Time Machine automatic backups don't work since 10.6.4

TM stopped doing automatic backups on my MacBook Pro, apparently when updated to 10.6.4 on 2010-06-16. Backup only runs when I initiate it manually, or when the machine reconnects to the home network, after time away or upon reboot.
Each time I enter System Preferences > Time Machine, the switch on the left says TM is OFF and the Next Backup time reads: Automatic backups off. I can turn the switch to ON (the word "ON" does not turn blue, as it should, and Next Backup does not change), but when I exit and re-enter, it shows OFF again.
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist when opened in Property List Editor says "AutoBackup, Boolean, checkmark." I have dragged this .plist out of its folder and restarted, letting TM recreate it -- it didn't change anything about the above behavior.
I looked in the backup set to see whether either /System/Library/PreferencePanes/TimeMachine.prefPane or /Applications/Time Machine.app had been updated at 10.6.4. Indeed, both had changed around the day of installing 10.6.4.
I replaced the directory /System/Library/PreferencePanes/TimeMachine.prefPane from a June 1 backup. After reboot -- nothing had changed.
I replaced the directory /Applications/Time Machine.app from a June 1 backup. After reboot -- nothing had changed.
Full details at http://recoveringphysicist.com/15/ . Thanks for any ideas.

Keith Dawson wrote:
TM auto-backup is now working again. I think the magic combination was (1) 10.6.4 combo update followed by (2) restoring /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto.plist from a backup before I could possibly have messed with it.
Aha! Great!
My takeaway from this investigation is best summed up by Chuck Goolsbee
That's exaggerated. Time Machine is more complex, and does more for you, than most backup apps. Some of the messages are not helpful, and Apple's documentation is, well, inadequate.
But it does work well for most of us, and there are resources to figure out how to fix it when something does go wrong.
But, I've learned over the years (mostly the hard way, of course ), never to trust my backups to a single app or piece of hardware: no app is perfect, and all hardware fails, sooner or later.
So, like many here, I keep +secondary backups,+ in addition to Time Machine. See #27 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum), for details.

Similar Messages

Time machine automatic backup not working.

I have just setup my time machine backup and it works fine when I initiate manual backups. but i have noticed that, after every hour auto backup doesn't start. i can always do a manual backup, but for some reason next backup time is increased by an hour every time for auto backups. there are no error messages. Can you please help me with this. I am on os X mavericks.
I also checked the system logs after seeing some other topics and I only see messages about manually started backups there.

These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
In the top right corner of the Console window, there's a search box labeled Filter. Initially the words "String Matching" are shown in that box. Enter the word "Starting" (without the quotes.) You should now see log messages with the words "Starting * backup," where * represents any of the words "automatic," "manual," or "standard."
Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Note the timestamp of the last "Starting" message that corresponds to the beginning of an an abnormal backup. Now
CLEAR THE WORD "Starting" FROM THE TEXT FIELD
so that all messages are showing, and scroll back in the log to the time you noted. Select the messages timestamped from then until the end of the backup, or the end of the log if that's not clear. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
☞ If all you see are messages that contain the word "Starting," you didn't clear the text field.
☞ The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
☞ Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

Time machine and filevault don't work together

Let me get this straight....my files can either be safe from being stolen if I lose my laptop OR they can be safe from being lost when my hard drive dies, but they can't be safe from both at once?
Seriously, FileVault is a great feature and so is Time Machine. Maybe someone at Apple can help them learn to live together?

This is a major screw-up on Apple’s part. Interesting that I just realized courtesy of MacIntouch that TM was NOT backing up my FileVaulted home folder. I use my MacBook Pro probably like most people. When I’m at home I’m behind a firewall. I leave the computer connected to my home network and I leave it open and on. I don’t log out ever! For security I do use the FileVault feature and I don’t use distant connections to my home network.
There should be an option for TM to back up the open file vault directory just as if, frankly, someone would have access to it if they picked up my open computer and walked off with it. The owner has to have physical control of the computer. FileVault works if the computer is asleep and the wake log-on is enabled or if the computer is restarted. However, if my filevault is open and being used by me it should be available for a TM back-up.
Interesting that Retrospect, with all its faults and promises of vaporware to come, WILL back up my MacBook FileVault.
Apple should provide some type of option for this situation. On the fly decoding of the open FileVault directory so as to avoid a repeated total backup of the whole thing is the answer. It is the owner’s responsibility to keep the TM volume secure.

