External Drive Two Days Old .. suddenly No Time Machine at All?
I have enjoyed watching Time Machine for about 48 Hrs. and this morning I noticed I was not hearing my Ext. Hard Drive (G-Tech Q, 500 gb). The drive's light was still on so I thought the iMac OS put the drive to sleep. I depressed the Time Machine icon on my Dock and a pop-up came up indicating "Connecting To Server" with a sub-title "Connecting to backup volume..." This pop-up just continually shows the barber pole type progress bar but nothing happens. I then went to my System Preferences and depressed the Time Machine icon. The message I got was "Loading Time Machine" but nothing actually happens. I would have thought there would be a "Time Out" eventually that would give me an error code, but no such luck. Anyone know what gives???
While this topic may be "answered" I feel that I have to note the same problem occurring with a Western Digital My Book Premium II 1TB drive. Backups would proceed along fine until I would discover that the machine had stopped logging hours ago. The drive power light would be off and the disk no longer appeared on the desktop. Hard Disk Utility cannot "see" the disk in order to mount it. A press of the "soft power" button on the drive would mount the drive and I would then be able to start backups again. The drive shows no problems with Hard Disk Utility "repair", it has even been reformatted and its RAID 0 configuration performed again with WD tools. The WD Drive Manager shows no problems. This has never happened before upgrading from 10.5.2 to 10.5.3 although when trying to retrieve files from Time Machine the display would "freeze" for minutes sometimes and the user interface would thereafter be inconsistent (stuttering selections) while within Time Machine. Turning of the Power Saver Put drive(s) to sleep whenever possible selection is a poor "solution" to the problem. Also, it would be nice to determine which drives should be allowed to go to sleep should the user need to do so.
Similar Messages
-
Can I include external drives to be backed up using Time Machine? Not only do I want to back up my IMac, but I have several extenal drives for one iPhoto, one iTunes and one for other files & documents. How do I know if they are included in the backup process?
Yes, if they are not exclude then TM backs them up.
Allan -
External drive does not show up in Time Machine
I just applied the lastest update today and now my external drive does not show up in Time Machine. It does show up in Finder.
Gracias Sir Kappy, These instructions didn't include Yosemite, but I followed the closest and used Mavericks instructions and the command-R was the key, which I suppose means 'restore?' Nothing is explained as we should all be able to read the programmers minds by now...
Thanks for the help and problem resolved. -
Hi, I had updated folder on my hard drive wich was wrongly replaced with a folder from my external drive. I m not using time machine. How can i recover that updated folder? (it was done on 3-5-12)
If the folder was replaced, it was written over.
Nothing short of forensic data recovery (probably involving taking the drive apart to scan the discs seperately) is going to recover anything (if indeed even that will). -
External Drive connected to Airport Extreme, need Time Machine 3 Mac's Help
I own an Airport Extreme and just recently added two new Macs with the Time Machine feature to our household. I would like to use Time Machine to backup to my Airport Extreme that has a 500 GB hard drive connected. It seems Apple has this blocked since they have released the Time Capsule version of the router. Is there a work around this feature so I don't have to go out an purchase what I basically have already got? Please help. We would like to upgrade our older macs to Leopard and us the same system to back them up as well. Please advise. Thank you.
I had my USB drive on my APE working with Time Machine under 10.5.1 very reliably. A few days ago however, I needed to suspend a backup operation, and when I came back to restart it, time machine refused to mount the disk image on the drive. After several attempts to get it to connect with no luck I decided to delete the image (the sparce image file) and start over. Now TM refuses to create a new image.
BTW, on the Mac OSX hints site there have been suggestions to start a backup with the drive directly connected, then stop the backup, move the sparce image file to the root of the drive, reconnect the drive to the APE base station to get it working. I tried this again, but I think Apple has changed something in 10.5.2, because when directly connected TM no longer creates a sparce image file.
