Time Machine can't see volume

I've had TM working since I got my new iMac over a week ago. But it stopped working in the last day or so. I've done 2 things in the last day that might have caused the problem.
I disconnected the drive to move the computer
I've been having problems downloading files and the Applecare person I talked with, who was very helpful and solved my problem, had me move all of my preference files out of the preference folder, then copy the application related ones back (which solved the downloading problem).
I don't know if either of these is the issue. I just know that TM won't backup, even when I tell it to backup now. I'm getting the message "Volume not found". Any suggestions on how to help TM find my backup volume? It's still there on the external HD and my desktop. My TM preferences are in my Preferences folder.

That's not really a big issue.
Make sure you close all open applications, or even restart, and you should be able to get past that step in repairing the disk.
If that still doesn't work, add the drive to the spotlight privacy list (>System Preferences...>Spotlight>Privacy>+), then add the TM drive.
After that, you should be able to repair the disk.
Post the results in a reply.
Good luck!

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My Time Machine can't see/connect to my NAS Thecus

Hello,
I have NAS Thecus N7700Pro V2.
I got it to be my network storage and I enabled teh AFP in my NAS to be able to use my Time Machine backup.
My current OS is Lion 10.7.5.
When I open teh Time Machine and try to connect it to my NAS it can't see it.
Please advise.
Thanks!

Thanks - that worked - although the solution requires a little updating which was mentioned further down that post. In summary it is now this:
1. Create a sparsebundle image manually on your local system. Open a terminal window and enter:
hdiutil create -size $SIZESPEC -fs HFS+J -type SPARSEBUNDLE -volname "Backup of $MACHINENAME" $MACHINENAME_$MACADDRESS.sparsebundle
Where $SIZESPEC is the size of the backup volume (followed by the lowercase letter g if Gigabytes, e.g. 100g), and $MACHINENAME_$MAC_ADRESS is your Mac's name followed by an underscore and then your Mac's MAC Address (otherwise known as its Ethernet ID; visible in the Network System Preferences panel), but without the colons. So if your Mac is named MyMac, and the Network System Preferences panel lists your Ethernet ID as 00:18:b3:11:84:dd, then you would use MyMac_0018b31184dd for the name of the sparsebundle.
The -size parameter can probably be as large as you want, now that Apple has evidently fixed the sparsebundle issues that were causing all but the most recent backup to be dumped. However, you can also specify a smaller size if you (like me) want to create a hard limit for the amount of space your Time Machine backups will take on your network drive. hdiutil does have a -resize option if you need to utilize that later.
2. Create and set permissions on your network share. Just make sure you have read/write permissions set on whichever SMB/AFP share you're going to dump this to.
3. Copy the sparsebundle to the network share root. Easy enough. Mount your network share and copy it over. I used this Terminal command after the MyBackup share was mounted: cp -r mymachine_0017f2c8426b.sparsebundle /Volumes/MyBackup/. Or just use the regular UI to copy and paste (it worked for me).

Time Machine - can't see backups

I have a 1T LaCie attched via USB and have been using since Sept 2008 - when i enter TM all I can see is back ups for Sept & Oct 2008, but nothing since. It seems to be backing up on a regular basis, and I get no warning messages. Can I just delete the backup file on the LaCie and start over if I don't care about files prior to what is on my HD now?

