Time Machine says Time Capsule Disk unavailable

I have the exclamation point in the menubar icon and Time Machine says Time Capsule Disk unavailable even though I have backed up to it many times before. I tried unpluging/plugging in the TC, but this did not solve the problem. Any ideas?

However, I did have a problem periodically with computers not recognizing the TC disk before I had unclicked the "Enable file sharing" box, so I might still end up using your advice if this happens in the future.
There is a bug or several of them.. losing the disk is one thing the new 7.6.4 firmware is supposed to fix.. my deeply held suspicion is that Apple are using all of us as beta testers.. as lots of people are having trouble. But who knows it may finally fix this bug.. we are awaiting confirmation. ie people saying it is now fixed.. rather than since loading 7.6.4 my TC is now dead.. or disappeared .. or broken.. or no longer has wireless output.
Lets say maybe they fixed a bug.. and added some more.
The reason I had unchecked the "Enable file sharing" box is because I have Mountain Lion Server and wanted to use port mapping on the TC to point to my computer as a File Server. To do this I went into Airport Utility and in Network pane tried to add File Sharing to the Port Settings. However, this conflicted with the "Enable file sharing" box from the Disks pane. Do you know of a way to have time machine backups to TC but also run a File Server from a computer networked with the TC using port mapping? Thank you for any guidance.
You only need the ports forwarded to the server to get outside access.. ie remote wan access.. Did you have wan access to the TC checked.. that will cause a conflict with AFP .. since it cannot be forwarded to multiple destinations at once.
If you do not have WAN access checked then you should be able to check "enable file sharing" since that is local lan..
Try it and tell me what happens.. I have never tried the combo you are using.
I would try simply using a different method to access if that doesn't work.. eg BTMM should work fine to the Server without needing ports forwarded in the TC.. as long as the TC is the main router.. and this whole issue is only because the TC is the main router.
You can also do it with vpn.. which is more robust and more business/pro method to access a server remotely than AFP.

Similar Messages

Time Machine says "The Backup Disk is Not Available"

Line 0: I have a 400 GB external Western Digital drive that I leave plugged into an Airport Extreme. Previously, this worked mostly without a problem. It took some massaging to get it to work at first (I had to create the backup with the drive directly connected to the computer, and then I moved the drive over to the Airport Extreme and it was fine after that), but after that, it worked forever. This was in the previous version of the OS that I was running (snow leopard?). I very recently upgraded to Lion and it seemed to be OK, but then suddenly it gave me an error that said it had not been able to do a backup for 10 days. I thought "wow, that means it hasn't backed up since I upgraded to Lion."
So I told it to do a backup right away. It failed with the error "The backup disk is not available."
I unplugged the drive and plugged it back in. No go.
I tried to reselect the drive from within Time Machine preferences. It would not appear and in fact it kept forcing me to go to the Airport Extreme software. I did this and there was no obvious way to set anything up from within that software. I left everything as it was ("Enable file sharing" checked, "Secure shared disks" was at "with device password," and it was remembering the password in my keychain).
Go back to Time Machine preferences and the disk still doesn't show up. Force a reboot on the router, it still doesn't show up.
I brought the drive over to the computer and plugged it in directly, and everything was fine. It did a backup on the spot, it read the backup that was there, the drive showed up, etc. I formatted it just for the heck of it and started over completely and it was happy. I did a disk check and everything was fine. After leaving it on all night to complete a new backup, I unmounted the disk, brought it over to the Airport Extreme, plugged it back in, and now we go back to line 0 and rinse repeat.
Can someone please tell me how to get my drive to start working with Time Machine again?

It should not have worked in the first place.. when you moved it from the PC to the airport extreme.. that is not correct.. I don't know how SL managed to work around it.. but Lion obviously cannot.
You will need to start all over again..
Also note.. the flakey nature of this setup.. according to well respected people here AEBS with USB drive does not give reliable TM backups.. I would pay close attention to what they are saying. Time Capsule is more than a AEBS with a hard drive inside.. although exactly the difference I don't know.
But you can expect the current setup to not work, because it never should have.

Help! Time machine says my backup disk is too small

I have a 500 gig back up disk for time machine back up and my hard drive on my imac is 500gigs but for some reason it is saying I don't have enough space on my back up disk for time machine to back up. how can that be if they are the same size.

Bucknut wrote:
I have a 500 gig back up disk for time machine back up and my hard drive on my imac is 500gigs but for some reason it is saying I don't have enough space on my back up disk for time machine to back up. how can that be if they are the same size.
How big is your Leopard filesystem?