Anybody else seen this behavior after upgrading to 10.5.2? -
Can I backup the contents of an external drive to a network location using Time Machine?
I have just installed a Lacie Thunderbolt external drive as I want the speed to access large volumes of photographs. If I configure it as RAID 0 I will need to back up the data on that drive. I have a NAS drive which I already use for Time Machine and which works well. Can Time Machine be configured to include the external drive in the backups to the NAS?
You may find these useful:
Mac Basics
Mac OS X: PC to Mac
PC to Mac Guide - OS X Tips, Tricks & Tutorials -
How to select external drive that is not showing in Time Machine
I have a WD My Cloud external drive. It shows in finder. However not in Tim Machine. How can I fix this so that it can be used for backups? Thanks.
A Networked drive will never show in Disk Utility. Only locally attached drives show in DU.
To my knowledge to use a Networked drive with Time Machine it has to be either a Apple Time Capsule or a external drive connected to an Apple Airport extreme router and formatted in the Mac OS X format or there are some other manufacturers that claim to have NAS boxes that are compatible with Time Machine.
Any other drive connected to some other router will never be available as a TM backup drive. First most routers can't format and or read and write to a drive formatted in the Mac OS X format (Some can but I don't know which router they are). Even if it the router can read and write to a drive formatted in the Mac format Time Machine more than likely won't see it as a valid backup drive.
You'll be better off conneting that drive directly to your Mac to use it as a TM backup drive.
It will be much faster connected directly to the computer then doing backups to it over your network. -
External Drive crashed-how to restore from Time Machine?
I've been using TM to back up my internal, as well as an external drive. The external has been acting a bit flaky the past week or so, and I think it just bit the dust. How do I go about just restoring the data that was on it to a new external HD? I don't want to affect the internal HD at all. TIA.
Do not use exactly the same name for the new drive. Once your replacement drive is properly formatted, connected, and mounted, turn TM off and just open a Finder window and +Enter Time Machine.+ Navigate to the last backup before the old drive died, and select your computer name in the Finder's sidebar.
That should produce a list of folders representing both the internal and external drives. Select the external and click the "gear" icon in the Finder sidebar. Select +Restore <item> to ...+ and you'll get a prompt where you can select the new drive as the destination. The restore will, of course, take a while.
Be warned that when your turn TM back on, it will back-up everything on the new drive, so it will be lengthy and take a lot of room on your TM drive. You cannot prevent this, unfortunately. -
my iMac has crashed...was told I need a new hard drive.....meantime I bought a mac mini.....I had an external drive connected to the mac....and was using time machine for backups....so....how do i move itunes music files to my new mac mini from the external drive?
Turn Time Machine OFF temporarily in its preference pane. Leave the window open.
Navigate in the Finder to your backup disk, and then to the folder named "Backups.backupdb" at the top level of the volume. If you back up over a network, you'll first have to mount the disk image file containing your backups by double-clicking it. Descend into the folder until you see the snapshots, which are represented by folders with a name that begins with the date of the snapshot. Find the one you want to restore from. There's a link named "Latest" representing the most recent snapshot. Use that one, if possible. Otherwise, you'll have to remember the date of the snapshot you choose.
Inside the snapshot folder is a folder hierarchy like the one on the source volume. Find one of the items you can't restore and select it. Open the Info dialog for the selected item. In the Sharing & Permissions section, you may see an entry in the access list that shows "Fetching…" in the Name column. If so, click the lock icon in the lower right corner of the dialog and authenticate. Then delete the "Fetching…" item from the access list. Give yourself read access if you don't already have it. Click the gear icon below the list and select Apply to enclosed items from the popup menu.
Now you should be able either to copy the item in the Finder or to restore it in the time-travel view. If you use the time-travel view, be sure to select the snapshot you just modified. If successful, repeat the operation with the other items you were unable to restore. You can select multiple items in the Finder and open a single Info dialog for all of them by pressing the key combination option-command-I.