So, thanks to a rotten power supply I have a freshly dead 17.5 month old 1 TB Time Capsule which is out of warranty. To try and preserve the utility of my prior Time Machine backups and what seems to be a perfectly good 1 TB HD, I bought a 3.5" SATA enclosure with USB 2.0 and pulled the drive out of the TC and put it in the HDD enclosure. Now following Pondini's Tip #17 in the FAQ I can browse to my prior backups.
The big question is: How can I get Time Machine use the same HD from the Time Capsule (now attached by USB instead of Ethernet) to pick up where it left off making further incremental backups as it had been making for 1.5 years up until the TC's power supply died? I'd like to not have to back the whole thing up separately again and bifurcate the backups.
In Finder I can see a 104.93 GB file titled:
Mjmckay's Mac Mini_0016cba344dd.sparsebundle and dated the date I started using the TC.
Using the Disk Utility I can also see the name and info of the HD as follows:
Name : Hitachi HDS721010KLA330 Media
Type : Disk
Partition Map Scheme : GUID Partition Table
Disk Identifier : disk2
Media Name : Hitachi HDS721010KLA330 Media
Media Type : Generic
Connection Bus : USB
USB Serial Number : 200904130782
Device Tree : /PCI0@0/USB7@1D,7/@2:0
Writable : Yes
Ejectable : Yes
Mac OS 9 Drivers Installed : No
Location : External
Total Capacity : 931.5 GB (1,000,204,886,016 Bytes)
S.M.A.R.T. Status : Not Supported
Disk Number : 2
Partition Number : 0
I also see 3 sub-drives listed as subsidiaries of the Hitachi:
#1
Name : APconfig
Type : Volume
Disk Identifier : disk2s1
Mount Point : /Volumes/APconfig
File System : Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Connection Bus : USB
Device Tree : /PCI0@0/USB7@1D,7/@2:1
Writable : Yes
Universal Unique Identifier : BD51DD81-2084-392A-8D03-BEA700498F7B
Capacity : 1 GB (1,073,741,824 Bytes)
Free Space : 1,003.5 MB (1,052,262,400 Bytes)
Used : 20.5 MB (21,479,424 Bytes)
Number of Files : 43
Number of Folders : 9
Owners Enabled : No
Can Turn Owners Off : Yes
Can Be Formatted : Yes
Bootable : Yes
Supports Journaling : Yes
Journaled : Yes
Disk Number : 2
Partition Number : 1
#2
Name : APswap
Type : Volume
Disk Identifier : disk2s2
Mount Point : /Volumes/APswap
File System : Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Connection Bus : USB
Device Tree : /PCI0@0/USB7@1D,7/@2:2
Writable : Yes
Universal Unique Identifier : B6B860F2-09EB-3678-AEE5-3C38BE6755C1
Capacity : 1 GB (1,073,741,824 Bytes)
Free Space : 1,003.5 MB (1,052,266,496 Bytes)
Used : 20.5 MB (21,475,328 Bytes)
Number of Files : 42
Number of Folders : 9
Owners Enabled : No
Can Turn Owners Off : Yes
Can Be Formatted : Yes
Bootable : Yes
Supports Journaling : Yes
Journaled : Yes
Disk Number : 2
Partition Number : 2
#3
Name : Time Capsule Disk
Type : Volume
Disk Identifier : disk2s3
Mount Point : /Volumes/Time Capsule Disk
File System : Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Connection Bus : USB
Device Tree : /PCI0@0/USB7@1D,7/@2:3
Writable : Yes
Universal Unique Identifier : 680A57E2-84F9-3176-8D2A-ECC1D034725F
Capacity : 929.5 GB (998,057,361,408 Bytes)
Free Space : 824.4 GB (885,197,500,416 Bytes)
Used : 105.1 GB (112,859,860,992 Bytes)
Number of Files : 13,483
Number of Folders : 17
Owners Enabled : No
Can Turn Owners Off : Yes
Can Be Formatted : Yes
Bootable : Yes
Supports Journaling : Yes
Journaled : Yes
Disk Number : 2
Partition Number : 3
#1 & 2 have orange USB drive icons; #3 is a green Time Machine drive icon
Further down the Disk Utility frame I have the disk image:
Name : Mjmckay's Mac Mini_0016cba344dd.sparsebundle
Type : Disk Image
Disk Identifier : disk3
Media Name : Apple sparse bundle disk image Media
Connection Bus : Disk Image
Disk Image Path : /Time Capsule Disk/Mjmckay's Mac Mini_0016cba344dd.sparsebundle
Full Path : /Volumes/Time Capsule Disk/Mjmckay's Mac Mini_0016cba344dd.sparsebundle
Partition Map Scheme : Apple Partition Map
Writable : Yes
Ejectable : Yes
Mac OS 9 Drivers Installed : No
Total Capacity : 929.5 GB (998,057,361,408 Bytes)
Disk Number : 3
Partition Number : 0
and subsidiary to that disk image is:
Name : Backup of Mjmckay's Mac Mini
Type : Volume
Disk Identifier : disk3s2
Mount Point : /Volumes/Backup of Mjmckay's Mac Mini
File System : Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)
Connection Bus : Disk Image
Writable : Yes
Universal Unique Identifier : 6C96AD5C-772F-3710-98E3-9E233560AC0C
Capacity : 929.5 GB (998,057,328,640 Bytes)
Free Space : 825.5 GB (886,406,656,000 Bytes)
Used : 104.0 GB (111,650,672,640 Bytes)
Number of Files : 1,370,273
Number of Folders : 209,366
Owners Enabled : Yes
Can Turn Owners Off : Yes
Can Repair Permissions : No
Can Be Verified : Yes
Can Be Repaired : Yes
Can Be Formatted : Yes
Bootable : Yes
Supports Journaling : Yes
Journaled : Yes
Disk Number : 3
Partition Number : 2
I'm sure there's information here which no one needs to answer my question, and other info I haven't provided.
Right now, TM doesn't see any oldest or latest backups
Are there settings I can change to get it to seamlessly pick up? I think I have seen some references in the user forums to a distinction made by Time Machine between backing up to a Time Capsule (wherein maybe TC is the only "easy" Network Attached Storage destination) with "sparsebundle" files and the way Time Machine backs up to direct, USB 2.0, direct-attached external hard drives (which is what my Time Capsule HD has now become). Or is that the problem at all?
Any one have suggestions?

