Time Machine stops backing up in the middle of preparing items

Note: As it may soon become clear, I'm not all that computer literate (i.e. many of the solutions I've read here for problems similar to mine tend to leave my head spinning), so please be as patient & as simple as possible in answering.
My Intel MacBook from 2006 runs OS X 10.6.8. I've always backed up via Time Machine to a Protronix external HD, and for a while, it worked just fine. Sometime in April, I disconnected the external from my MacBook in order to travel with it, and I just hadn't bothered reconnecting it until a few days ago (these days, I don't use my computer nearly as often as I used to). The external is still recognized just fine, and I can even browse through my older backups in Time Machine. However, whenever it attempts to backup now, either on schedule or if I click to do so manually, it successfully scans some 700K or so items, then it starts preparing them, and then it just stops after preparing 21K or so items. No error message, nothing. If I watch the progress bar closely, I can sometimes see the status change to "cleaning up" for maybe half a second, but then it still stops entirely, as if it had somehow finished (though no message says so). I've tried dozens of times now, and I have rebooted the MacBook &/or disconnected the external drive several times, yet after every backup attempt it always says my latest backup is from April.

Select "Back Up Now" from the Time Machine icon, and wait for it to complete. From what you describe that won't take long.
Then:
Find the Console app - it is in your Utilities folder and looks like this
You can find it by selecting Utilities from the Finder's Go menu.
Open Console.
If the log list column on the left is not already displayed, show the log list by selecting Show Log List from Console's View menu.
Locate system.log in the list and select it. Many date and time-stamped entries will appear, hundreds of them, and you must find the entries relevant to your Mac's problem.
To do that type the words backupd in the Filter field at the upper right of the Console window. That will cause all log entries to be hidden, except for the entries containing those words.
Copy and paste those log entries in a reply. If hundreds of the same repetitive messages appear, please edit them before posting.
Most of the entries will be cryptic but will contain information you might consider personal such as your Mac's name. If you do not want that information to appear, delete or obscure it when posting your reply. Leave enough information so that the entries can be deciphered.

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Time machine stopped backing up due to not enough space. What to do?

On my MacBook time machine stopped backing up and the message said not enough space . What can I do?

Broadly speaking you can supply more space.. or delete the old backups to regain existing space.
You have posted in the TIme Capsule area.. but I am not sure if that is what you are using as people mix up Time Capsule (TC) and Time Machine (TM) on a regular basis. TC is hardware router with a disk in it for backups to be stored.. TM is the software on the Mac that does backups.
So TC is not exactly flexible.. but you can add a USB hard disk to it.
This is not always a great idea.. but can work for people using wireless which is slower even than USB.
The internal disk of the TC can be upgraded.. only do this if you accept the risk and most likely it is no longer under warranty.
You can buy a TC with a bigger hard disk and sell off the old one.. except you might already have 3TB one in which case you will need to run two.
You can use a local drive instead of a network drive.
So buy a USB drive and plug it into your computer.. this is a good solution for desktops.. less great for laptops which are carried around as you forget to backup.
OR
Wipe the current backups and start anew.. You can also archive the old backups wipe the existing disk and start over.
Tell us which you prefer and if it is more difficult than go and buy a new disk and plug it in tell us.

Time Machine stopped backing up certain files

Hi, I am running OS X Server 10.5.4. (Yes, upgrade is planned)
Time Machine has been running fine, backing up everything, etc.
However, at some point, Time Machine stopped backing up certain files regularly. The affected files are all Frontier databases (frontierkernel.org). They are 'open' files, and I wonder if this is the cause. However, I know that they used to be backed up regularly, without problems. So, maybe Time Machine was updated in 10.5.4 to change this behavior?
If I quit Frontier and then reopen it, Time Machine will back up the files. So, this tells me that TM can back up open files... sometimes. But, if I let the machine run for days, TM often skips these files, even though they have been updated on disk.
I've checked and these files are not set to be excluded from TM.
Any ideas? Thanks.

Bill Dennen wrote:
Waiting for index to be ready (-911 < 0)
Bulk setting Spotlight attributes failed.</div>
These aren't the cause, but might indicate a problem with, or communicating with, your TM drive. Try the things in #D2 of the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
Everything else looks normal (assuming the files in question are on the 06-0834 drive).
Since the same files are backed-up sometimes but not others, it's probably also not something corrupted (usually, corruption will cause the backup to fail, but rarely a whole folder won't get backed-up).
So we're back to your original suspicion that they weren't backed-up because they were open. Normally, an open file will be backed-up. In the case of large databases, that's often a problem, as the entire database is backed-up if only a single small change is made, often taking up a lot of time and disk space. There are a many threads here about that.
There does appear to be an extended attribute that will prevent TM from backing up a file. XCODE seems to set that on it's "build" folders, for example. Perhaps the Frontier package sets it while the files are open, and removes it when they're closed? If so, maybe there's an option somewhere to disable that?
Can you check with the Sourceforge folks about that?
Otherwise, sorry, but I'm out of ideas.