Does time machine automatically backup external hard drives?

Hi
I have 4 external disks connected to my macPro and a 5th which I am using to backup too. In the TM prefs I have selected the drives & specific folders that I DON'T want backed up. Can I assume it will back EVERYTHING ELSE up, including the external drives?
I conducted an experiment - I unmounted one of the external drives (my main Logic projects disk), then entered TM. I COULDN'T FIND the Projects disk even though the BackUp disk was still mounted! So if there was a problem with the Projects drive HOW would I access my backed-up projects?
I don't have much faith in TM at the moment.
Cheers
Chris

Hi
Time Machine will back up the files for all users, as well as the system files.
best,
Matt

Time Machine backups have not worked since upgrade to Lion OS X

I get the following error message when trying to use Time Machine - "The backup was not performed because an error occurred whilecopying files to the backup disk. The problem may be temporary. Try again later to back up. Ifthe problem persists, use Disk Utility to repair your backup disk."

Not one of Apple's better messages.
It's having a problem with a particular file, but there's no hint of that.
See #C3 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

I baught Seagate Backup plus 2T hard drive to use as my Backup time machine. But its not working when i connect to time machine its not coping files, it keep saying preparing files. Can someone help me please...

i baught Seagate Backup plus 2T hard drive to use as my Backup time machine. But its not working. when i connect to time machine its not coping files, it keep saying preparing files. Can someone help me please...

Please read this whole message before doing anything.
This procedure is a diagnostic test. It’s unlikely to solve your problem. Don’t be disappointed when you find that nothing has changed after you complete it.
The purpose of the test is to determine whether the problem is caused by third-party software that loads automatically at startup or login, by a peripheral device, by a font conflict, or by corruption of the file system or of certain system caches.
Disconnect all wired peripherals except those needed for the test, and remove all aftermarket expansion cards, if applicable. Start up in safe mode and log in to the account with the problem. You must hold down the shift key twice: once when you turn on the computer, and again when you log in.
Note: If FileVault is enabled, or if a firmware password is set, or if the startup volume is a Fusion Drive or a software RAID, you can’t do this. Ask for further instructions.
Safe mode is much slower to start up and run than normal, with limited graphics performance, and some things won’t work at all, including sound output and Wi-Fi on certain models. The next normal startup may also be somewhat slow.
The login screen appears even if you usually login automatically. You must know your login password in order to log in. If you’ve forgotten the password, you will need to reset it before you begin.
Test while in safe mode. Same problem?
After testing, restart as usual (not in safe mode) and verify that you still have the problem. Post the results of the test.

Due to NAS issues, when I started a new time machine backup it did not have the old backups available. My question is do I need to delete them or will time machine automatically reclaim the space? Only one Sparse Bundle, same name.

Due to NAS issues, when I started a new time machine backup it did not have the old backups available. My question is do I need to delete them or will time machine automatically reclaim the space? There is only one sparse bundle but when I enter time machine I don't see my historic backups. I use a synology DS212 for my time machine. Started a new backup which is 218gb but it says 618 gb is occupied therefore it looks like 2 or 3 backups are still on the disk. Before my NAS issues the last backup was in 2014. As you can see there is a second sparse bundle from 2012. Not sure what that is.

