Time Machine has stalled

I am backing up my Mtn. Lion MacBook Pro to a Drobo connected via Firewire to my Snow Leopard server. I am backing up over WiFi.
The backup failed a few days ago. I have tried mount the backup. I repaired the backup by connecting the Drobo directly to my MBP. The Time Machine backup started again, but it stalls in the KB to low MB range of 6.5GB. Does anyone have any suggestions as to why?
Thanks in advance for the help.

No, that's not normal at all. What model of the MBP do you have? How is the external drive connected (USB 2, USB 3, Firewire 400 or 800, etc.)? Answer those questions and also check out these Time Machine FAQs.
Regards,
Clinton

Similar Messages

Time machine has stopped backing up to my Western Digital Network Drive

I have a WD 1TB World Edition drive which pretty much worked plug 'n' play when I bought it in early Jan backing up with with Time Machine instead of the bundled software. I've had a few troubles backing up, but largely due to router problems. Time machine has worked great with the drive, as promised.
Until a few days ago, when it stopped backing up altogether. The usual backup icon stopped appearing on the desktop and it came up with error message saying the backup file cannot mount or something like that. Strangely, the shared folders on the drive still show up and I can access all the mp3 files, etc I have loaded up. So, I checked the router, cabling to the drive, rebooted the drive, resetted the drive and checked the settings using MyBookWorld. This stopped the error message showing when I tried to backup and the backup icon now shows on the desktop again. But it won't backup !!! It just stalls and in Time Machine says its configuring without doing anything. I have tried hooking up to the drive directly, still no joy.
I'm now at the end of my tether. Does anyone have any ideas? I have asked WD support and they were next to useless. Thanks !

Hi, and welcome to the forums.
Time Machine does not back up reliably, if at all, to most network drives, except Time Capsules or a shared drive on another Mac running Leopard or Snow Leopard on the same local network.
Here's the criteria they must meet: Disks that can be used with Time Machine. And be careful here: just because some 3rd-party hardware claims to support Time Machine doesn't necessarily mean that Apple supports it, or that it will work in all circumstances.
We've seen a number of problems reported with that drive. Have you downloaded the firmware update that's supposed to make it work?
with error message saying the backup file cannot mount or something like that.
The exact message might help.
Time Machine says its configuring
Is the word "configuring" or is it "Calculating changes"? "Configuring" sounds more like a message from WD, or perhaps your router, than one coming from Time Machine.
Click here to download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window. Navigate to the backup in question, then copy and post all the messages for that run here.
You might also try to Repair the backups. I don't know exactly how you'd get to them on a NAS, but try the procedure for a Time Capsule in #A5 of the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.

New unibody macbook pro time machine backup stalling/stalls

I have been using time machine to back up my Macbook Pro 17 (First Gen), I have 2 external Western Digital Drives connected via USB in a RAID (Striped) Configuration. Everything has worked fine for months and the backups are quite snappy...
I just changed to a NEW Unibody Macbook Pro 17 and formatted the drives, set up the RAID configuration again from fresh in disk utility and reset Time Machine and said OK when it requested to use the drive for backups.
The process gets some way into backing up... sometimes 7GB, 13GB, 17GB even 70GB and then just stops. The hard drives(at least one of them anyway i cant tell exactly) spin down and the file count in Time Machine window just stops. There is no error message and the window just stays there saying its backing up but there is no external HD activity. I have to cancel the backup (which sometimes - but not always - causes everything to stall until i unplug the drives by whipping the USB cable out). Everything then works fine i dont need to restart and it just brings up an error message saying that Time Machine failed to backup...
Any ideas??
I do have antivirus software installed (VirusScan) but i have had that on my previous machine aswell so it cant be that...

I have a MacBook C2Duo (black 2008) customer who has upgraded to 10.5.7 with a new internal and external hard disk and a fresh install of the OS. After doing this, Time Machine constantly stalled at 12.55 GB when backing up to an external disk (USB2). After a lot of reading on the net, I think the problem marks the re-emergence of an old bug where the mdworker task used by Spotlight to index drives is crashing and starting to take up to 99% of the CPUs. At this point, TM simply does not have enough CPU time to work and crawls almost to a halt.
I messed around for a while with Activity Monitor watching the mdworker crash and it is very predictable. Time Machine buddy does not pick it up because of course TM is still working albeit at a snail's pace.
Since mdworker is very associated with Spotlight, I tried setting Spotlight to not index any folderssame problem.
Finally, I set the TM destination drive to be a Private drive in the Spotlight Preferences and it finished without an mdworker crash.
It might be a temporary workaround or it might be coincidence that TM worked this time, so YMMV and Apple should look at this too.