Time machine says back up disk doesn't have enough room?

use to work no problem, now this... any help is appreciated.
macbook pro (late 2011, mavericks, 500gb HDD)
back up drive lacie and 500gb

I have had this problem with time machine on OS X Lion also.
About your only options are to Erase that drive then make a new TM backup or buy a new larger external drive.
Time machine is supposed to delete older backups to make room for new ones but in my experience that doesn't happen with the Lion TM system. Eraing the drive was what I had to do.

Time Machine says not enough room on disk

Time Machine says that I do not have enough room on my backup disk. It is a 1 TB Drive, with 992 GB available.
I only want to back up my programs and data, which, if a full backup, is 662 GB, but for some reason, I am being told that I have 2.6 TB of data to back up. I have no idea where all of this other data is coming from, is there any way I can select what I want backed up? Effectively I want to back up my boot drive, and my data drive, that's it. I do have two other drives in my tower, and they are full of data, but I do not need to back them up, and they may be what is causing the problem, but I don't know how to remove them from my backup list.
Any help or direction would be appreciated.
Thank you.

About TM "Backup Drive is Full" Alert
TM only deletes older files if they have been deleted from the source and when TM needs space on the backup drive for a new incremental backup. Time Machine "thins" it's backups; hourly backups over 24 hours old, except the first of the day; those "daily" backups over 30 days old, except the first of the week. The weeklies are kept as long as there's room.
So, how long a backup file remains depends on how long it was on your Mac before being deleted, assuming you do at least one backup per day. If it was there for at least 24 hours, it will be kept for at least a month. If it was there for at least a week, it will be kept as long as there's room.
Note, that on a Time Capsule the sparsebundle grows in size as needed, but doesn't shrink. Thus, from the user's view of the TC it appears that no space has been freed, although there may be space in the sparsebundle.
Once TM has found it cannot free up enough space for a new backup it reports the disk is full. You can either erase the backup drive and start your backups anew or replace the drive with a larger drive.

I keep getting this error when trying to backup time capsule with time machine. The backup disk image "/Volumes/Data-1/Dan's iMac.sparsebundle" is already in use.

I keep getting this error when trying to backup time capsule with time machine. The backup disk image “/Volumes/Data-1/Dan’s iMac.sparsebundle” is already in use.

Make sure that no other Macs are backing up at the time.
Pull the power cable from the back of the Time Capsule
Count to ten
Plug the power cable back into the back of the Tme Capsule
Wait a few minutes, then try a backup again.

Why is Time machine saying backup disk disconnected? Using MBP 17" Lion 10.7

Why is Time machine saying backup disk disconnected? Using MBP 17" Lion 10.7

Do you have an external drive connected?
If you do has it gone into sleep mode? There is a setting in the OS to put drives to sleep if they aren't being used. Energy Saver "Put the hard disk to sleep when possible".
Also most external drives have a built in sleep function that if they aren't being accessed for a period of time they go to sleep by themselves.

My Time Machine says there is no backup disk available. I've never had any problems with my time machine. I'm not technologically savvy, so if anyone can help, I'd appreciate it!

My Time Machine says there is no backup disk available. I've never had any problems with my time machine completing backups. I was away from house with my laptop for about 9 days so I'm wondering if there is something I need to do now that I'm home to get it working again. I'm not technologically savvy, so if anyone can help, I'd appreciate it!
Thanks,
Jana

You can lose your ability to backup through TM for any number of reasons, but the most common is what happens after a update. If your drive still works, your best approach is to read this:
http://www.chriscolotti.us/technology/how-to-fix-osx-mountain-lion-time-machine/
The attached link contains helpful graphics, so don't worry if you're not tech savvy.

Time machine - backup of a disk attached via usb on a time capsule

Hi,
I would like to know it is possible to backup data with TIME MACHINE of an external disk attached directly to a time capsule via USB.
I use it as a network disk for all my Mac's to access at the same iphoto library.
Thank you very much for your help

To back up the drive, connect it directly to the Mac and remove it from the exclusion list in the Time Machine preference pane.

Can Time Machine write to a Disk Image on a Time Capsule?

