Time Machine, just doesn't stop running on my machine

I have three internal SATA drives, one of which is dedicated to Time Machine backups, the initial backup seemed to go okay, but now when Time machine runs, it never stops, the little syncing arrows go round and round in the side, and no amount of clicking or stopping it will bring it to an end. Meaning I need to restart to get the thing to stop the hard drive clicking away.
Very annoying, anyone have any ideas, other than Time Machine being a big let down?

Thanks for all the help, I don't really feel like do another huge update to try and fix something I'm not actually that sure about, the more and more I think about it, the less and less I think I'll use Time Machine, I've already stopped using Spaces and CoverFlow, and I think like Dashboard on 10.4, I'll probably shelf Time Machine for the time being.
At least Quick Look is decent.

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Time Machine Just Doesn't Work Anymore

I was a happy Time Machine (with Time Capsule) user for months. But it just doesn't work anymore. It takes longer than an hour to do every hourly backup so it is backing up 24 hours a day. It finds hundreds of thousands of files changed every hour and tries to back them up. Finders says only tens of files have been modified all of today. I have tried rebuilding my spotlight indexes, repairing my Time Capsule with Disk Utility and starting over with a brand new backup. But it just backs up hundreds of thousands of files every hour. So I am turning off Time capsule since it is clearly broken. If anyone has any suggestions at all I would welcome them.

Marcia,
Consider the following, it might give you some ideas:
Time Machine performs backups at the file level. If a single bit in a large file is changed, the WHOLE file is backed up again. This is a problem for programs that save data to monolithic virtual disk files that are modified frequently. These include Parallels, VMware Fusion, Aperture vaults, or the databases that Entourage and Thunderbird create. These should be excluded from backup using the Time Machine Preference Exclusion list. You will, however, need to backup these files manually to another external disk.
One poster observed regarding Photoshop: “If you find yourself working with large files, you may discover that TM is suddenly backing up your scratch disk's temp files. This is useless, find out how to exclude these (I'm not actually sure here). Alternatively, turn off TM whilst you work in Photoshop.” (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1209412)
If you do a lot of movie editing, unless these files are excluded, expect Time Machine to treat revised versions of a single movie as entirely new files.
If you frequently download software or video files that you only expect to keep for a short time, consider excluding the folder these are stored in from Time Machine backups.
If you have recently created a new disk image or burned a DVD, Time Machine will target these files for backup unless they are deleted or excluded from backup.
Installing new software, upgrading existing software, or updating Mac OS X system software can created major changes in the structure of your directories. Time Machine will backup every file that has changed since the installation.
Files or folders that are simply moved or renamed are counted as NEW files or folders. If you rename any file or folder, Time Machine will back up the ENTIRE file or folder again no matter how big or small it is.
George Schreyer describes this behavior: “If you should want to do some massive rearrangement of your disk, Time Machine will interpret the rearranged files as new files and back them up again in their new locations. Just renaming a folder will cause this to happen. This is OK if you've got lots of room on your backup disk. Eventually, Time Machine will thin those backups and the space consumed will be recovered. However, if you really want recover the space in the backup volume immediately, you can. To do this, bring a Finder window to the front and then click the Time Machine icon on the dock. This will activate the Time Machine user interface. Navigate back in time to where the old stuff exists and select it. Then pull down the "action" menu (the gear thing) and select "delete all backups" and the older stuff vanishes.” (http://www.girr.org/mac_stuff/backups.html)
*TechTool Pro Directory Protection*
This disk utility feature creates backup copies of your system directories. Obviously these directories are changing all the time. So, depending on how it is configured, these backup files will be changing as well which is interpreted by Time Machine as new data to backup. Excluding the folder these backups are stored in will eliminate this effect.
*Backups WAY Too Large*
If an initial full backup or subsequent incremental backup is tens or hundreds of Gigs larger than expected, check to see that all unwanted external hard disks are still excluded from Time Machine backups.
This includes the Time Machine backup drive ITSELF. Normally, Time Machine is set to exclude itself by default. But on rare occasions it can forget. When your backup begins, Time Machine mounts the backup on your desktop. (For Time Capsule users it appears as a white drive icon labeled something like “Backup of (your computer)”.) If, while it is mounted, it does not show up in the Time Machine Prefs “Do not back up” list, then Time Machine will attempt to back ITSELF up. If it is not listed while the drive is mounted, then you need to add it to the list.
*FileVault / Boot Camp / iDisk Syncing*
Note: Leopard has changed the way it deals with FileVault disk images, so it is not necessary to exclude your Home folder if you have FileVault activated. Additionally, Time Machine ignores Boot Camp partitions as the manner in which they are formatted is incompatible. Finally, if you have your iDisk Synced to your desktop, it is not necessary to exclude the disk image file it creates as that has been changed to a sparsebundle as well in Leopard.
Let us know if any of this helps.
Cheers!

