Time Machine/Time Capsule problems - won't backup

Hi,
Hope someone can help! I have Time Machine working with a Time Capsule that also serves as my Wifi Access point (i.e. normal setup. Its been working perfectly since I bought it back in March. 2 days ago however its stopped working properly and every hour when it attempts to do a backup I get the following error message:
"Time Machine Error: Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume"
I therefore initiated another manual backup and recorded the following from the console. (I'm not techy in the slightest so can't interpret what this means, so can anyone help me please!!) :--
Tuesday, 15 July 2008 14:12:45 Europe/London
Jul 15 14:12:55 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[2054]: Backup requested by user
Jul 15 14:12:55 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[2054]: Starting standard backup
Jul 15 14:12:55 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[2054]: Network mountpoint /Volumes/Data-1 not owned by backupd... remounting
Jul 15 14:12:56 Macintosh kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_mount: /Volumes/Data, pid 2125
Jul 15 14:12:56 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[2054]: Network volume mounted at: /Volumes/Data
Jul 15 14:13:08 Macintosh hdiejectd[2135]: running
Jul 15 14:13:12 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[2054]: Disk image /Volumes/Data/Steve Gerrard’s iMac G5_000d934cdcde.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Backup of Steve Gerrard’s iMac G5
Jul 15 14:13:13 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[2054]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Backup of Steve Gerrard’s iMac G5/Backups.backupdb
Jul 15 14:13:44 Macintosh mds[21]: (Error) Server: machmsgdispatch: (ipc/send) invalid destination port [msgh_id 14016]
Jul 15 14:14:45 Macintosh mds[21]: (Error) Queue: _queueCount not zero (or retire > pushed)! journalRetire:7 total-pushed:0 total-retired:7 queueCount:0
Jul 15 14:14:56 Macintosh com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.netauth.sysagent[2125]): Stray process with PGID equal to this dead job: PID 2128 PPID 1 check_afp
Jul 15 14:16:06 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[2054]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 326.3 MB requested (including padding), 304.42 GB available
Jul 15 14:17:13 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[2054]: Stopping backup.
Jul 15 14:17:13 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[2054]: Error: (-43) copying /Library/Mail to /Volumes/Backup of Steve Gerrard’s iMac G5/Backups.backupdb/Steve Gerrard’s iMac G5/2008-07-14-051449.inProgress/5F2C36F2-1F8B-44D4-84C9-113FF010560B/MAC HD/Library
Jul 15 14:17:13 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[2054]: Copied 131 files (15 KB) from volume MAC HD.
Jul 15 14:17:13 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[2054]: Copy stage failed with error:11
Jul 15 14:17:19 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[2054]: Backup failed with error: 11
Jul 15 14:17:30 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder[104]: StatusMonitor::volumesChangedCallBack returned -47
Jul 15 14:17:30 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[2054]: Ejected Time Machine disk image.
Jul 15 14:17:31 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder[104]: StatusMonitor::volumesChangedCallBack returned -47
Jul 15 14:17:31 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder[326]: StatusMonitor::volumesChangedCallBack returned -47
Jul 15 14:17:34 Macintosh kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_unmount: /Volumes/Data, flags 0, pid 2165
Jul 15 14:17:34 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder[104]: StatusMonitor::volumesChangedCallBack returned -47
Jul 15 14:17:34 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder[326]: StatusMonitor::volumesChangedCallBack returned -47
Jul 15 14:17:34 Macintosh /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[2054]: Ejected Time Machine network volume.

I'm not sure what all the Console messages mean, but try these things:
From Disk Utility, Repair Permissions on your startup drive and then Verify your startup drive. If errors are found you will need to reboot from Leopard Install DVD and repair using Disk Utility from there.
Also force a new Spotlight index for both your startup drive and Time Capsule. In System Prefs/Spotlight, select Privacy tab and add your startup drive and Time Capsule to "Prevent Spotlight from searching...". Then log out and log back in and go back to Spotlight prefs and remove those two items from the privacy list. Spotlight should now re-index those directories. It will take a while, but it will help.