Time Machine Restore Stalled

I had a failure of a 160 Gig hard drive on my 17" G4 Powerbook 1.67Ghz (2 gig ram, running OS 10.5.5). I bought a Western Digital 250Gig Hard Drive to replace the bad drive. I have an ongoing back up from Time Machine. After installing the new HD I inserted the OS 10.5 DVD and asked it to RESTORE from Time Machine. The process began without a hitch.
When I left last evening I was at about 63% complete and the display said I still needed about 24 hours to complete the RESTORE process
It is now the morning of day three of the restore process.
I arrived this morning to a black screen (as expected). I touched the keyboard to awaken the machine's display as I had over the past two days ... to see the restore processes progress ... nothing happened. The light (next to the latch was burning bright. I touched "enter", I touched "return". Nothing. The display would not come to life. I waited.
After another ten minutes, still nothing after repeated attempts to awake the machine via typical means. So then I touched the "power" button for about a half second (not long enough to shut the machine down) and the display came to life. I was relieved, but only for a moment.
The display showed 67.7% restored. Only a few percentages above 12 hours ago. Very strange. I thought, "I'll check the log to see if there is any indication of why the slow process has slowed down even more.
No cursor is visible. No track pad input in noted o the screen. Crap!
Now every 5 minutes or so the display goes dark (as I would expect) but it will only wake up when touch the power button, and still no cursor or mouse visible.
Now after an hour of watching the screen, re-awakening the screen, and watching for progress ... I'm still at 67.7% restored and no indication of trackpad activity or mouse on the screen.
I have googled "Time Machine Restore Stalled". No helpful posting under that search.
Any ideas? Feel free to forward this discussion anywhere you think would be helpful.

One last piece.
I connected an external USB mouse. It was immediately recognized. I checked the Installer Log. Nothing looks strange.
Time Machine is still locked at 67.7% even now after another 5 hours of waiting.
Should I stop the RESTORE process and begin the three day process again?

After upgrading to 10.7.2 Time Machine has failed

Hi everybody,
After upgrading to Lion 10.7.2 Time Machine has failed and won't mount the Time Machine drive.
I use a WD My Book Studio LX for my Time machine and also have a smaller WD My Book daisy chained through it in to the iMac with 2 partitions.
Both of the partitions on the My Book are loading fine and the Studio LX Drive is on and functioning ... the light is blinking away like a good'un ... but the drive won't mount on to the Desktop.
Has anyone else experienced this or have any possible solutions for it?
Thanks
Simon

I znever realized that you need to add firmware updates, since Apple sells this but doesn't provide any instruction or information on use. I had my WD external since about May and just looked into adding necessary firmware. This was my second drive and was not aware of this necessary upgrade. If failed to recognize my drive so I contacted Westen Digital and after a series of emails they said sorry but Lion is not supported! I was dumbfounded and in disbelief. They tried to
Get me to upgrade to another model but didn't tell me about any cost. I called the Apple store where I purchased it and talked to. Manager who brought on the phone a genius. He told me he has one and it does work with Lion! He walked me through adding the firmware and there you go Apple knew more than the Tech support at WD! I am hoping someone at Apple will read this and contact WD management and tech support to get their act together.
Regards,
Barry

HT3275 My Time Machine has stopped backing up and now it errors out everytime I make another attempt.

My Time Machine has stopped working and now errors out everytime I try to re-connect ?

What is the error.. ??
We cannot help much without details.
Look at the pondini troubleshooting.
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
The vast majority of issues are C12 or C17.. especially with ML.. which rather than fixing issues left over from Lion exacerbated them.

Time Machine has left me in the past!

I recently had a mac genius re-install my OS due to poor performance and too many glitches to name them all. I was confident in my time machine back-ups since I could see the clock moving everyday on my tool bar. After my OS was re-installed, I connected to my external hard drive and can only see files from November. Nothing else. Am I just ******** or is there something I'm doing wrong? I have only had a few hiccups in my 10+ years using a mac but they have been huge ones. Does anyone out there have a solution to this or has it happened to anyone else? Time machine has left me in the past, November 07 to be exact and I need to be in May 08! Someone please help!!!!

Double-click the drive icon, then double click the "Backups.backupdb" folder. Double-click your old computer's name, and scroll down to the bottom, and look at the most recent date. That most recent date is the most recent TM has.
Good luck!
P.S. Welcome to Discussions!

My Time machine has stopped backing up saying there are some read only files.

My Time machine has stopped backing up and says that ther are some read only files preventing this. What steps do I need to take to fix it?

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an 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.
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left.
Enter the word "Starting" (without the quotes) in the String Matching text field. You should now see log messages with the words "Starting * backup," where * represents any of the words "automatic," "manual," or "standard." Note the timestamp of the last such message. Clear the text field and scroll back in the log to that time. Post the messages timestamped from then until the end of the backup, or the end of the log if that's not clear.
Post the log text, please, not a screenshot. If there are runs of repeated messages, post only one example of each. Don't post many repetitions of the same message.
When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into a message.
Some personal information, such as the names of your files, may be included — edit that out, too, but don’t remove the context.

