences > Network window. If Ethernet is not at the top of the list, then go ahead and temporarily disable AirPort.
After all this is done will the wireless connection be fast enough for normal itunes operation?
For audio streaming it should be, but just be aware that your iTunes host will have to get the audio source wirelessly from the TC, which in turn will have to get the data from the USB hard drive. Finally, the iTunes host will have to wirelessly stream the iTunes audio via AirTunes to the AirPort Express.

Is it possible to connect an external drive to the time capsule that I could use to store and access my primary iTunes files?

I would like to move my music files to an external drive that my iMac iTunes could access wirelessly and I'm wondering if it is possible to do so through connecting a drive to my Time Capsule.

This can be done....but if you move your iTunes Media folder to the drive that is connected to the Time Capsule, you might first want to think about how you will backup these important files.
Time Machine cannot backup the files back to the Time Capsule, so you will need to use a commercial backup application like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to copy the files back to the Time Capsule drive.
As long as you plan to add a hard drive, you might want to consider an alternate plan:
Connect a hard drive directly to your Mac using USB or FireWire and move the iTunes Media Library there. Then, Time Machine will back up both your Mac and the hard drive, so you have original copies on one drive and backups on another.
Whatever you decide, be sure to follow the correct instructions to move the iTunes Media Folder. You cannot simply drag and drop.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1449

IPhoto on External Hard Drive Attached to Time Capsule

Hi,
I can't seem to find the answer to this question on any of the forums.
I currently have a Mac Mini, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. I have two iPhoto libraries, one on my MacBook Pro and one on my Mac Mini. I use the Pro as my primary library for editing the photo's and then using a USB stick transfer the photo's to my Mac Mini which is attached to my television as I use it as a media centre.
What I want to do is have just the one library which can be displayed on my Mac Mini and editied using my two laptops.
I am thinking of using an External Hard Drive attached to my Time Capsule and then use this to store one iPhoto library that I can access on the network on all three of my computers.
Is this possible to do?

I read your question a while ago and since nobody has jumped in .. let me have a go..
Yes, I should say it is possible to have your iphoto library on the TC.
It is older post but still should work.
http://gigaom.com/apple/using-time-capsule-as-a-media-drive/
Second point... don't do it.
Here is why..
1. Extremely slow. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4577/airport-extreme-5th-gen-and-time-capsule-4th- gen-review-faster-wifi-/7
Much worse than the internal drive.
2. More importantly .. there is zero backup. If you do want to backup, you have to drag the files off the USB disk, across the network and back onto a drive connected to your computer.. Net gain.. zero.. you still have to have a disk connected to a computer.
Use the Mac Mini, a drive connected by firewire is hugely faster. Even usb drive direct from the computer over the network is faster.
And you can set it to backup via Time Machine. Remember all files on single hard disk will one day be lost.. get ready for that day.

Format for external hard drive attached to Time Capsule

What format should I used for an external hard drive attached to my Time Capsule that will allow both my Mac and PCs to read and write to it?

It should be HFS+.. it may work with fat32 but that is a lousy format.
The actual format of the drive is irrelevant to the PC.. the TC offers SMB connection.. so it is a true file sharing device.. the format used to store the files cannot be directly read by windows but is "interpreted, translated" via the firmware of the TC.
BTW this is true of all network storage.. A NAS can store files in whatever format its OS requires.. freebsd like freenas might use XFS.. or linux use EXT2 or REISFS.. it makes no difference as long as it offers that store to the windows (and apple) network as SMB.. then windows can handle it.

Connect iMovie '11 to External Hard drive attached to Time Capsule

I have an external hard drive hooked up p my time capsule. In order to access it I have to go to finder, then time capsule then external hard drive. I see on all the tutorials that those of you who know what your doing have external hard drives on your Desktop. How do you do that? Thank you
Forgive my elmentary questions I'm very new to Ac but love it, thank you in advance

1. Select Finder > Preferences (from the Finder menu which you get to by clicking on the desktop or click finder from the Dock.)
2. Click the General settings box if not already displayed.
3. 4th item down under Show These Items on the Desktop, click to select the Connected Servers.
4. Done, click the red dot to exit Finder Preferences.

I want to attach an external drive to my time capsule, what format should i select for it?

I have a WD external drive that I want to add to my Time Capsule. It had previously been used to store TV shows on. I need to reformat it for the Time Capsule. What format do I choose?

Format in Mac OS Extended (Journaled), which is also known as HFS+.

External drive conntected to Time Capsule keeps losing connection

I've been having this problem since I bought my TC over one year ago. Other than this everything works fine (aside from the occasional need for a restart).
I have an external 500GB drive attached to my 500GB TC via usb. I use the TC strictly for backups and the other drive to host my media files. When I want to use those files I switch on the drive. Only about half of the time does that work. When it does work everything is fine. I see the drive in the finder as expected.
When it doesn't work, I can see the drive name in the finder. But if I click to go into the folder, I get an error saying that the connection cannot be found.
It shows up in the Airport Utility as normal.
Powering the drive off and on does not help.
Relaunching the finder doesn't help either.
The only way I can connect to the drive again is to either logoff and log back into my mac, or restart the TC.
It seems that my computer is remembering some kind of network disk mounting settings that don't get refreshed when I turn on the drive, but then do get refreshed when I logoff and back in. Does anyone know how I could force that refresh to happen? Has anyone had this problem before?
Any suggestions would be much appreciated
PS all my software and firmware are the latest.
Thanks.

OS X fan
This helped meRe: Time Capsule keeps losing connection in Finder
Dec 17, 2013 4:08 AM (in response to whootang12)
Left click on the Finder icon from the Dock and click "Connect to server...", go to recent server and click on your Airport Time Capsule.
THANK YOU!!!!
This solved it for me!

External Drive attached to Time Capsule failing to work consistently

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