This is an old message now, but what happened to me similarly was:
I had a major computer crash and through complicated pathways ended up reinstalling (Mavericks) as a new user (long story).
At least I had good Time Machine backups on an NAS drive (Synology DS212j), or so I thought - when I started Time Machine up again, the old backup file was gone, replaced by a new one using my "new computer" name. The old file was gone both by directly mounting the NAS drive and by clicking "Enter Time Machine".
It's like I had {OldShareName}.sparsebundle and then it was replaced by {NewShareName}.sparsebundle, all of the old info vanished.
(I have spent a week finding old files elsewhere and have completed a satisfactory self-restore. It pays to "archive" [my own variation of] as well as "back-up".)
My belief is that if this were a wired-netword-drive, e.g. plugged right into my iMac with a USB cable, then the old file would have remained.
But this is an NAS drive, connected directly to my Airport wireless router, and I don't know the significance of the fact that it stores its Time Machine backups as "sparsebundle" files rather than simply as plain(er) files.
As usual when things get complicated with computers (not just Apple computers) there was never a warning message. Something like "YOU'RE ABOUT TO DELETE A TIME MACHINE BACK-UP FILE!!!" would have made my life a lot simpler.
BTW, I did try a "restore from Time Machine" option the first thing I had my "new computer" (old hardware, 2009 iMac) up and running, using Migration Assistant, and it ran for many hours and then failed in the wee hours - what that has to do with anything I'm not sure.
I'm not sure that I have a question about this other than "why do these things happen to me?", but it's a warning. Apart from that I've been very happy with the stability and reliability (but not the cost or set-up complexity) of NAS vs. directly-cabled external drives.
Charles

HT3275 Time machine error, backup disk image "/volumes/data-1/.sparesbundle " already in use. I don;t know what this means, can someone help?

My Mac mini time capsule is showing an error Time machine error, backup disk image "/volumes/data-1/.sparesbundle " already in use. I don;t know what this means, can someone help?

I had a similar problem and I solved it as follows -
In Time Machine - > I deselected time capsule Data Disk as a destination.
Then I pulled the power plug on the Time Capsule, twiddled my thumbs for 15 secs, plugged the power back in.
Went back t Time Machine -> Re-Added the Time Capsule Data Disk as destination. And then tested by selecting Backup Now.
All went well and the backup picked up from before the problem.
BTW - I also have a USB drive connected to Time Capsule that is an alternate disk for Time Machine to backup.
In Mountain Lion the GUI lets you add more than one Time Machine backup destinations very easily so I think it a good idea to have redundancy.
Hope this helps.

HT4522 Time Machine's backup to Time Capsule has stopped working

TM reports "an error". The Time Capsule is visible in the "shared" tab of the Finder window, but is listed as "Not connected". It is visible and connected to another Mac on the net. Is there a solution short of using the Airport Utility to erase the drive?

Hi there Cinclus,
You may find the troubleshooting steps in the article below helpful.
Time Machine: Troubleshooting backup issues
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3275
-Griff W.