Time machine has created a new sparse bundle

I have booted my new Macbook from my time machine back up. Time machine has created a new sparse bundle and I cannot access the previous backups. Is there any way to make time machine to use the previous sparse bundle? Thanks, Karl

Use the old backups to continue backups or use them for migration etc..
If you have a new Mac then continuing to use the same backup is not recommended..
Info you can see here..
B5 and B6 http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
I do not think it is good idea.. however you can access the old backup to get files if you need them.
See Q17 here.
http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html

Time machine has deleted/hidden *all* my backups.

At the moment I'm using two 1TB external hard drives connected to my mac, one as storage and one just for time machine. Yesterday the storage drive died on me, so I replaced it with another 1TB drive.
Time machine has been backing up everything on the main computer and the storage drive for several months now so I thought it would be an easy fix, just restore what was lost from the storage drive and I'm set.
After connecting and formatting the new external hard drive I tried restoring the lost data but couldn't figure out a way to have it restore from time machine directly to the new drive. Instead, I went into the Backups.backupdb folder on the time machine drive, found the most recent backup of the files I needed from Feb 9th and just dragged and dropped it into the new drive.
It comprised of some 550GB of data, so I left it copying overnight. Checking on it this morning, it seems that a little less than half of the data has been copied across and what's worse - time machine no longer shows any backups made before this morning. Checking in the drive contents, it seems that the backup folders no longer exist either.
Now, I don't actually think the data has gone missing since the time machine drive is still showing that it has some 700GB of data still on it, it's just not viewable for some reason.
I've been through Disk Utility to see if the drive needs repairing, but I'm being told that there's no problem with it. I've also checked to see if the data has somehow found its way into the trash can, but it's not there either.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to what happened and how to recover my lost backups?

pheadlessg wrote:
Thanks for that. It's backing up again now but the old backups are still missing.
I have no idea what went wrong with the drag and drop. It should have copied your data (likely with a zillion permission problems), but shouldn't have affected the TM data. There might be something in your logs, but that probably won't help now.
Your old backups are probably hosed (pardon the technical term <grin>).
You might be able to give yourself read rights to the .Trashes folder, and see if there's anything in it, but I doubt you'll see anything.
To do so, select it, then +Get Info.+
Click the padlock at the bottom of the pane, then enter your Administrator's password.
Then click the plus sign at the bottom; you should get a selection screen for yourself. Click it.
That should give you read rights.
A very long shot, but worth a try.
Most likely, you're going to end up erasing the drive/partition and starting over.

Time machine has deleted all old backups

Hi, I'm desperate! time machine has all the old backups deleted on my time capsule, only today's early still a backup available. It was still 1TB space on the hard disk. What did I do wrong? There was no warning!

Time Machine will not delete your old backups unless it starts to run out of space on the hard drive......or.....your backups have become corrupted and Time Machine cannot repair them.
In the latter case, a message like this will appear on your screen:
Do you recall seeing this message recently?

Time Machine Has All My Music, Do I Need My CDs Anymore?

Silly question, perhaps. Time Machine has ALL my music from my CDs and that music which I have downloaded. Now, I only use my iTunes for listening to music - my CDs are all packed away. So, do I really need my CDs anymore or can I sell them, give them away? If you house catches fire, the CDs are gone anyway and I'm grabbing the Time Capsule . . .
~ Anna

Hi, and welcome to the forums.
Unless you also have at least one set of backups off-site, keep them (in your safe deposit box, workplace, relative's house, or other secure place).
I hate to even suggest the possibility, but just the other day someone posted where his Mac and external HD containing his backups were stolen.
You can also lose both your originals and backups in cases of fire, flood, or direct lightning strike on your power lines.
See #27 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum) for some suggestions.

Time Machine has stopped making backups

Time Machine has worked fine for me fore many months, the backup disk being a 1 TB external firewire drive.
But now Time Machine will not make a backup. I keep getting the same error message: "Time Machine Error. This backup is too large for the backup volume. The backup requires 88.7 GB but only 58.5 are available."
I thought Time Machine just deleted the oldest files on the drive to make the room it needs for continued backups. So why isn't it doing that now? How do I get it to go back to doing that?
Thanks for any help!
Tom