I just inherited a Gen 1 Time Machine (500gb). I have three Macs on my network. In my current set up I have an external 500gb drive split into three equal partitions, one for each Mac.
I know I cannot partition the TC HD, but I also know I can create one or more Disk Images.
Question: Can Time Machine write to a Disk Image on a Time Capsule?
Thanks.
MotionMan

I know the backups will not mix.
One of the Macs is a MacBook that only hooks up to the network every couple weeks. Before I partitioned my existing TM backup disk, the TM backups of the other two Macs were filling the disk. When the MacBook then tried to make a backup, the oldest backups of the MacBook would drop off.
So, the other two Macs had backps for months, but the MacBook ended up with much less. That is what lead me to the 3 partitions, so each Mac had an equal space for their backups.
Odd that there there is no good solution for this.
MotionMan

Time Machine and Time Capsule don't seem to work well together?

Reposted.
I get the feeling there are some serious problems with the combination of Time Machine and Time Capsule.
This is extremely disappointing, as the idea of a centralized backup device on the network (instead of disks attached to each and every computer we have running Leopard) seemed like such a good idea and a good way to supplement our tape-based backup that takes place with Retrospect.
In reality, it's a disaster on both Intel and PowerPC systems. All systems and the Time Capsule are fully up to date with software updates from Apple. I have two 1TB Time Capsule units. It goes something like this:
1. I have a few systems (mainly Intel) that work perfectly with the Time Capsule. There are no complaints and no issues at all. These systems just quietly run their backups as they should. They are the definite minority--maybe one or two have worked properly.
2. I have some systems that complain from time to time (mainly PowerPC) but will back up with a little encouragement. These too are the minority.
3. And finally, I have systems that are nothing but pain. These are both Intel and PowerPC systems. They are also the majority of the systems I have. The most common problem is sudden loss of the credentials needed to access the Time Capsule hardware--a user will be going along about their business when the Mac OS asks for the Time Capsule user name and password--after it's already been supplied and backups have been running. This should simply never ever happen.
Another charming behavior I've seen is corruption of the sparse disk image file that each computer creates on the Time Capsule. Time Machine will complain that it can't perform the backup, and examining the disk image file with Disk Utility shows it to be severely damaged. Turning off Time Machine, deleting the corrupted sparse image file, and starting over fixes it. For a while.
Finally, there are the machines (again, both Intel and PowerPC) that just can't seem to actually get through the first backup run. They either go so far and can't continue, or never actually manage to get started. I've checked the disks in these computers and found no problem with the hardware or file system. The installations are fresh and fully up to date.
Meanwhile, I have computers running Leopard with directly attached disks configured for use with Time Machine. One is a QuickSilver that isn't even officially supported by Leopard, with a Firewire attached disk. It doesn't skip a beat. The other is an Intel Mac mini being used with Mac OS X Server 10.5.4 and a USB external hard drive. These machines just do their thing, and I never have to babysit them.
These problems with the Time Capsule have been so severe that I've just given up on most of the computers and shut off Time Machine entirely. We have tape backups that run over the week, so it's not a huge loss. But that's not what really made me throw up my hands and say "enough"...no, that was the speed. Even with just one computer backing up to it, the Time Capsule seemed terribly slow. Watching the progress indicator was just painful.
I put in a word about all of this to my independent Apple dealer, and they say I'm definitely not the first to complain about some or all of these problems. In fact, they told me they were going to set up a test lab in their shop to see if they could duplicate these findings. I have no doubt that they can.
There are a total of seven computers backing up to one Time Capsule. They all store maybe ~40GB worth of data including the OS. There are about six computers on the other. Because of the way the network is laid out, the Time Capsule is connected to a Gigabit switch (and that is the only thing it's connected to). It cannot be used as the router, although I know Apple suggests this. The Airport section is disabled--I have no need or desire to use it. Some computers link up at 100 megabits, others at 1 gigabit. There are no network problems--we have no problems moving large amounts of data across the same network to our tape backup machine.
Is anyone else seeing these kinds of problems? Am I doing something wrong or expecting too much from Time Capsule?

I may be on to something. The Time Capsules I have live in a telephone equipment room that is indoors but not directly air conditioned or heated. It doesn't ever get too hot to be comfortable in there--the highest I've ever seen the temperature was 80 degrees (F). Most of the time the temperature is between 60-78 degrees.
I happened to touch one of them the other day while it was in use, and I noticed that the casing was hot to the touch...not dangerously so I suppose, but much hotter than I would have expected.
So I turned a small fan on both Time Capsules and have left it running. And I've noticed that not only do backups seem to complete more quickly, the reliability is also better. I am going to try some of my most troublesome computers once again just to see what happens.
I know there is a fan pointed at the hard drive in the Time Capsule, but I can't see how it does much in the way of cooling things down. In my opinion, it's just surrounded by too many heat producing devices to do much good...after all, not only is there a 7200 RPM hard disk in there, but also a 500MHz Marvell processor and radio set.