Media Encoder stops encoding but doesn't stop running!

What I mean by this is,
I set up a bunch of files to begin encoding into various different forms, carefully check the settings and hit the go/run/play button and things kick off nicely.
Using the Dynamic Link option to encode right out of Premiere Pro CC project sequences.
Trouble is that occasionally I will return to the machine to see that the current file is still encoding and it's taking way longer than expected. On closer look though, the thumbnail is not moving and the remaing time is just slowly going up and up.
AME shows that all is well and it seems to be working but actually nothing is happening and I have to stop the process, reload the files and start all over again!
Time is precious right now and I can't trust AME to do the job!
Anyone else had this experience?
Formats I am encoding into: H.264 for BluRay; H.264 for Web; Mpeg2 for DVD. Use a mix of VBR 2-pass for the physical discs and CBR for the web (as this is what Vimeo recommend). Shorter files of about 15-20mins or less seem to have more luck than any file over 30mins.
Any help greatlly appreciated.

Hi Thomas,
Thanks for your reply.
It doesn't appear to be the problem though. The encode I have running at the moment has been going for the last 13 hours and in the last two hasn't once got any further along!
Current elapsed time for a 30 minute film going to MPG2 is 13 hours and 18 minutes! Seems a touch excessive for just muxing!
Any other ideas? Would be really grateful for any advice as Adobe Media Encoder is becoming very unreliable and I have tonnes of encoding to do!
Many thanks

Need Help - It just won't stop running

I'm converting a PowerPoint file 22 slides, 1.07 MB. It never completes the conversion. I left it for 42 minutes and finally gave up.
I need it for a presentation and I'm in a serious time crunch.
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Alice

Hi Alice,
I've sent it along, but haven't received a response yet. I'm sorry about that, and will let you know just as soon as I do.
As you mentioned this is an urgent business need, and there is no guarantee we'll be able to resolve it, I'm going to suggest you try this relatively inexpensive option:
http://createpdf.adobe.com/
Thanks you for your patience with us!
Michelle

Firefox 5 doesn't stop running when closed

I'm running win7 x64 Home Premium and after closing Firefox 5 it still runs and has to be shut down by the Task Manager. It happened every time so I reverted back to Firefox 4.

See "Hang at exit":
* http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_hangs
* https://support.mozilla.com/kb/Firefox+hangs

My code is running on machine A but want to run nodemanager on machine B.

Consider I am on machine A and want to start nodemanager on the same machine using WLST. For this I can write code like given below.
import org.python.util.InteractiveInterpreter;
import weblogic.management.scripting.utils.WLSTInterpreter;
public class StartAdminAndNodeManager {
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But if I want to start node manager which is on machine B and my code is running on machine A then what should I do.
Is there any command like.
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the only solution coming to my (weak) mind is using SHH to execute a startNodeManager.sh command remotely
see http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/sshexec.html for inspiration
there are open source SSH libraries you can incorporate in your Java program
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i've been charging my battery for almost 2 days, but it just doesn't stop anymore....
usually it told "charged" and stopped, but it wont anymore

Did you unplug it? I know it sounds stupid and not very helpful but maybe it's just a bug that doesn't show it's done charging. I know sometimes for me I take it off of the charger while it says charging and when I plug it back it says charged.