When you're done, turn TM back ON and close its preference pane. -
External drive not being backed up by Time Machine
I have 2 external HDDs, both USB 2. I'm using 1 for backups using time machine and one for my photos and music. Time Machine appears to backing up my internal drive but is not backing up the external data drive. The external data drive does not appear in the excluded files box in Time Machine setup but it is not being backed up. What am I doing wrong?
newbie Vanc wrote:
What I've done now id exclude it from the backup and tried to include it again and the minus sign does not come up when I select the data drive.
The data drive is a fat 32 drive. Will that make a difference?
It will indeed.
TM only backs-up HFS+ partitions (any variant of Mac OS Extended). This is because TM uses the hidden +File System Event Database+ that OSX puts on such drives, tracking all the changes to the data on the disk.
Your only recourse to back it up with TM is to find a place to copy that partition or drive temporarily, then erase and reformat it. See item 5 or 6 of the Frequently Asked Questions post at the top of this forum for instructions.
Otherwise, you'll have to use a different app. I think that either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper! may be able to do that. Check them out via Google, VersionTracker.com, or MacUpdate.com. -
Getting new external drive, can I switch back up time machine drives?
I don't want to loose the info time machine has already captured on my external hard drive called B1, if I install a new hard drive B2, can I just copy B1 to B2 and then point time machine to B2?
Not sure what the process would be, but I want to get rid of B1 as a time machine drive and add b2 and not loose any info already captured.
Suggestions?Related question:
I partitioned my 500GB external drive, 30GB in G-1 for a bootable system (currently 10.4.10) and the remaining space in G-2 for Time Machine.
I now want to resize the partitions on the fly in Terminal, to free up 20GB more for TM, but I plan to use Carbon Copy Cloner to first make a backup of both G-1 and G-2, just in case.
If I lose data resizing the partitions and then have to restore the TM backup files from the clone, will Time Machine recognize its earlier files and pick up where it left off, or will it start over?
Aside: Disk Utility in Leopard indicates it will resize partitions on the fly without losing data, but I have read in other threads that data has been lost anyway.
Ken -
My iMac suddenly can't read the backup hard drive I've been using for Time Machine. I tried unplugging the cord that connects the HD to the iMac and plugging it back in, but I still get "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" below which are buttons for Initialize, Ignore and Eject. I was using a cord that went from larger square plug to larger square plug. So then I tried one that went from smaller square plug to what I think is USB (thin rectangular plug) of the sort that connects the keyboard and mouse. It's the type that my printers and scanners use to connect to the iMac. I did NOT just upgrade the OS or anything. The external HD is an OWC Mercury Elite All Pro. It's worked fine since I got the iMac 4 years ago. What else can I try before just trying to initialize and
Thanks, Michael! I do hear it at times spooling up and running. Just after I bumped the thread I looked for troubleshooting for this drive online and found the manual which suggested using Disk Utility which I've seen before accidentally (if I hit Command Shift U instead of Shift U to type "Unit" on a new folder for a student's homework ) but had never really noticed. Disk Utility does see it and also a sub-something (directory?) which might be the Time Machine archives on the disk, called disk1s2), sort of the way that my iMac's hard drive shows up as 640.14 GB Nitachi HDT7... and has a sub-something titled DB iMac, which is what I named my iMac's hard drive.
Anyway the owner's manual just shows the image under the formatting section, not the troubleshooting section, but as soon as I saw it in the manual I remembered seeing it accidentally a few times, went to it, and am now verifying the disk. Right now it's telling me that it will take 2 hours to complete the verification, so I guess I have a bigt of a wait. :-)
Does that fact that Disk Utilities can see it mean it's not failed, or just that it hasn't completely failed?