Time Machine stopped backing up files 2 years ago!

So... I recently tried to restore my Macbook to an earlier time and discovered that Time Machine stopped backing up my files (documents, music, photos, etc) years ago! When I select a time period (say Sept 24, 2013) the actually files included in the backup are from no later than 2010. Why did this happen? I thought Time Machine backed up everything. I did not exclude anything and it certainly backed them up at one point. I'm not sure if there is some way that I am missing to retrieve information that was "backed up" a week ago.

A backup was listed for a week ago, it's just that when I went into the files looking for what was missing (music, for example) there is nothing new since 2010. That's years worth of new files missing all the while thinking that Time Machine was backing them up. My external hard drive was connected and Time Machine was performing that backups as usual without any indication that something was going wrong. There are dozens of backup slots over that time frame that are missing the new files.

Time Machine stopped backing up my user directory

After many successful back-ups Time Machine stopped backing up my user directory. After reading many blogs I delted everything (it took days!) and started with an empty externel HD. To my suprise the new back up has the same problem. HELP!

I have the SAME problem with my imac 7,1 (2007) running os 10.8.5. What is the fix?
i checked and i do NOT have FileVault enabled. so, why is TMachine NOT backing up? this is a rather horrifying discovery. i only learned
about it when i tried to restore some downloaded files. Thanks for any help.

Time Machine stopped backing up to Time Capsule

Three weeks ago, my Time Machine stopped backing up to My Time Capsule. I get a Time Machine Error that says the backup disk is not available. When I go into Time Machine on my Systems Preferences and click Select Disk, I get None. If I then go to Set Up Time Capsule, Airport Utility finds my Time Capsule.
I click through where it asks whether I want to change some settings for this Time Capsule. I click all the way through, changing nothing. And of course, I haven't resolved the problem. I don't want to go back to factory settings because I have archived a lot of old home movies on the Time Capsule and am afraid I'll lose them.
The only changes I've made recently that may affect this have to do with a mobileme account. I've been using one mobileme account for work for several years. Three weeks before I started having problems with the Time Capsule, I started a MobileMe account for the family. Now, when I sync all of our machines, the system looks for a new local host, which I have created. About the time I started syncing my computers is about the time the Time Machine stopped backing up.
Can switching between the two local hosts be the source of my problem?
—

Turns out my Hard Drive went down. Not sure why.

Time Machine stopped backing up. What do I do???

Time Machine stopped backing up 3 days ago. Even though the desktop Icon periodically revolves to show a backup is occurring, when I go into Time Machine I see the last time it backed up was 3 days ago. I have it backing up to a 1 Terrabyte drive and there are still close to 300 GB available. It has been working fine up until 3 days ago.
One suspicion I have: I installed a demo version of MacScan which erased all my cookies. I may have done this on the day Time Machine stopped working correctly. Does Time Machine depend on any cookies?
Help

shrink1 wrote:
Time Machine stopped backing up 3 days ago. Even though the desktop Icon periodically revolves to show a backup is occurring, when I go into Time Machine I see the last time it backed up was 3 days ago. I have it backing up to a 1 Terrabyte drive and there are still close to 300 GB available. It has been working fine up until 3 days ago.
One suspicion I have: I installed a demo version of MacScan which erased all my cookies. I may have done this on the day Time Machine stopped working correctly. Does Time Machine depend on any cookies?
Help!!!
Is it possible that MacScan went into your TM backup and corrupted it by removing files (cookies, etc.)? If you modify the contents of the TM backup improperly, you can totally hose the entire backup. In general only TM should be allowed to modify it's own contents via the TM app.

My Time capsule/time machine stopped backing up and states no disk found-now I can't even get connected to time capsule

My Time capsule/time machine stopped backing up and states no disk found-now I can't even get connected to time capsule. When I go into sys pref and time machine nothing comes up and it just keeps stating rescan

Go to to your Users/Home/Library/Application Support/iWeb folder in the Finder and then enter Time Machine. Go back to the last backup that has the domain file, select it and use the Restore button.
OT

Why time machine stopped backing up my application folder?

Help! About a month ago time machine stopped backing up the application, library, private and system folders and only back up the users folder. what happened? I cant seem to make machine back up everything anymore.

Since a few days I have exactly the same problem.
"Time Machine stopped backing up the application, library, private and system folders and only back up the users folder."
I did all the checks without success. Thereafter I deleted the backup disk and started a new copy on a new formatted disk.
Same result.

