Time Machine - A bag of hurt with RAID 0 volumes

Here's my situation:
Mac Pro with 4 internal Hard Drives. 2 of them are in RAID 0 and they are the boot volume. The 2 others are also in RAID 0 and are used as a Time Machine volume. Both volumes have a capacity of 1TB.
I had a problem with the boot volume which forced me to erase that volume. So the next logical step was to boot from the Leopard install DVD (10.5.4) and run the Restore from Time Machine application.
But once I reached the 'Select your destination volume' step it didn't show my internal RAID 0 volume.
I tried every possible configuration but the restore application didn't want to show the internal RAID 0 volume. If I would erase the 2 volumes from the RAID 0 as 2 seperate volumes they would show up. But that wasn't what I needed since the backup was larger than the capacity of 1 seperate hard drive.
Eventually I put the 2 drives in a second Mac Pro. Started that Mac Pro in FireWire disk mode and connected it to my Mac Pro with a FireWire 800 cable. Now, the boot volume would show up in the restore application.
After 12 hours of restoring my data and having almost finished the whole process the restore application gave me an error message saying that 'An error occured, please restart'. No explanation which error had occured. Also, I wasn't able to boot from the partially restored volume.
Conclusion:
1. Apple should fix the Time Machine restore utility so that it would find internal RAID 0 volumes.
2. I still don't have a restored machine. The only possibility now is to reinstall the OS and all the applications manually and retrieve my backup data manually from the Time Machine backup.
3. I'm reverting back to CCC for making backups
David

Carolyn Thanks for quick response and advice.
Firstly I erred re the 167 re Open DNS . I did have in correct if preferences!
However...
I followed your advice and cleared all DNS except for the Open DNS ones.
That rectified the problems on the iMac.
BUT, before I can get too excited, I still have Safari NOT opening some windows on the MBP afterreverting to only Open DNS!
Specifically Macupdate, EhMac and most links from sites set up on My Yahoo.... such as New York Times, CBC, BBC etc.
eg - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/08/business/economy/08obama.html?exprod=myyahoo
or
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2011/01/07/bc-highway-mudslide.h tml?ref=rss
The two above fly open on Imac but take three or more minutes on MBP!
Yet other links are open promptly
So I think it is more than just DNS.

Similar Messages

I have just upgraded to Mavericks and have been using Time Machine on an external disk with Snow Leopard. Can I continue to backup with Time Machine on the same external disk or do I need a new disk since the operating system has changed?

I have just upgraded to Mavericks and have been using Time Machine on an external disk with Snow Leopard. Can I continue to backup with Time Machine on the same external disk or do I need a new disk since the operating system has changed?

Hi there,
I found that Time Machine in Mavericks will sort it all out for you. You shouldn't need to buy another backup drive, unless you have insufficient space left and can't afford to delete whats on there. It should just work fine.

HT5988 I downloaded Mavericks and now my WD Smartware that I use for Time Machine is no longer compatible with this OSX version? How do I make that unit compatible? olefromca

I downloaded Mavericks and now my WD Smartware that I use for Time Machine is no longer compatible with this OSX version? How do I make that unit compatible? olefromca

I agree entirely, been messing with this since the upgrade to Mavericks but I didn't find it quite as easy as uninstalling the WD smartware as it still operates when you plug the drive back in - I think it gets loaded onto the drive and runs from within (?). The advice from WD was that time machine was faulty and I should contact Apple...thanks guys!
Anyway, for the OP's benefit, this is what I found:
1. My problem was that time machine couldn't see any further back than before the Mavericks install, but if I opened up and interrogated the WD drive, the old backups were still there.
2. When TM started doing new backups, it overwrote the ones that it could see, not the oldest ones on the drive. This indicated to
me that the WD software had somehow partitioned off the old backups and excluded that part of the drive from being overwritten. Of course, as the drive was practically full, it meant that any new backups wouldn't fit in the available space.....
3. The only way I could find to resolve this was to use the disc utility to erase and repartition the external drive. This will obviously remove all of the old files and backups, but I was more concerned about keeping a current profile as backup rather than a load of stuff from months ago.
4. Anyway, what happens after the eraseure has completed is that you get the WD icon on the desktop, and you're invited to install the software - this means the software has now been deleted. Juts don't reinstall it, just let TM do it's backup and all is well.
Usual disclaimers and warnings about keeping another copy of your system etc. obviously apply, and I know this is a radical move to delete all your old data but it worked for me. I guess I didn't appreciate that you could use the external drive without the software that came with it and just followed the screen guide.
I'm also aware that if you don't want to use TM to do a complete restore and only want to find one old version of a document, this is difficult. However, you can then install the WD software and find the file but you'll then have to do this all again.....