My time machine says it need more room to complete back up, how do i make more room? up

My time machine says it need more room to complete back up, how do i make more room?

Delete the old backups..
There is a reason though for this to happen. Tell us what model Time Capsule you are using and what size disk it has .. how much free space is available and how much is now required. If you upgraded to Mavericks it probably needs to do a whole new backup and simply doesn't have the space .. nor can it delete the old backup.
Please read Pondini FAQ for details of these issues.. deleting backups for example Q12
http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
There is also info on how much space is required for backups.
eg Q9

Time Machine Error - Time Capsule not big enough?

I have a 500GB Time Capsule which I use solely to back up my Macbook. Time Machine is giving me an error message as below:
This backup is too large for the backup disk. The backup requires 176.38 GB but only 121.14 GB are available.
Looking on the Time Capsule, the current Sparsebundle is about 376GB - so I'm not sure why Time Machine is suddenly failing to just increment onto that?
Am I missing something?

pompeygreg wrote:
I have a 500GB Time Capsule which I use solely to back up my Macbook. Time Machine is giving me an error message as below:
This backup is too large for the backup disk. The backup requires 176.38 GB but only 121.14 GB are available.
Looking on the Time Capsule, the current Sparsebundle is about 376GB - so I'm not sure why Time Machine is suddenly failing to just increment onto that?
Do the math: 500 GB less 376 GB gives 124 GB, around the size that Time Machine says is available. It seems that Time Machine is trying to create an entirely new, complete backup of your computer. Did anything change with your computer recently, such as the disk drive or main logic board? Either of these can make Time Machine want to start over.

Recently installed a 1TB hitachi travelstar hard drive into my Macbook 10.6.8 however Time Machine says not configured hence cannot back anything up

Recently installed a 1TB Hitachi travelstar hard drive into my Macbook (13inch mid 2010) OS X 10.6.8 .
However now having problems with configuring , latest issue my Time Machine says Not Configured hence cannot back up using this device !
Can anyone help ?

You installed the new hdd with new install of Mac OS .. or did you recover your old TM setup??
If TM cannot locate the Time Capsule .. is it visible in airport utility or finder??
Are you even using a TC?? If you are using an external drive you need to spell it all out.
Time Machine may not recognise the old backup.. you can usually inherit the old one.
See B5 and B6 here.
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
Otherwise use A4.. delete the existing TM setup and reconfigure it from scratch. If you do that TM should discover and reuse the old backups if possible.. but a new hard disk might not be possible it may need to start over.

Time machine and time capsule

I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard and installed Time Capsule. I connected a Maxtor external drive to Time Capsule to enable me to access my photography library wirelessly. I have a 2nd external drive that direct connects to my Mac Book Pro. I have found the following problems:
1. Time machine shows backup files for the external drive that connects to my mac, however they are old files no longer on the drive. It does not backup the current drive but does indicate backup was successful. I would also like time machine to backup the external drive connected to time capsule.
2. I tried to delete the folder containing the old files and received a message saying I did not have permission.
3. I am experiencing problems entering Time Machine. It takes a long time to connect (including when I am connected via an ethernet cable) and after a few minutes I receive a message asking if I still want to enter time machine. Once I do have access, I typically only see mail and am not able to access folders.
Help is appreciated! Thank you.

rgoodman wrote:
1. Time machine shows backup files for the external drive that connects to my mac, however they are old files no longer on the drive.
Where does it show the old files, on recent backups in the "Star Wars" display?
It does not backup the current drive but does indicate backup was successful.
Are you sure it's not backing-up the new drive? Try the procedure in item #E3 of the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip.* It's for a slightly-different situation, but should confirm which disks were backed-up on each backup.
If you're sure the new external is not being backed-up, and is not on the +Do not back up+ list, do a "full reset" of Time Machine per item #B3 of the Troubleshooting Tip.
I would also like time machine to backup the external drive connected to time capsule.
Sorry, it won't. TM will only back-up internal or directly-attached FireWire or USB drives.
You might want to review these:
Time Machine Tutorial
Time Machine 101
How to back up and restore your files
Time Machine Features
Apple - Support - Mac OSX v10.5 Leopard Time Machine
and perhaps browse the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip.*

Time Machine says Time Capsule Disk unavailable

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