Tom Baker1 wrote:
My Time Machine backup disk is an external 1 TB firewire drive with only one partition, dedicated entirely to TM, and it backs up the two internal drives in my G5. One of these two internal drives has about 600 GB of data on it and the other about 400, so together they would be enough to fill the external Time Machine backup drive.
Yes, that's too small. Our "rule of thumb" is, TM needs 2-3 times the space of the data it's backing up. See #1 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
Now I have discovered that there is something wrong with the Time Machine backups as well. I decided to go into TM to see just how far back in time the backups go, but it will only allow me to go back as far as yesterday. It acts as though there are no backups older than yesterday afternoon.
That's probably correct; your TM disk is too small, and there's just not room for more. Here's the situation: A full backup has nearly filled the disk; something fairly large has been added or changed, and there just isn't room for it, in addition to the full backup.
The 88.7 GB it's requesting means it's trying to back up about 74 GB (it adds 20% for workspace, etc., on the TM disk).
This is getting stranger all the time. At this point should I just give up trying to fix the situation, erase the backup drive, and start all over again?
That probably won't help much, if at all. To confirm what's going on, Click here to download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window. Navigate to the last backup attempt, then copy and post all the messages for that run here.
You need to do one of the following:
Get a larger drive, at least 2 TB.
Get an additional drive; use one for TM backups of one of your internal HDs, the other for a different app to back-up the other internal HD.
Exclude a lot of stuff from Time Machine (at least 300 GB).
Use a different app, such as CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper, to back up your internals to separate partitions on the 1 TB drive. These will be exact copies only; no previous copies of things you've changed or deleted.

Time Machine has locked my external drive. HELP

Time Machine hosed me again. After several unsuccessful attempts to backup on my PowerMac G5 dual 2.33 Ghz, I was able to complete my first full backup to an external 2 gig DROBO (USB 2.0 interface). It took 20 hours to do 180 gigs.
Now I have just discovered that Time Machine has made that external drive READ-ONLY! I cannot write to the drive and neither can Time Machine.
Does anybody know what is up and how to fix this short of using root UNIX shell which terrifies me. I just want to take it off and cut my losses, but the drive also has a ton of music on it that iTunes uses.

Okay Jeffery, I think I've found the solution, especially if you are seeing the "Unknown" user in your Get Info window's Sharing & Permissions setting for your drobo.
I had written earlier about my work-around for getting my drobo to work right after getting the "read-only" error from Time Machine. But unfortunately it was a temporary and temperamental fix. There were times then I had to eject the disk and launch Disk Utility to run a repair on the disk which would take more than half an hour on my drobo. But all the while my permissions had this "Unknown" user. Well I decided to "Go UNIX" and see if I could fix this problem once and for all.
I opened up Terminal and typed "*ls -la /Volumes*". This gives me a directory listing of my mounted drive volumes. I noticed that all of my drives, internal, external, USB and FireWire, all had "root" as the user and "admin" as the group, _EXCEPT for my drobo!_ So I forced it to conform by changing it manually by typing "*sudo chown root:admin /Volumes/Drobo\ Backup\ HD/*".
sudo = temporarily enables root mode by asking for your password before executing.
chown = changes ownership to...
root:admin = "root" is the user and "admin" is the group.
*/Volumes/Drobo\ Backup\ HD/* = My drobo drive is named "*Drobo Backup HD*", but UNIX sees spaces as command separators, so you have to use the "\ " to signify spaces within a name.
After doing this over a week ago, _I have not had any other problems_ with using my drobo as a backup drive. It has never come up with the "read-only" error in Time Machine, the Sharing & Permissions setting do not have any "Unknown" users or groups, I don't even need to wait for my drobo before logging in like I did in the past. I just boot my Mac and everything with my drobo and Time Machine just works... No problems!
It seems to be permanently fixed for me, so if you are willing to try this solution, I'm sure it would work for you. If UNIX terrifies you too much, and you do not trust yourself editing the commands above, let me know the name of your drobo drive on your desktop and I will post a message with the EXACT UNIX commands customized for just for you, so all you have to do is copy and paste them into your Terminal window to do it. But like I said, I've done this over a week ago and I not had one single problem.

Time Machine has never worked

OS 10.7.5
iMac
Backing up to Toshiba 1.5 TB Trive
Time Machine has only backed up a full back up and will not backup regularly. I have searched everywhere. Apple used to make things that just work. This does not "just work". Here's the error I get:
"Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup folder."
Any info would be appreciated!
thanks

Forget TimeMachine and consider using bootable clones.
1: New external powered drive
2: Use Disk Utility to Erase with Zero Security option (move slider one spot over) and click Erase, this will map of potential bad sectors.
3: Set Partition: 1, Option GUID, Format: OS X Ext J and give it a name like MacintoshHD
4: Download and install Carbon Copy Cloner, clone the OS X boot drive to the external drive and that's it.
5: Hold option/alt key on a wired or built in keyboard while booting and select the clone to boot from.
6: CCC will save the saved changes when you update the clone, however you can select the option to maintain a pure clone also.
Most commonly used backup methods

Time Machine has stalled

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