Time Machine running on Linksys WRT600n with external drive.

Hey Folks,
After searching the internet for the answer on how to setup OS X Time Machine on my Linksys WRT600n with storage link, and finding nothing or only parts of what I needed, I finally got it to work. Hopefully this will help you in your setup.(this should work for any linksys routers with storage link.)
1) First you will need to attach your external USB drive to the Linksys Router, and format it using the linksys utility. This will format the drive as fat32 so it can be access by the mac and the router.
2) You now need to create a share on the drive using the Linksys utility (I called mine "TimeMachine") and grant R&W permission to it. I found and article that said you have to create a group called "root" and a user called "root" within that group, then grant the group R&W access to you share. I did this but I am not sure if its required. you may be able to edit the default "admin" account.
3) Once you have the share created you should be able to access the share from your mac by logging into it using your (Linksys) "root" account and password. Make sure you can save a file here. You maybe able to create a folder but make sure you can save a file (.doc for example).
4) Apple has blocked the use of unsupported drives in Time machine so you will have to make a change for this to work. open a terminal window and type the following in one line:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
Hit enter, and close terminal.
5) For some reason Time Machine will have issues creating the .sparse bundle Disk required for the backup over the network. So you will have to create it yourself. Safely unplug the USB drive from the router and plug it into your mac. Open disk utility (applications > utilities > disk utility) and create one the same size as your external drive.
parameters:
- Volume name: "Time Machine" (has to be this to work)
- Mac OS Extended (Journaled);
- No partition map
- sparse bundle disk image
Make sure the sparse bundle is in the share folder. If Time Machine had created this sparse bundle it would named it after your machine. You will have to rename it accordingly. This is the required format 'computername'_'mac address without colons'.sparsebundle
(eg. "joe's MacBook Pro_000000000000.sparsebundle")
6) Once all the above is complete you can reattach the drive to the router, and attach to the share again from your mac. Open Time Machine and you should see your share. Setup Time Machine to use this drive. You may want to be connected using Ethernet for the first backup as it may take a while.
I have found the wireless backup to take a bit of time to prepare and run but it seams to work nonetheless. The slowness could be caused by the difference in mac addresses from wired to wireless. So you may want to change the sparse bundle file name depending on how you are accessing time machine.
Hopefully this will work for you as it did for me.

I am afraid I have to pour some cold water on your enthusiasm.
Yes, what you say can get TimeMachine working, but there is a nasty snag:
WRT600N uses FAT32 for its external harddrives and (regretably) understands nothing else. FAT32 has two restrictions:
1) Maximum file size is 4GB
2) (a lesser-known one) Maximum number of files in a directory of 65,535.
The first restriction isn't really a problem because Time Machine organizes its data in 8MB "bands", which are files within your sparsebundle directory.
The second restriction, however, will cause Time Machine to eventually hit a brick wall: The sparsebundle bands are given a sequence number in hexadecimal and there isn't really a limit to how many you can have. If you run Time Machine on a large harddrive attached to the WRT600N, you will eventually run into a situation where you are hitting the 65,535-files-in-a-directory limit. Time Machine will, therefore, run for a while and then suddenly fail for no apparent reason.
Given the parameters of Time Machine, you can't run Time Machine reliably on a WRT600N with an external harddrive larger than 8MB * 65535 = 512GB. If that's good enough for you, then great. If not, you can do one of two things:
1) Get something that doesn't format its harddrive in FAT32.
2) Install DD-WRT on your router (thus voiding its warranty), fight with it for a while in order to get SAMBA running on it, and gain the ability to format your harddrive in Ext2.
I hope this helps somebody.