Time machine just stops.

I upgraded to leopard a few days ago, and have been trying to get time machine working. Whenever I try to back up, it goes until about 13 or 14 GB have been copied, and then stops suddenly. Sometimes it says that the latest back up failed due to an unnamed error, but usually it just doesn't list any. I tried what the sight says to do, re-partitioning the drive so it uses GUID instead of the other one it came with. I have also tried with two different drives, a Toshiba External USB 250GB, and a DiskGO Edge External USB 160GB, and they both fail at about the same point. To be clear, I have the drives set up according to this article, TS1550. I spent a lot of money on these drives, I would like at least one of them to work as the back up drive. One last thing, the DiskGo was recommended by a certified Mac distributor.

Welcome to Discussions.
Double check the partitioning scheme in Disk Utility as sometimes the formatting doesn't "take". Click on the upper icon for your drive. At the bottom right of the window "Partition Map Scheme :" should be GUID. If it isn't try following the directions for formatting this article

In Lion, Time Machine seems to be perpetually running - and running slowly

Up through Snow Leopard, Time Machine did its incremental backup every hour quickly and stopped.
Since upgrading to Lion back in July, Time Machine seems be be running almost all the time - and very very very slowly. There doesn't seem to be any exessive Spotlight indexing going on anymore. That was long ago. So I don't think that's it.
Preparing for backup takes a long time. It take hours to eke through the backup itself, even if there weren't many changes, and finishing backup takes a long time.
I would say each backup, no matter how small, takes more than three hours.
At these forums there seems to be lots of discussion threads about this, and help pages linked to, but the suggested solutions seem to be a jumble, with some people saying they worked and many saying it didn't.
I did do a disk repair on the Time Machine volume just in case. And there is nothing else on that drive except for Time Machine backups. The drive is directly connected to my iMac (3.06 GHz Dual Core Duo, 12 GB RAM). While not vital, I'd rather not reformat the drive and lost all my old backups, which go back over a year. If I knew for sure that was the solution I'd do it. But in the discussions here there are people who seem to have tried that and reported back that it didn't help.
Right now it says it's backing up 3.5 MB of 132.9 MB - and taking forever to do it.
I know that since the last backup I haven't changed anywhere near 132.9 MB of data. Unless Lion is making massive behind-the-scene changes.
Something definitely seems to be wrong with Time Machine in Lion.
Have there been any additional thoughts on this? Is Time Machine just buggy in Lion?
Thanks,
doug

I feel ya, dawg, as they say. Right now I'm running a backup that has taken 43 minutes thus far. On an idle machine, it backed up 29.8 MB (17,949 files) followed by 19.5 MB (17,256 files). 12 min. for the first batch, 11 min., for the second. 13 min. of "Finishing backup" until it transitioned to "Cleaning up," which just completed after 12 min. Each backup typically goes 70–90 minutes. So backups are running for 65% – 80% of the time, if I leave TM running. I don't; instead, I turn on backups before going to bed, and turn them off on the first happy occasion when I notice that TM is idle.
TM backups have been behaving this way for about 2 months. Before that they were as speedy as Snow Leopard, for a couple of weeks. Before that they were taking 3 hours with the dreaded "Waiting for index to be ready" messge repeating for on hour or more. I fixed this latter problem by "trying everything" from http://pondini.org/TM/D2.html (a fine resource but, as you say, all over the map as all of the suggestions are).
TM in Lion is hosed. It's as simple as that.

HT1657 after renting a move and starting viewing I can not stop it and come back to in within the time frame. If i stop it it goes away not able to find it. Just like I did not rent it at all.

after renting a move and starting viewing I can not stop it and come back to in within the time frame. If i stop it it goes away not able to find it. Just like I did not rent it at all.