Restore from Time Machine can't see new HD

I am upgrading my 250gb hard drive to a 320gb WD Scorpion (found here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136280) so I took out the old hard drive, put in the new one, booted from the leopard install disc, and went to Utilities>Disk Utility. I can see the new drive, I partitioned it using Mac OS Extended (journaled), and called it Macintosh HD. Then I went to Utilities> Restore System from Backup... I selected my external drive with my time machine back ups, and picked the latest one. On the Select a Destination screen, it says "Searching for disks" but never finds my new drive that disc utility can clearly see, so I can not restore my system.
PLEASE HELP! Why is it not recognizing the drive?

Hi jonmerlin
Welcome to Apple Discussions
Sounds like you have formatted it correctly, but have not set it to the correct Partition Map Scheme.
While booted from your Install disc, open Disk Utility and select the drive in the left hand column. Then click on the Partition tab and then the Options button, there you'll see several choices. The first "GUID Partition Table" is for Intel-based iMac's or "Apple Partition Map" for PowerPC-based Mac's. Select the choice that is appropriate for the Mac you have, then click OK. You should now be able to format the drive as Mac Os Extended.
Then follow the instruction in the Restore from your Time Machine backups article:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/15638.html
Dennis

Time Machine can't see my external hard drive

Time Machine won't show me any backup disk options other than "Set up Time Capsule". When I click on that, it searches for AirPort wireless which I do not have installed. How do I get Time Machine to see my external hard drive connected via Fire Wire? I went into Disk Utility and it showed the external drive was there. Backups had been working previously.

I don't know the answer but I have the same thing happen. I have two external drives I use for backup. Sometimes it can see one and sometimes another. Then sometimes it can't see either one. I will take one out for a while then plug it back in and then it may see it. Maybe it's a cable issue or something but I will be curious to hear what someone more knowledgeable says.

PPC Time Machine can't see Airdisk

I just got the latest Airport Extreme Base Station and connected a 1TB Seagate HD to it. I cannot get Time Machine on my G4 PowerBook (running 10.5.8) to see the HD over the wireless connection (or with an ethernet connection, for that matter). I can connect to the HD and can read/write to it, but although it is mounted on my PB, Time Machine cannot find it when it generates its list of available backup drives. I've tried the same process with our Intel Macs and their Time Machine has no problem finding the HD. Changing Firewall settings hasn't helped.
Any help would be really appreciated! Thanks

Thanks to both of you... My problem has been solved!! I tried the terminal command, but with no success. Then, I looked at the names of my PB, the AirDisk and the name of my base station. The PB was fine, just continuous letters. The AirDisk had an ampersand and spaces... both of which I changed to continuous standard characters. Finally, I got rid of the spaces and periods in the name of the base station (yes, I know, they shouldn't have been there in the first place... I got carried away with my new gadget and used abbreviations-with periods!:). Result of my changes... problem went away and Time Machine saw the mounted drive.
It's strange that the "non-standard" characters and spaces were ignored by Snow Leopard's Time Machine, but not Leopard's. Anyway, thanks again for your quick help!

Time machine-- can't see more than 2 weeks back.

I recently discovered that I can't see back more than 2 weeks on my Time Machine. Last month I could see back forever, relatively speaking. My WD 320 has roughly 32GB free space left, so all the data must be there, but I can't access it. Any ideas?