If I completely fill my hard drive 500Gb how time machine will keep working having 1Tb of total space, I mean I have to delete mu hard drive but how I keep my previous information on time machine and keep using to with new information?

If I completely fill my hard drive 500Gb how time machine will keep working having 1Tb of total space [externak hard drive], I mean I have to delete my hard drive but how I keep my previous information on time machine and keep using it with new information?

Time Machine does not provide archival storage.
If you delete a file from your disk it will eventually be deleted from your TM backup without any notice to you.
You need a second external disk to use for archival storage.
You also need a third disk for backups of the second disk.

Time Machine does not cope well with nearly-full disk

Although Time Machine is supposed to delete old backups when the disk fills up, under some circumstances it does not cope well with a disk-full condition.
Hardware: iMac (mid 2007)
OS: Mac OS X version 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard)
Processor: 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory: 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
The other day I noticed that I had not had a successful Time Machine backup in over a day. Backups were taking a long time to run (4 hours or more), during which time the backup disk was chattering constantly and the disk showed "Estimating index time" in the Spotlight menu (even though I had excluded the disk from Spotlight indexing). When the disk finally stopped chattering, the backup finished with no visible errors but Time Machine continued to state that the last successful backup was yesterday. The backup disk was nearly full, but I had assumed that Time Machine was designed to cope with this situation by deleting old backups.
A complete annotated log file of the incident and my observations can be found here: http://bentopress.com/backup.log.zip
Here are some of the interesting entries from the system.log file:
Sep 7 16:22:14 Bento-iMac com.apple.backupd[56515]: Starting standard backup
Sep 7 16:22:14 Bento-iMac com.apple.backupd[56515]: Backing up to: /Volumes/My Backup Disk/Backups.backupdb
Sep 7 16:23:07 Bento-iMac com.apple.backupd[56515]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 100.0 MB requested (including padding), 137.2 MB available
Sep 7 16:25:49 Bento-iMac com.apple.backupd[56515]: Copied 32984 files (23.7 MB) from volume iMac HD.
Sep 7 16:25:53 Bento-iMac com.apple.backupd[56515]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 100.0 MB requested (including padding), 108.4 MB available
Sep 7 16:25:57 Bento-iMac KernelEventAgent[47]: tid 00000000 type 'hfs', mounted on '/Volumes/My Backup Disk', from '/dev/disk1s3', low disk, very low disk
Sep 7 16:25:58 Bento-iMac mds[45]: (Normal) DiskStore: Rebuilding index for /Volumes/My Backup Disk/Backups.backupdb
Sep 7 16:25:58 Bento-iMac KernelEventAgent[47]: tid 00000000 type 'hfs', mounted on '/Volumes/My Backup Disk', from '/dev/disk1s3', low disk
Sep 7 16:25:59 Bento-iMac mds[45]: (Normal) DiskStore: Creating index for /Volumes/My Backup Disk/Backups.backupdb
Sep 7 16:26:00 Bento-iMac KernelEventAgent[47]: tid 00000000 type 'hfs', mounted on '/Volumes/My Backup Disk', from '/dev/disk1s3', low disk, very low disk
Sep 7 16:26:00 Bento-iMac mds[45]: (Warning) Volume: Indexing reset and suspended on backup volume "/Volumes/My Backup Disk" because it is low on disk space.
Sep 7 16:26:02 Bento-iMac mds[45]: (Normal) DiskStore: Reindexing /Volumes/My Backup Disk/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/35367D91-8096-4D43-802B-A8658DBAB581 because no basetime was found.
Sep 7 16:26:02 Bento-iMac mds[45]: (Normal) DiskStore: Rebuilding index for /Volumes/My Backup Disk/Backups.backupdb
Sep 7 16:26:04 Bento-iMac mds[45]: (Normal) DiskStore: Creating index for /Volumes/My Backup Disk/Backups.backupdb
Sep 7 16:26:14 Bento-iMac com.apple.backupd[56515]: Error: Flushing index to disk returned an error: 0
Sep 7 16:26:14 Bento-iMac com.apple.backupd[56515]: Copied 776 files (17.3 MB) from volume iMac HD.
Sep 7 16:26:15 Bento-iMac com.apple.backupd[56515]: Backup canceled.
Note the "error: 0". Error code zero normally indicates success.
There were also many, many, many copies of the following message, which occurred while Spotlight was trying to index the backup disk:
Sep 7 17:28:40 Bento-iMac com.apple.backupd[58064]: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
Here's what I think is happening: at the very end of the backup, after the files have been copied to the backup disk, mds resets indexing because the disk is now full. backupd's attempt to flush the index to disk then fails because indexing is suspended (error zero), so the backup is canceled. I suspect that this may occur when the new backup and the old one(s) being deleted are both small enough that the disk "packs" tightly, leaving no room for the index. If a large (>500MB) old backup had been deleted to make room for a small (<100MB) new one, the problem would not have occurred.
I worked around the problem by switching Time Machine from the full disk to my Time Capsule. (I did not have this system backing up to the Time Capsule originally because I purchased the Time Capsule later for a different system.) The downside of this is that I lost access to older backups (though they are still accessible by right-clicking on Time Machine in the dock and selecting "Browse other Time Machine disks..."—however, I have not actually tried this). I'm also not completely happy having both my main systems backing up to the same hardware, but everything seems to be working well at this point and I do have a secondary backup system, using SuperDuper to clone the systems' disks to an external HD, which I do about once a month.
Although I have worked around the problem, I am posting this in the hope that it will be useful to someone else, in the hope that someone at Apple will notice and perhaps improve the performance of Time Machine in this situation, and also in the hope that someone can suggest a solution that does not involve throwing a bigger disk at the problem. Is there any way to free up space on Time Machine's backup disk, for example by manually pruning older backups, either through Time Machine itself or via the Finder or command line?