Time Machine incomplete backup on new External Hard Drive

I have a LaCie 2TB firewire external hard drive I bought 2 years ago. I made 3 partitions, one called "Time Machine" for TM backups of my iMac HD, one called "Video" for video files, and one called "HD2" that I used to install new programs and store edited photos and img files. I ran TM onto this HD for the last 2 yrs with no problems. I recently decided that I needed to have a backup of my iMac HD --- AND the 2 partitions (Video and HD2) on my LaCie. So I bought a Seagate 2TB external USB HD that I planned to use ONLY for Time Machine.
So I hooked it up and formatted it (no partitions), then went to TM options and selected the new Seagate Hard Drive to backup to, and in the options I excluded the Seagate (by default) and the Time Machine partition on my LaCie. Nothing else was excluded. In other words, I wanted to backup my entire iMac HD, and my Lacie Video and HD2 partitions.
My internal iMac HD has 116 GB used, my Lacie Video partition has 355 GB used, and my Lacie HD2 partition has 175 GB used. So I was expecting the Seagate to backup 646 GB.
When my Time Machine backup started at 1 AM, I was happy to see that the status box showed "Backing up 1 GB of 646 GB." When I woke up at 8 AM, I was happy to see that the status box showed
"Backing up 536 GB of 646 GB."
But it stayed stuck on 536 GB until 12 Noon, then started slowly working again. By 7 PM, the status showed "Backing up 623 GB of 646 GB." Then at 8 PM, the status box disappeared and it seemed like everything was backed up. But my Seagate HD shows only 629 GB of used space. So I decided to check the backup in Finder to see what went wrong.
In the Seagate backups folder, I have three folders - one named "Macintosh HD" which shows 112 GB on disk, one named "Video" with 341 GB on disk, and one named "HD2" with 175 GB on disk.
So it appears that my iMac HD was only backed up 112 GB out of 116GB, my Video partition was only backed up 341 GB out of 355 GB, but my HD2 partition backed up the entire 175 GB out of 175 GB.
So my question is - is this normal, or is my backup really missing 4 GB of files from my iMac hard drive and 14 GB of files from my video partition? I started to look at them file by file to see if they matched, but there are so many files, so I thought I would ask in case any of you might have heard of this before. If your answer is that my backups are corrupt or incomplete, should I reformat the Seagate and start over?
Also, is it safe for me to manually delete all the files in my time Machine partition on my LaCie hard drive, since I won't be using that anymore for Time Machine backups? Or is there a process I must follow to delete those older backups?
Thanks for reading this far and for any advice you can shoot my way.

Thank you for your well thought out response. It was really helpful by showing me where to look at things more closely.
Time Machine automatically excludes some things that aren't necessary for a restore, such as system work files, most caches and logs, and trash.
This is good to know. Although I didn't have anything in the trash, I have no idea how much is in the various caches and logs. I'd be surprised if they totaled 4GB, though. I'm still worried about this backup, as explained below after doing a Console log check.
If any files were open, they may not have been backed-up (a partial file wouldn't be of much use). I don't know of any special exclusions for video files or apps, but there may be some. You might want to try the Terminal command in the yellow box of #11.
I didn't have anything else running except TM, so no files were open. I checked the exclusions in the yellow box #11, the Terminal Command, and /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions.pl ist, but nothing seemed to point to the video files I have saved. So I'm still at a loss with this part of the backup.
You might want to look at the log of that backup
I looked at the log - thank you for the link on how to see it - but the entries show that the size of the backup was even less than I thought - It seems I am actually missing 0.2 GB from the HD2 partition, 6 GB from the iMac HD, and 14.4 GB from the Video partition. And since it shows the exclusion amounts, I'm really at a loss for the iMac HD now. Here's what the Console listed for this backup:
Aug 29 00:55:54 paul-imac-5 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[567]: Backup content size: 174.7 GB excluded items size: 0 bytes for volume HD2
Aug 29 00:55:54 paul-imac-5 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[567]: Backup content size: 355.7 GB excluded items size: 0 bytes for volume Video
Aug 29 00:55:54 paul-imac-5 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[567]: Backup content size: 116.3 GB excluded items size: 30.5 MB for volume Macintosh HD
Aug 29 00:55:54 paul-imac-5 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[567]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 776.02 GB requested (including padding), 1.82 TB available
Aug 29 00:55:54 paul-imac-5 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[567]: Waiting for index to be ready (909 > 0)
Aug 29 02:37:30 paul-imac-5 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[567]: Copied 3275 files (174.5 GB) from volume HD2.
Aug 29 05:49:40 paul-imac-5 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[567]: Copied 5412 files (515.9 GB) from volume Video.
Aug 29 19:18:46 paul-imac-5 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[567]: Copied 146976 files (626.2 GB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Is it possible to see how many files are in each drive that I was backing up? If I could match the file count, it might give me a better idea. I used Finder, but it only gives me the GB Capacity, Used and Free. For example, if I could see if the LaCie Video partition has exactly 5412 files (or 2137, if the file count above is a running total), I will believe that all the files backed up but may have been truncated. If the partition shows more than 5412 files, then I'll know that not all files were backed up. So at least I can start looking manually.
It will be much faster and easier to erase the partition with Disk Utility.
Thank you for this advice. This should save lots of time. I won't erase my other partitions when I do this, right? Also, will it leave a blank partition there so I regain my space?
I'm really bummed out by this backup. I haven't used my iMac for anything except Safari since this happened, because I do not want to start working again until I know that I have a safe backup, and I don't want to make any new files until I can resolve this. I thought of just reformatting the Seagate and starting over, but I have a feeling it may do the same thing. So at this point, I don't know if the Seagate is faulty, if the TM is not working properly, if I am making a dumb user error, or if this is perfectly normal. The worst thing that could happen is that my iMac HD or Lacie HD fails and I try to restore from my Seagate TM backup, only to find out that my TM backup is incomplete or corrupt.
So I really do appreciate your help and any additional insight you or anyone else might have. Thanks.