Did anything unusual happen lately, such as hardware repairs, a full restore, etc.? If so, Time Machine may have had to do a very large or even full backup, requiring lots of space, so it had to delete a bunch of old backups.
Although I haven't actually verified that you and Camelot have the right answer, i'm satisfied that you both have the correct answer. Unfortunately, i'm not familiar enough with using this user-discussion group to respond correctly (i credited Camelot with a 'helpful answer' instead of 'correct answer', and i can't find my response to him).
Time Machine - Troubleshooting
for a handy widget that will display the backup messages from your logs. Use it to navigate back through recent backups, and see if there's a very large backup listing a lot of deletions. If so, copy and post the messages here.
I haven't yet been able to download this widget-- server must be super busy. I'll keep trying, later.
Thanks,
pk

Time Machine Can Be Made to work with a Network Share

FYI I am just posting this here for the benefit of the community. The source of this info is: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=375047
As I write this, I am doing a Time Machine backup to a ReadyNAS NV+ afp mounted share. Here is a summary of what the thread above says you need to do. It worked for me.
Take any supported USB standalone drive and plug it in to an available USB port.
Use Disk Utility to format the drive (or partition on the drive) and name that partition to whatever you want your network share to be called. In my case, I called it "office-tm".
After you do this, open the Time Machine preference panel and select that new drive (in my case "office-tm") to be the Time Machine backup drive.
After Time Machine sets up the drive, it will start counting down before the next backup. Press the little X on the right side to cancel the backup.
Now open a terminal session and change directories to /Volumes/<drive> where in my case <drive> was office-tm (cd /Volumes/office-tm).
When you do a ls -a -l, you will see two important files. One starts with a period (.) and contains numbers after it. The other one is called .com.apple.timemachine.supported.
What you need to do is copy these two files to your network share. The trick is that you want your network share to have the same name as this drive you just prepared (again, in my case it was called office-tm). I first created a new share on my ReadyNAS+ called office-tm and set the quotas properly.
Then you need to copy the files. There are several ways to do this but the way I did it was that I temporarily mounted the network share at a different mount point in terminal just to get the files over. So for example, I did:
sudo mount -t afp afp://<ip.addr.of.share>/office-tm /Volumes/office-tm2
Then I copied the two files over (substitute your appropriate volume names):
cp /Volumes/office-tm/.00whateveryourfilenameis /Volumes/office-tm2/.
cp /Volumes/office-tm/.com.apple.timemachine.supported /Volumes/office-tm2/.
Turn off Time Machine so you can unmount.
Now you can unmount both the USB drive and the network share and then you remount the network share as the proper name. The same one that the USB drive was named so as far as Time Machine is concerned, the volume is still there. The two files are on the network share so all is fine and Time Machine can find the volume it expects.
Wait for Time Machine to start it's hourly backup and away you go.
PLEASE NOTE THIS DISCLAIMER - There is probably a good reason why Apple disabled this feature so you might want to think carefully before you rely on this hack published in the MacRumors forum to back up your Mac. I am using this for testing purposes only and I am still using traditional backup techniques for my "real" backup of my office machine. If you don't get good Time Machine backups and you have relied upon them for critical data, don't blame anyone but yourself.

Name: RAIDiator
Version: 3.01c1-p6
Date: Tue Dec 12 17:46:22 2006
Size: 46566912 bytes
Reason: Final 6.
We should probably start a new topic in networking on this. I am seeing some strangeness with afp shares as well.
I have most shares set up to allow access by both CIFS/SMB and AFP. If I use Sidebar and try to access the shares by AFP, it says it can't connect to the server. But the same shares via CIFS works fine. (I can click on the "Windows" server icon and connect.) But for any of these shares, I can manually connect with the normal Go > Connect to Server... method, specifying afp://<ip address> and that works fine.
In the case of the Time Machine share that is the subject of this post, I disabled CIFS and am only using AFP because I wanted to make sure I connected to the share only via AFP for Time Machine purposes.
BTW, I do not use USER or DOMAIN security mode in my case and my shares are set up as SHARE security mode.

Back up with time machine can't finish, because volume with sparse bundle already seems to be in use

I have problems with time machine. The message I got (in Dutch) is "Het schijfkopiebestand '/Volumes/Back up schijf/iMac van Gerard.sparsebundle' dat voor de reservekopie wordt gebruikt, is al in gebruik." The sparsebundle seems to be in use so Time machine can't finsh back up process. Any idea what I should do to fix this? I'm using time machine over a wireless netwerk, backing up on a NAS form Lacie, connected to the netwerk via airport extreme. Ik normally works well.
regards,
Gerard

http://pondini.org/TM/C12.html

Time Machine does not see my external HD

I would like to setup TM but it does not see my external HD, but I can see it on desktop in and finder. I can browse it. But time machine does not see it and forces me to use airport time capsule but I don't have it. Help please.