If you suspect that the disk being full is the problem, have you tried deleting some of the old backup data on the TM disk?
When in TM, go back to the past a long way, right click on a file/directory and select "delete backup". Do this on some big files you have (so that you get more space per removal) that you change all the time (so you'll still have recent backups).

Time machine still doesn't work with 10.5.2

After loading 10.5.2 I find that Time Machine still doesn't work with a new Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS) and USB drive although I was reassured by my local Apple retail store that the fix was in the update. I should have known better. <Edited by Moderator>

Can you explain what archive and install is please?
I am having the same problem. Automator as soon as it starts crashes.
I have tried reinstalling from the OS disk, repairing permissions and none of them work.
Many Thanks
Dafydd

Does Time Machine backs up also the format of the volume?

Since many softwares cannot be installed on case-sensitive volume, so I erased the whole volume and install OS X Mountain Lion with format of OS Extended(Journaled). Then I use Time Machine backing up to the new system.
But now when I'm trying to install Adobe softwares, here's what I see.
still, It hints that this is a case-senstive volume.
Then I go to check the Disk Utility:
Very weired! It shows as "Mac OS Extended(Journaled) in the Drop-down list, but "case-senstive, journaled) in the discription in bottom.
Anyone has some clues of this??
Thanks.

As well as doing backups and other things, you can use Disk Utility to create RAID volume sets.
Returning to the image you posted, RAID is selected at (1) and so it thinks you are about to create a RAID volume. The format for the new volume would be as shown at (2). On the other hand, the volume at (3) is selected and it is that volume's format which is shown at (4).
I don't think you wanted to create a RAID set; maybe Disk Utility got a click you didn't intend for it. RAID is explained a bit in the Disk Utility help.
I have found a lot of good information about Time Machine at this site:
http://pondini.org/OSX/Home.html
To go back to your original question:
> Does Time Machine backs up also the format of the volume?
My guess would be "No"; but see pondini.org for a definitive answer.

Did Time Machine put 274 GB of data in my Volumes directory?