Can I set Time Machine to backup both my hard drive and an external hard drive?

Hi. I've been working with a lot of family video lately and my internal hard drive has filled up significantly. iMovie doesn't seem to have a good archiving facility like Adobe InDesign which I use at work were all the relevant files are gathered together into one folder. Apple advised me to relocate my movie files to an external hard drive and herein lies my query.
Is there a way for me to set Time Machine to backup both my iMac's internal drive and the external hard drive that would contain my movie files? I've been using Time Machine for my backups for a few years now, but backing up the external as well has me stumped. If Time Machine could be used then all the necessary file accociations etc would be safely backed up as well - that's why I don't want to have to manually backup the external.
Anyone have any ideas? Thanks!

7string48 wrote:
Thanks so much Pondini!! You just quickly answered a question that none of the Mac people in 3 stores or Apple Care have been able to answer.If you can format it HFS+ (any variation of Mac OS Extended), it will work. If not, it won't.
I'm not too surprised about the Apple Stores, as they don't get much training on Time Machine. But AppleCare sure ought to know.
Oh...what about if the external drive is an array...like a Drobo with it's own proprietary formatting...I guess that would not work...??
I've never used a Drobo. A number of folks here have used them as their Time Machine drives, but I don't recall seeing anyone try to back one up with TM, so can't say for sure. But if you can format it as HFS+ (any variation of Mac OS Extended), it will work. If not, it won't.
At least part of the reason is, Time Machine uses the File System Event Store, a hidden log of changes that OSX keeps on each Mac-formatted disk/partition, to figure out what's changed and needs to be backed-up. See How Time Machine works its Magic for details.
See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #32 for details and considerations of backing-up multiple volumes with Time Machine.
However, even if it will work, that may not be your best strategy, depending on your circumstances:
Since Time Machine keeps copies of things you've changed or deleted, the destination needs to be considerably larger than the data being backed-up. How much larger varies widely depending on how you use your Mac, but a general "rule of thumb" is, it needs at least twice the space to be able to keep a reasonable "depth" of backups for you.
If you have a large internal HD, fairly full, plus a large external HD, and the files on the external don't change frequently, you might want to use Time Machine for the internal, and a different app to a different disk or partition, on a different schedule, for the external. Especially if space is a consideration, you might not need to keep previous versions of files on the externals. See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #27 for some alternatives.

Trouble getting time machine to backup latest numbers file.

I'm able to use Time Machine to backup my macbook wirelessly to an external hard drive attached to my iMac. However, I recently noticed that I am failing to back up the latest version of a numbers file.
Has anyone noticed any incomplete or outdated files - that shouldn't be - in their number file back ups?

Well, Time Machine unfortunately is bugged beyond use for some people. It is nearly impossible to tell if TM will work every single time until Apple will take a look at their programming and fix the darn thing.
Anyways, back to the point. The problem with updated files is that TM will look for new things that are indexed as new, and by indexed as new as in the Spotlight regards the file as updated since last backup. I don't really know if this would work, but you could give it a try.
Try this:
1) Duplicate the file into the same folder with a different name
ex. filename.doc, and make a new file called filename_1.doc
2) Make sure that this file is in the same folder as the other file.
3) Back up
I think that would make Spotlight tell TM to backup the updated documents.