I can see the virtue in having multiple redundant backups, or at least two backups. What do you suggest? Two external hard drives? I had this one linked by ethernet, and but I also have a cord that could link it by USB (like a printer), so if this one is reparable I could get a second one and link it by USB. If this one is not reparable I could get two and do the same thing. I do have an Airport so I suppose it's possible to get some sort of Wi-Fi hard drive (my new printer/scanner uses only the network and not a cable, although it has a cable that I used for the initial installation), but I'd suspect a Wi-Fi hard drive might have a higher price.
What hard drives, if any, do you recommend? I seem to recall that when I was looking at external hard drives 4 years ago, Apple's were substantially more expensive, which is why I got the OWC Mercury Elite All Pro. -
Macbook pro two days old...bought logic from app store...logic has installed partly each time i open it up it wants to download rest of programme then stops half way thru and gets error message 'logic is unable to continue with download' help needed !
Hello:
I would trot back into the Apple store and have them fix the problem (or call Applecare with a warranty issue). There is no sense in you wasting your time trying to troubleshoot things on a new computer.
Barry -
I need to create a second back-up of iPhoto from Time Machine to a separate external drive. The old iPhoto in TM will not open. Please help! And thank you!
Most Simple Back Up:
Drag the iPhoto Library from your Pictures Folder to another Disk. This will make a copy on that disk.
Slightly more complex: Use an app that will do incremental back ups. This is a very good way to work. The first time you run the back up the app will make a complete copy of the Library. Thereafter it will update the back up with the changes you have made. That makes subsequent back ups much faster. Many of these apps also have scheduling capabilities: So set it up and it will do the back up automatically.
Example of such apps: Chronosync - but there are many others. Search on MacUpdate or the App Store -
Is there a possibility to recover erased files from an external hard drive that was reformatted by the Time Machine?
Basics of File Recovery
Files in Trash
If you simply put files in the Trash you can restore them by opening the Trash (left-click on the Trash icon) and drag the files from the Trash to your Desktop or other desired location. OS X also provides a short-cut to undo the last item moved to the Trash -press COMMAND-Z.
If you empty the Trash the files are gone. If a program does an immediate delete rather than moving files to the Trash, then the files are gone. Recovery is possible but you must not allow any additional writes to the hard drive - shut it down. When files are deleted only the directory entries, not the files themselves, is modified. The space occupied by the files has been returned to the system as available for storage, but the files are still on the drive. Writing to the drive will then eventually overwrite the space once occupied by the deleted files in which case the files are lost permanently. Also if you save a file over an existing file of the same name, then the old file is overwritten and cannot be recovered.
General File Recovery
If you stop using the drive it's possible to recover deleted files that have not been overwritten by using recovery software such as Data Rescue II, File Salvage or TechTool Pro. Each of the preceding come on bootable CDs to enable usage without risk of writing more data to the hard drive. Two free alternatives are Disk Drill and TestDisk. Look for them and demos at MacUpdate or CNET Downloads.
The longer the hard drive remains in use and data are written to it, the greater the risk your deleted files will be overwritten.
Also visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on Data Recovery.
Maybe you are looking for
-
Autoforward one page in iWeb site to .Mac gallery?
Does anyone know if there is a way to have one of your iWeb pages autoforward to another site? I would like my "Picture" page in my iWeb site to automatically forward to my .Mac gallery, rather than force people to have to click the link. Any advice
-
I keep getting an error message "can not connect to the iTunes stores" - what gives.
-
Printing on Wireless Network with iMac G4 EXTRA Page with jibberish.
Hello folks, I hope to find an easy fix. In my wireless network environment there are 6 PCs and one iMac G4 Flat Panel (OSX 10.4.6) that share a wireless router, and 3 wireless print servers that have 4 different printers attached. Everything works v
-
Calendar invitation via email disappear?
Calendar invitation received via email just disappear without getting into the calendar? - How can I change so they will stay in the inbox after I answered the invitation? - Can I delete an invitation in the calendar without sending any information b
-
How to make a page break/create independent sections
using apple pages how do i make section breaks where i can have a different number of columns in each section? 5 column until line 48 and then 3 columns thereafter etc?