My first hint that something was wrong was that Carbon Copy Cloner complained that my 600GB encrypted disk image wasn't big enough to hold my backup.
I knew that couldn't be write. My data was roughly 300GB.
So I fired up the superb (free) OmniDiskSweeper and found there were 274GB of data in my /Volumes directory (hidden system folder, to visit it with Finder use "Go To Folder" and type Volumes.
That Folder normally holds Unix Aliases, not files.
It turned out to hold two copies of my hard drive, one fairly complete, the other a mere 40GB, both dated within one day of Jan 26, 2011. They were named after my Time Capsule hosted Time Machine image.
I'm pretty sure TIme Machine put them there during a Time Capsule backup. I've never seen reports of this, but I have seen reports of similar behaviors with disrupted Time Machine backups to a local firewire drive.
I deleted the 600,000+ files and OmniDiskSweeper reported Volumes now uses 12kb.
Has anyone else heard reports of this? I'd guess I'm not the only person who's experienced this, though some friends claim I'm cursed. I don't think it impacted my backups much, neither Time Machine nor SuperDuper nor CarbonCopyCloner actually copy the /Volumes folder, there's not supposed to be anything important there.

Maybe a good tip to prevent dopplegangers hidden in Bombich CCC website?
http://help.bombich.com/kb/dmg-and-remote/a-caveat-for-backing-up-to-a-remote-ma cintosh-that-has-no-user-logged-in
I am going to do this and see if it prevents this problem from happening
A copy of the link's text follows because he sometimes deprecates a real gem posted in his support site.
A caveat for backing up to a remote Macintosh that has no user logged in
For "improved detachability", Mac OS X will unmount any non-internal volumes that are attached to the system when you log out. So, for example, if you log out of your computer while a USB or Firewire hard drive enclosure is attached, you can detach those hard drive enclosures from the system without having to manually unmount them first. This is a good thing — it would be annoying if you had to log back in to your system just to eject a drive. The downside of this, though, is that if you have a scheduled backup task that runs when no user is logged in, the destination volume may be unavailable. For a local backup, CCC will attempt to manually mount the destination volume. When the destination of your backup task is a remote Macintosh, though, CCC will not be able to mount that volume prior to backing up.
If you anticipate backing up to a remote Macintosh that may be sitting at the loginwindow, you can change the behavior of Mac OS X to not unmount detachable volumes. To change this behavior, run this command in the Terminal application on the remote machine:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin -bool YES
Note for Snow Leopard users: This workaround does not work on Snow Leopard 10.6.0 to 10.6.3. If you require this functionality, please apply the 10.6.4 update (or the latest available) for the best experience.

When backing up on time machine is get " The back up disk image'/volume/data/eric balnchard's Macbook.sparbundle"could not be accessed (error-1). what does it mean? it's a new time machine

when backing up on time machine is get " The back up disk image'/volume/data/eric balnchard's Macbook.sparbundle"could not be accessed (error-1). what does it mean? it's a new time machine

Expect to see this error again due to a bug in Lion (and Mountain Lion).
See # C17 in Pondini's excellent support document below, or look over to the right of this web page under the heading of More Like This
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html

Time Machine not freeing up space with manual delete of old backups

I have time machine backing up an external RAID to a Drobo with 7.2TB of total space. The total backup size as estimated by TM is 4.6TB. This setup was running fine for me for a while, until I added some internal drives full of data to my Mac Pro, and forgot to tell TM to exclude them. I didn't realize this until TM told me my backup disk was full. Fine, so I excluded those drives, and then deleted all backups of those drives, as well as going back and deleting quite a few old backups in their entirety. I even went and found about 500GB of data that I no longer needed, deleted it from my RAID and then again deleted all backups of that folder from TM. But after all this, my drive still only has about 70GB of free space on it. When I know at a minimum there should be 500GB free, if not 1-2TB free after all that spring cleaning. How can I get that free space back? It seems as if TM is holding it hostage. I should add that slowly over the few days since deleting, my Drobo free space slowly creeps up. Maybe about 10GB every hour when I go and check free space available. Is this just TM taking forever to delete the old backups, even after the computer has been restarted, shut down, etc. multiple times?
I really don't want to have to erase the entire TM drive and start over, as it takes days to backup 4.6TB of data and slows down my whole system. Any help is appreciated!