Hi,
We have rolled out a fix for this issue.
Please log off and log back in to your machine and the issue should be resolved automatically. In case that does not work, please manually run the msi installer posted here (may require reboot).
For details, please refer to the KB article here: Multiple RunOnce keys created 11.0.10 and 10.1.13 Acrobat | Reader
Please let us know if you still face any issues.
Thanks,
Ashu Mittal

HT2284 My Time Capsule just stopped working.

Thank you in advance for any help. My Time Capsule just stopped working and I do not get the 'Connection Failed' error message as the Time Capsule is not showing up in the finder window. The light continues to flash amber on the Time Capsule. I am using it with my iMac running Lion. Any help will be really appreciated.

This is just typical Lion.. reboot the TC.. if that doesn't work.. reboot the whole network from fully off.. in order.. modem.. router/TC.. clients. 2min gap between each.
If still has issues.. press reset on the TC and redo it.
Download a utility that has tool properties..
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1482
Just ignore the toyland version in Lion.
Next time it happens go to disk page in the utility and hit disconnect all users..
C12 and C17 can suggest some other things.
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html

Time Machine UI doesn't display previous backups

Hi!
My Time Machine is running to a mirror disk and backing up files regularly. I can see them in the finder when I go to the backup disk. But when I "Enter" time machine, it doesn't recognize and show the files. Just "Now" and some time ago before I switched out hard drives.
Background: This occurred when I swapped in new drives for the old ones and named them the same as the old ones were named. Basically, I upgraded from 1TB drives to 2TB drives and now have this issue.

Thanks, Pondini.
I don't see any drives in grey. They are in black but in the UI I see "Now" and Oct. 23rd with nothing in between even though Time Machine is backing up every hour and I can see the backups by navigating to the backup drive in the Finder. So Finder shows there are backups, Time Machine menu and sys prefs pane says it's backing up, but the app doesn't find and display the backups.
Ideas?

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My MacBook Pro 13" won't turn on 90% of the time I try to get it running, and when it does turn on, even on a charger, it shuts down if I stop using it for 2+ seconds and it won't turn back on. Should I replace the battery? It doesn't hold a charge either...

EmadJamal,
the battery won’t melt because of long connection to the AC charger, although that has the potential of reducing the battery’s life.
Do you have access to a second 60 W AC charger to test with your MacBook Pro, or access to a second 13-inch MacBook Pro against which your AC charger could be tested?

Have downloaded firefox update 3 times and it doesn't run

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I tunes won't open. No warning message, just the first terms agreement opens and when i agree itunes stopes running. I just wiped and reinstalled everything including windows. I updated everything fully. Deleted spybot unintalled and reintalled new

I tunes won't open. No warning message, just the first terms agreement opens and when i agree itunes stopes running. I just wiped and reinstalled everything including windows. I updated everything fully. Deleted spybot unintalled and reintalled the newest and one older version of itunes. still nothing. I tried to delete some files that is hidden as directed by apple. I have been trading emails with customer support but it has been no help at all. I am running Windows XP. Before i wiped my computer I ran itunes with no problem, on this computer, this week.

WOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! JUST WANTED TO UPDATE Y'ALL THAT BY SOME STROKE OF HEAVENLY GLORY, ITUNES DECIDED TO WORK AGAIN!!!
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
How did I do it you ask??
after all the stuff I updated you about, I tried one last time to install....still didn't work...so once again I wiped my system of everything itunes and apple related
well today I was trying to watch a video that required me to get the quicktime plug in, and it too me to a page that was a quicktime install + itunes 7.blah blah blah instead of the other way around
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IT WORKS!!!!
I HAVE MY ITUNES BACK!!! (JUMPS FOR JOY)
Just wanted to share my shear elation

Time Machine, just doesn't stop running on my machine

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