HT201250 Time Machine stopped backing up system folders

A couple of months ago, Time Machine stopped backing up my System folder and my Library folder. What is going on?

ttimshell wrote:
i'm sorry, i don't understand. i went to "time machine preferences" and "options." under options are all my external hard drives, and that's it. you said, "if THEY'RE shown there, select them . . ." what is the "THEY" that you're talking about?
Your system folders. Some people don't want them (and/or other things) to be backed-up.
i don't see any option to change what time machine backs up and what it doesn't back up.
That's where you can tell it not to back up certain things, or to back up external HDs. See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #10.
I don't recall seeing those folders not being backed-up unless they were specifically excluded. Is your Applications folder getting backed-up?
Perhaps the preferences file has been damaged. Try a "full reset" of Time Machine, per #A4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
EDIT: Note that when TM does back them up for the first time, it will be a fairly large backup, and seem pretty slow. That's because those folders contain many thousands of mostly small files.
Message was edited by: Pondini

Time Machine stops backing up external disk

I have 907 GB of backups on my WD 1 TB backup disk. Further backups blocked. Tried unsuccessfully to erase disk with utility. Support item MAC OS X 10.5 ("Time Machine stops backing up on external disk") gave instructions for partitioning the back up disk: "Partition failed could not unmount disk" Ran disk utility again. Verified and ran repair to backup disk. Response is that partition is okay. Have heard that Mountain Lion can cause backup problems. Anybody help please?

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. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
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. Select the messages timestamped from then until the end of the backup, or the end of the log if that's not clear. Copy them (command-C) to the Clipboard. Paste (command-V) into a reply to this message.
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 this discussion.
Some personal information, such as the names of your files, may be included — anonymize before posting.

The time machine stopped backing up, the green light is on but it says it can't find the disc

The time machine was working perfectly but all of a sudden it stopped backing up. The green light on the time machine is on and it seems to be functioning correctly (I can access past backups). It is connected using wi fi. The message says that the back up disc is not available. My printer and the internet are also connected wirelessly and they are working OK.

I had the same problem a couple of days ago.
You'll have to Repair disk from Disk Utility on your T/M. But do this over Ethernet not Wifi. Then you 'll have to repair permissions. Once these steps are completed you should restart your Mac.

Time Machine stopped backing up but doesn't give warning/error

Hi,
by chance I noticed, that Time Machine doesn't backup up any more, but still doesn't give errors. In Console I see the following for a now typical run:
21.04.15 09:58:11,493 com.apple.backupd: Starting standard backup
21.04.15 09:58:12,043 com.apple.backupd: Backing up to: /Volumes/drosera-backup-02/Backups.backupdb
21.04.15 09:58:41,729 com.apple.backupd: 5.18 GB required (including padding), 96.84 GB available
21.04.15 09:58:55,149 com.apple.backupd: Copied 23 files (93 bytes) from volume Macintosh HD.
21.04.15 09:59:04,385 com.apple.backupd: Copied 36 files (93 bytes) from volume DATA.
21.04.15 09:59:06,100 mds: (Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
21.04.15 09:59:06,102 com.apple.backupd: Starting post-backup thinning
21.04.15 09:59:07,668 com.apple.backupd: Deleted /Volumes/drosera-backup-02/Backups.backupdb/drosera/2015-04-20-183344 (24.0 KB)
21.04.15 09:59:07,668 com.apple.backupd: Post-back up thinning complete: 1 expired backups removed
21.04.15 09:59:07,762 com.apple.backupd: Backup completed successfully.
The 5.18 GB are never backed up. The backup drive (drosera-backup-02) is attached by FireWire. I have checked the disk with First Aid, I have disconnected and reconnected it. I removed the backup disk from Time Machine, stopped TM and reconfigured. I stopped mds, ran backups and reenabled mds. All to no avail.
I am at a complete loss and I'd appreciate to get this running w/o having to remove all existing backups. Any ideas or pointers?
I'm running Mac OS X 10.7.5 on a Mac mini
Cheers
Frank

Thx. I had already tried the hints from mds: (Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume to no avail. Your tip to rebuild the Spotlight index would probably helped, too. But just before getting yout comment and after reading http://pondini.org/TM/Works.html and http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/69054/force-time-machine-to-perform-a-d eep-traversal I had simply removed /.fseventsd and reran a backup. That seems to have fixed the problem (at least for the time being).
Interesting side note: During the non-backup phase I created a new account on the Mac and ran TM. This triggered a one-time working backup of the whole system, but all subsequent backups again failed silently. Additionally the externally attached FireWire harddrive was always backed up correctly, only backups of the local drive failed.