What format is the external drive in?
If it's formatted for Windows (either using the MBR partition table or using FAT/NTFS volumes) then Time Machine cannot back up to this disk.
The disk needs to be formatted as Mac OS X Extended using either the APM or GPT partition tables.
Life is complicated somewhat by the fact that the OS, in general, can read MBR/FAT drives, but they're not suitable for Time Machine (limitations in the disk formats prevent some of Time Machine's features from working).
You can check the current partition map/disk format in Disk Utility.app - just select the disk on the left and the information will be displayed below. If the disk is using MBR and/or FAT then you'd need to reformat the drive in order to use it with Time Machine.

Time machine can not access time capsule after upgrade from snow leopard to mountain lion

Two days ago I upgraded my 2009 17" MBP from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion. That evening my time capsule/time machine combination worked fine and did an incremental backup of about 12 gigabyte. Yesterday - only one day later - the time machine backup did not work anymore.
It appears that the system can not find the time capsule - even though it shows the remaining free space on the time capsule (so it did find it after all).
The message is always the same:
Time Machine can not complete the backup "Time Capsule"
The image of the backup volume "/Volumes/Data/Pauls MacBookPro.sparsebundle" is not accessable (Error -1).
I also can not delete the backup image on the time capsule since it is read-only. And I do not want to format the time caspsule yet since my wife's MBAir is also using the same time casule.
I tried out all kinds of suggestions (hard and soft resetting both the MBP and the TC, entering the password again, setting the TC up again) all to no avail. No backup is possible anymore.

Mr. Zooot wrote:
Time Machine can not complete the backup "Time Capsule"
The image of the backup volume "/Volumes/Data/Pauls MacBookPro.sparsebundle" is not accessable (Error -1).
I also can not delete the backup image on the time capsule since it is read-only.
Sounds like you got this message earlier:
If so, see #C13 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
Offhand, I don't recall anyone not being able to delete one via the Finder (but most were only backing-up one Mac, so just erased the disk).
You may have to wait for that message to appear again (24 hours later), or you might try holding Alt/Option with the TM icon in the menubar, and select Verify Backups if it will let you.

Time Machine can't find external drive after installing Lion

Time Machine can't find external drive after installing Lion. I have a Laice 1 terabyte external drive that worked fine with Snow Leopard and now no show ... tried connecting it to front port and Mac Pro can't see it. Also lost Office,Quicken, and Final Cut Pro says: " You can't open application because Power PC apps are no longer supported" this is Not a good surprise!

Does the drive work when just directly connected? If so, have you prepped the drive?
Extended Hard Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. If you need to reformat your startup volume, then you must boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger or Leopard.)
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Set the number of partitions from the dropdown menu (use 1 partition unless you wish to make more.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (only required for Intel Macs) then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the volume(s) mount on the Desktop.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.

Time Machine can't use the disk image because it can't be written to.

Time Machine can't use the disk image because it can't be written to. help!

VictorSMiller wrote:
I just started getting the same message. I'm using a Western Digital My Book 3TB disk. Normally I have the backups done with the disk attached to Airport Extreme.
I hate to have to tell you this, but backing-up that way is unreliable and not supported by Apple. See: Using Time Machine with an Airport Extreme Air Disk.
Backup failed with error: The target disk image volume is read-only.
Most likely, you got this message before all this started:
What that doesn't explicity say is, the backups failed the verification. When that happens, Time Machine marks the sparse bundle as damaged and won't back up to it anymore (even if Repair Disk can't find the problem). See #C13 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting for details.

Time Machine will not see USB drive attaced to AEBS

I am having some difficulty getting Time Machine to see a USB attached Lacie drive. I can get it to mount through the finder, but Time Machine will not see it. It also works fine through a direct firewire connection. I have all of the current updates. Any help is appreciated.

have you tried formatting the drive, by selecting the disk or volume and using extended (journal). If the drive use to be a PC drive, you need to also give it a new index table. To give it a new table, you got to go to the partition section and use the option button. There will be 3 types, the GUID table is for intel macs, the 2nd selection is for PPC macs, and the third is for Window/Dos. You want to use to GUID table. After the table is set, format the disk using extended (journal).

Time Machine can't see volume

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