Time Machine freezes at onset of first backup

Question

I took one of my external Lace disk drives (250 MB - with 200+ MB available) and designated it as the target drive for Time Machine. I've used this drive for over a year with no issues. Time Machine starts up, does its calculations and starts its initial backup. There is a Backups.backupdb folder created on the drive. In that folder another folder is created bearing the name of my system and within that folder there's a time stamped file (i.e., 2007-10-31-150019.InProgress) of the Kind "package". The file gets to a nominal 38.8 MB in size and that's it. I let this sit for over an hour with no progress. Attempting to stop the back up in the Time Machine System Preferences window results in a "Stopping..." message with the application just spinning its wheels. Any suggestions? Log files I can look at? Etc? Thanks!

Answer 1

I am not sure what to make of this, but it appears that Time Machine is probably running into a locked file or something. I have had my backup running just fine all day, but it's currently frozen as I type this, trying to backup 20.5 MB or so of changes on my main drive.
I have no idea how to troubleshoot this. I can see in the Console messages that Backupd started, but just gets stuck (no error) in the middle. Like so:
10/31/07 11:48:10 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[689] Backup requested by automatic scheduler
10/31/07 11:48:10 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[689] Starting standard backup
10/31/07 11:48:17 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[689] Backing up to: /Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb
10/31/07 11:48:19 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[689] No pre-backup thinning needed: 200.0 MB requested (including padding), 351.60 GB available
... and that's it. No further messages.
What it OUGHT to look like (when working):
10/31/07 10:48:10 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[608] Starting standard backup
10/31/07 10:48:17 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[608] Backing up to: /Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb
10/31/07 10:48:18 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[608] No pre-backup thinning needed: 240.3 MB requested (including padding), 351.68 GB available
10/31/07 10:48:44 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[608] Copied 2565 files (72.3 MB) from volume Kidd.
10/31/07 10:48:45 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[608] No pre-backup thinning needed: 188.7 MB requested (including padding), 351.60 GB available
10/31/07 10:48:47 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[608] Copied 1172 files (90 KB) from volume Kidd.
10/31/07 10:48:49 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[608] Starting post-backup thinning
10/31/07 10:48:49 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[608] No post-back up thinning needed: no expired backups exist
10/31/07 10:48:49 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[608] Backup completed successfully.
When this occurs, I cannot stop the backup from the UI. I can kill backupd the 'hard way' with Activity Monitor and an Administrator force quit, but afterwards Time Machine will not backup again without more drastic measures (minimum reboot).
I am curious if the condition will eventually fix itself once the file becomes unlocked, but I dunno if it will.