Time Machine stopped backing up

I am using Time Machine on a 500 GB Time Capsule (which also serves as my Internet router). I have 3 Macs using Time Machine: 1) PowerMac G4, 2) PowerMac G5, 3) MacBook. The G4 is wired to the Time Capsule, the G5 and the MacBook are wireless. The G4 does not have a wireless card. From all machines, I can browse the Time Capsule and see the backup files contained there.
The PowerMac G5 and the MacBook still function normally and are being backed up regularly with Time Machine. The G4 had been working fine, being backed up regularly, then the backups suddenly stopped. I can look at the Time Machine Preferences and see when the last backup occurred (Sept 4) and see that the Time Capsule has 264.7 GB of 463.3 GB available. I have 3 volumes attached to my Mac (excluding the Time Capsule) and have excluded entirely 2 of those attached volumes. The only volume included (my boot volume) I have configured to exclude a large number of files (most applications, for instance). The total used space on that drive is 186 GB, so I know that the backup is not too big.
I do not get any error messages that I am aware of (can you tell me somewhere specifically to look?). My configuration shows Time Machine in the menu bar, and if I select "Back Up Now" from that menu, nothing appears to happen. If I open the Time Machine Preferences pane and edit the EXCLUDE list, it appears to queue a backup, as the preference pane indicates next backup in 119 seconds, 118 seconds, etc, counting down to 1 second, and then jumps to next backup at xx:xx. I can keep the preference pane open and watch it until that time (xx:xx) actually ticks by on the clock and the time for Next Backup in the preference pane jumps to the next hour, with no backup performed.

William,
A shot in the dark. I just posted this for someone with a similar but not identical issue. Try it for what it is worth. It at least might start getting us going in the right direction.
It can occur that Time Machine doesn’t recognize its’ own previous backups. In that case Time Machine will ignore these backups and attempt to start a full backup.
First try, Ctrl-click the Time Machine icon in the Dock and select “Browse Other Time machine disks…”
Now see if it will allow you to select the existing backups. Now can you go ‘back in time’ and see your previous data? Then it is indeed still there, it has just lost the link to it.
*Computer Name*
If that’s the case, the most likely culprit is you or something else has changed the name of your computer.
Go to System Preferences --> Sharing. If the “Computer Name” field is blank, Time Machine will have a difficult time maintaining consistent backups. Before adding or changing the computer name do the following:
In a Finder window open your Time Machine drive.
Open the folder labeled “Backups,backupdb”.
Inside is the folder containing the backups of the computer in question.
Note the name of the folder. It might be something like “Bills MacBook Pro”. That was your computers’ name when Time Machine performed its’ first full backup. If this name is missing or different in the Sharing “Computer Name” field then time Machine backups will fail.
Copy the name of the folder and paste it in the “Computer Name” field.
Next turn Sharing OFF and then back ON by unchecking and then rechecking the box on the left.
Close the backup folder and eject the Time Machine disk.
Now try resuming backups or launch Time Machine and try viewing your past data..
*Corrupt Backup Files*
If you were not able to access your previous backups via the “Browse Other Time machine disks…” function, then it is likely that the backup data is corrupt.
In that case you’ll want to erase the disk or partition that the old backups are on and begin Time Machine backups again.
To help prevent future instances of corruption, avoid storing other data files on the same partition that the Time Machine backups reside on. Rather create a separate partition for other files and folders to use.
Let us know if any of the above helped.

Time Machine stopped backing up iMac

My Time Machine has stopped backing up my iMac. It is a 2Tb TM with 693GB still available and has been working fine since I got it out of the box in August 2012.
Watching the process a few times it seemed to get stuck on calculating changes. Investigating this I then followed instructions to delete com.apple.TimeMachine.plist from the root library, restart the Time Machine and iMac, then reconnect the Time Machine to the iMac, at which point there is a 120 second countdown and the backup starts.
No luck. Still calculating changes. I let the process just run for days and days without altering anything on my iMac. No backups taken.
I followed instructions to verify disk and it said that there was descrepancy. So I then followed instructions to boot on MAC OS X installer disk a verify and repair hard disk. Result was that after repair it said everything looks OK.
Again retried the reboot and iMac/Time Machine again several times, gets through scanning and then preparing items but never actually backs up.
Downloaded the widget and it says that UUIDs don't match and goes into an indexing routine;
Waiting for Index to be ready (101)
for quite some some the says
Node requires deep traversal:/ reason:must scan subdirs|new event db|
I leave the process to run but never seems to actually backup. I get an error
Error: Flushing index to disk returned an error: 0
I then leave it to run on its own schedule for several days but still not backup complete.
Time Machine says last backup was 28th May 2014.
I should add that the same Time Machine is regularly backing up my Macbook Air as normal without the same issues. My iMac is OSX 10.6.8.
How can I get Time Machine to start backing up my iMac again?

Deleting the sparsebundle worked. Eventually.
Much like other posts I had to connect to Time Capsule from a Windows machine to delete the sparsebundle. Didn't seem to want to from my iMac!!!
Took a day to delete the sparsebundle and another half day (over ethernet cable) to do the backup but since then backups performing properly.
Thank you.

Time Machine stops backing up in the middle of preparing items

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