I have no direct experience with a Drobo, but in many threads about them, as with many other 3rd-party NASs, either the built-in software creates a sparse bundle, or the instructions have the user do so.
But yes, a sparse bundle is a sparse bundle is a sparse bundle , so if you can locate it via the Finder, and have permission to it, you should be able to compact it manually, per those instructions.
If not, you'll have to talk with the Drobo folks.

Time Machine slow when backing up internal RAID

I've had some issues for some time now with Time Machine taking forever to backup information from my internal RAID in my MacPro. When I say forever, I don't think Time Machine is able to back up every hour, even if it's just doing the 44 mb backup. That can sometimes take 3 hours. I just determined today that it was specifically having trouble with the RAID. I copied a bunch of information to my OS drive, and WHAM, time machine was flying! I primarily work off of my RAID as this machine is used for video editing. The RAID is an 8tb RAID 0. The time machine volume is a GTech GSpeed 9TB RAID 5 connected via eSATA.

Bump for a monday, and hopeful for some replies.

How can I obtain a complete Time Machine backup (about 300 GB), with Windows 7-Parallels Desktop, without the system re-booting automatically?

I have been operating my MacBook Pro 15" (Mac OS 10.7.5), with Windows 7 - Parallels Desktop, for about one and one-half years. However, whenever I execute a Time Machine back-up, and leave the system to complete the process, I return only to find that my system has re-booted, long before the back-up is completed. I do not use the auto-backup feature because I do not see how to change the shedule for backups away from the default schedule of hourly backups (too my stain on performance). Is there something that I am missing in setting up for such a back-up? I am currently operating away from home, using wi-fi for Internet access.
Appreciatively, Arbyem

I have been operating my MacBook Pro 15" (Mac OS 10.7.5), with Windows 7 - Parallels Desktop, for about one and one-half years. However, whenever I execute a Time Machine back-up, and leave the system to complete the process, I return only to find that my system has re-booted, long before the back-up is completed. I do not use the auto-backup feature because I do not see how to change the shedule for backups away from the default schedule of hourly backups (too my stain on performance). Is there something that I am missing in setting up for such a back-up? I am currently operating away from home, using wi-fi for Internet access.
Appreciatively, Arbyem

Error message in time machine: "There was a problem with the user name or the password of the network

I have been unable to back up my macbook to my time capsule for some time now. I received the following error message (translated from Swedish) when trying to back up using time machine:
"The network's volume could not be placed on the desktop. There was a problem with the user name or the password for the network.
Open system preferences and go to Time Machine. Select the volume for security backup again and state the correct user name and password."
I have confirmed the network password, and also tried with resetting the password. I have not idea what else to do. Any help is much appreciated.
Best regards,
John

I have been unable to back up my macbook to my time capsule for some time now. I received the following error message (translated from Swedish) when trying to back up using time machine:
"The network's volume could not be placed on the desktop. There was a problem with the user name or the password for the network.
Open system preferences and go to Time Machine. Select the volume for security backup again and state the correct user name and password."
I have confirmed the network password, and also tried with resetting the password. I have not idea what else to do. Any help is much appreciated.
Best regards,
John

Can an external Mac/Time Machine hard drive be connected with Airpot thru USB for wireless backup

I purchased a seagate 3 tb hard drive and planned on connecting it to my airport via usb. I setup the drive and did the full time machine back up of my imac. I then powered down the airport and the hard drive. I then plugged in the drive and airport and then powered them up. The airport lite up green then went yellow and stopped broadcasting.
Can these two work together like Time Capsule does?

I was sort of in the same boat. I ended up getting a 4th generation TC about six months ago. I only got the 2 TB model as I have a number of those WD My Passports laying around. I decided to use the TC's internal HDD as a NAS and use a powered USB hub with two My Passports attached to them for Time Machine backups. I use the 500 GB for my Mac mini backups and the 750 GB for my two other Mac laptops.
I could have just as easily switched to using the intenal HDD for Time Machine and the My Passports for the NAS. However, I wanted better to use the better transfer rates of the internal drive for my NAS.

Time Machine - A bag of hurt with RAID 0 volumes

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