Time Machine hourly backup seems a tad large

Hi all
Occasionally, my hourly Time Machine incremental backups to my Time Capsule seem a tad large. One hour the backup is a sensible size, then an hour later, when I've been doing very little on my machine, the backup is massive (as in, several gigabytes).
Not only that, but the backup seems to grow in size as its happening. the pictures below should help illustrate.
The backup is listed as being 719MB, only an hour after a more modest backup. Time Machine seems to be claiming that is has transferred all of the required backup:
!http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/4988/picture2gih.png!
But then, only two minutes later, see how the situation has changed:
!http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/3739/picture3m.png!
And the situation continues:
!http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/9339/picture5.png!
Any ideas? This issue happens intermittently (although it is happening now... that last image was taken a few minutes ago and the backup was still going - up to 3.1GB - before I told it to stop).
I'm not certain if Time Machine is actually transferring this amount of data to the Time Capsule or not.
Cheers.

Hi,
I had the same problem today as well. The last backup was done this morning at 2 a.m. When I turned my PowerBook G4 on again this afternoon, the backup size continually grew, just like on your machine, Rob. I aborted the backup a couple of times, deleted the inProgress file, but it always got bigger and bigger. After downloading Time Machine Buddy and Time Tracker, I just let Time Machnine "do it's thing". Luckily, I had enough free space on my WD MyBook 500 GB I use for the backups, because it stopped only at 24.8 GBs, after initially displaying 61,3 MB in the menu bar, and requesting 1.05 GB according to Time Machine Buddy.
Time Machine Buddy protocol:
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/My Book/Backups.backupdb
No pre-backup thinning needed: 1.05 GB requested (including padding), 32.74 GB available
Copied 139261 files (24.8 GB) from volume Macintosh HD.
No pre-backup thinning needed: 1.16 GB requested (including padding), 7.36 GB available
Copied 7042 files (2.0 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Starting post-backup thinning
Deleted backup /Volumes/My Book/Backups.backupdb/Claas Olthoffs PowerBook/2009-03-05-202501: 7.36 GB now available
Deleted backup /Volumes/My Book/Backups.backupdb/Claas Olthoffs PowerBook/2009-03-05-192342: 7.37 GB now available
Deleted backup /Volumes/My Book/Backups.backupdb/Claas Olthoffs PowerBook/2009-03-05-123736: 7.37 GB now available
Deleted backup /Volumes/My Book/Backups.backupdb/Claas Olthoffs PowerBook/2009-03-05-113526: 7.38 GB now available
Post-back up thinning complete: 4 expired backups removed
Backup completed successfully.
So I took a look at Time Tracker to see what was backed up. I was suprised to see, that the biggest chunk was my Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support folder. This folder is 23,9 GB in size, mainly because it contains Final Cut Studio media and templates. Time Machine backed it up completey. This seems weired, because none of the files I looked at in this folder were changed during the last couple of months, if not the last year, since I installed them. I don't know why Time Machine would backup all of those unchanged files.
For the sake of completeness, the external drives contains other, non-backup, files as well.
I hope this gives you some more information to work with Pondini.
Greetings,
Claas

Time Machine - Preparing backup - It's endless

My C2D Mac Mini is hanging on Time Machine - Preparing Backup for the second time since "Upgrading" to 10.5.2
I had to re-format my backup disk last time and start all the backups again.
Here is an extract from the console log:
29/04/2008 23:50:13 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1094] Starting standard backup
29/04/2008 23:50:13 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1094] Backing up to: /Volumes/LaCie Disk/Backups.backupdb
29/04/2008 23:50:15 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1094] Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Macintosh HD
29/04/2008 23:50:15 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[1094] Node requires deep traversal:/ reason:kFSEDBEventFlagMustScanSubDirs|kFSEDBEventFlagReasonEventDBUntrustable|
Does anyone recognise this? I'm a Mac novice so I don't understand what it all means. I hope I don't have to reformat and start again as I was converted to Mac from PC on the advice that "A Mac Works!"
My backup drive is a 500GB Lacie Mini if that is of any relevance. Spotlight is told not to index the drive and also the Lacie drive is told not to back itself up.
Can anyone help as it's driving me nuts!

Are Lacie really that bad? I thought that the main reason they are mentioned in these forums is that Lacie are one of the only brands of external storage that apple actively promote through their own web stores so there a good chance that quite a few Mac users will buy one. Anyway I can't afford to buy another Hard Drive at the moment and the lacie works perfectly apart from Time Machine.
The problem seems to be with Mac OS the more I delve into these forums and more importantly the 10.5.2. update which is where Time Machine appears to be providing users with a lot of troubles.
The Apple support self service on the website is far from comprehensive as I guess they want you to purchase Apple Care for ongoing support after the 90 days initial period but come on apple give us a break and sort it out or provide a support email address for specific problems!

Time Machine "preparing backup" eternally upon wake from sleep

at a bit of a loss here...
iMac 24" (version which offered 7300GT as BTO option)
10.5.5 with all updates applied
LaCie 500 gig USB 2.0 drive directly attached.
Up until about two months ago, Time machine functioned fined. Then for some reason, the following started to happen. (no known reason, no software update related etc, that I know of)
scenario... Time Machine functions correctly EXCEPT when waking from sleep. If iMac wakes from sleep and attempts a backup immediately (e.g. more than one hour has passed), it gets stuck "preparing backup" forever. I've let it run overnight (actually as long as about 30 hours), it never stops. Finder and other programs become extremely non-responsive, machine is almost unusable. Literally, the only way out is to manually shut down external drive, with attendant warnings/errors.
What I've done:
1) deleted the time machine .plist file
2) erased, repartioned (as a single partition) external drive
3) started brand new time machine backup (takes about three hours)
At this point, time machine will backup up fine... I can force a successful backup, if I leave the machine running, at one hour it does a successful backup.
BUT, as soon as it goes to sleep, time machine is hosed.
The only workable method for using time machine is to turn the external drive and time machine off when not using it, and turn the whole shootin' match on to do what essentially becomes manual backups. These backup are fairly lengthy, as time machine also does lengthy "preparing backup", but they complete in about 30 minutes to one hour.
Given that time machine doesn't give mountable/cloneable backup, I'm probably going to go back to Carbon Copy Cloner. Still, I like the ease/regularity of Time Machine, and would use it if it works.
Any ideas?
thanks

It could be a number of things. There are lots of things that Time Machine does in order to "manage" backups -- apart from just copying data to the backup drive.
It has to manage the transition of hourly backups into daily backups and must also transition daily backups into weekly backups. Each time it does this it has to move a lot of data around. It also has to maintain indexes of everything so you can quickly find backups should you want to perform a restore.
I've also noticed that there are circumstances that can cause TM to question whether it can trust it's existing backup database... I've caught Time Machine saying that it needs to do a "deep traversal" of the backup (basically it wants to check and see what it really has) and this can take a very long time.
Still... 30 hours is an extremely long amount of time. I'm almost wondering if there's a problem with either your USB bus or your drive when they wake up such that you may be getting a huge number of retries on something that should have happened quickly.
I'd suggest you start the "Console" utility, select "All Messages" at the left, and then watch the messages being written to your log file. Not only does Time Machine log all of it's progress messages to the system.log (in more detail than you'd see in the Time Machine UI), but so do lots of other system processes. If you're getting USB bus problems the error messages would likely show up in the same log. I'm especially suspicious about non-TM related causes since you said you've already blown away your TM backups & preferences and started from scratch and you're still getting the problem.
Try re-creating your problem with the Console log messages being displayed and see if you can't see something in the log that would let you get a little closer to the root cause.
Regards,
Tim

Time Machine automatic backups don't work since 10.6.4

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