Similar Messages

TS1550 My time capsule will not back up. There is a time machine error message that states "The backup disk image "/volumes/Backup/Jane's MacBook Pro.sparsebundle" is already in use. How do I correct this problem?

My time machine will not back up. I get a Time Machine Error message that reads: "The backup disk image "/Volumes/Backup/(myname)'sMacBook Pro.sparsebundle" is already in use.
I have not been able to back up for two weeks, I think this occurred after an update to the operating system, but I am unsure.
How do I correct this problem?

Have you tried restarting the computer? Also, see Time Machine Error from this pages sidebar under More Like This.

Time Machine will not complete a system backup and terminates with "Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume. This follows a problem when Time machne terminated when the volume was almost full.

On 11/1/2011, Time Machine (TM) terminated with an error message I did not record. I noted that the drive was full and decided to do a separate complete bootable system backup using Carbon Copy Clone (CCC), before clearing the TM volume and trying to start it over clean. Part way through the full system backup CCC put up a message that there was a Physical Problem "Library/Application Support/Techtool Protection/McIntosh HD/Directory Backup 2011-11-01-16-28-16". That was about the time that TM malfunctioned, so I assumed they were related. After starting CCC over a couple of times, and getting the same error message, I let it go through to completion of the backup, which took three or four hours. I then ran tests using Disk Utility and verified that there was nothing physically wrong with both the internal hard drive and the TM volume. I also erased and reformatted the TM volume. However, every time I started Time Machine, it would record a few GB and terminate with "Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume". I restarted the computer with no change in results. Note that prior to starting the CCC backup, I "Repaired Permissions", "zapped the PRAM" and "re-set the SMC", hoping to have a clean bootable system on the backup. I ran Techtool and no problems were found.
I'm running this on an Intel iMac under 10.5.8 and recording to a 500GB My Passport drive. My hard drive is only about half full at 246 GB. My assessment is that something happened at 16-28-16 on 11/1/2001 to screwup the Backup Directory in the file at "Library/Application Support/Techtool Protection/McIntosh HD/Directory Backup 2011-11-01-16-28-16". My question is, how do I fix it?
I had just completed writing everything above here, explaining the problems I had been encountering for the past 24 hours. I had the Time Machine window standing open on the desktop where I could see it, having recentlycleared it after the last termination. As I was proofing what I had written, I looked at the window and noted that the clock had started a new run for a full back up, since all prior efforts had failed and the TM volume was empty. As I watched and waited for it to fail again, as it had been doing at about 13 GB, it kept going and going until it just finished a complete backup, about 4.5 hours later, with my having done nothing. Now my question would have to be - what could possiibly have happened to make it perform this way? It will be interesting to see if it continue to operate normally, or if the problem will return, in a later backup run.

jcm21 wrote:
CCC put up a message that there was a Physical Problem "Library/Application Support/Techtool Protection/McIntosh HD/Directory Backup 2011-11-01-16-28-16"
You should not keep those files for long, and probably shouldn't back them up (if you need them at all -- since you do regular backups, I'm doubtful just how worthwhile that feature is).
"Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume".
One of Apple's maddeningly incomplete messages. Most likely, there's a problem with a file (quite possibly the one CCC didn't like). See #C3 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting for details and instructions on finding and fixing it.
If you continue running the Directory Protection app, be sure to exclude your Time Machine drive from it (as it will just take up lots of room, and won't help repair your backups if there's a problem); and exclude the folders it creates from being backed-up by Time Machine (as they'll create large backups, and you probably can't use the backed-up folders anyway), per #10 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions.

How to safely remove all backups from Time Machine/Time Capsule?

I plan to 'clean up' my Time Machine/Time capsule completely, whereby I want to make it impossible for third parties to recover all or part of these old backups.
After I have accompished this I want to start from scratch backing up my Mac.
Can you please let me have a step by step procedure to accomplish my goal.
Thank you in advance!

Muizen wrote:
Thank you WZZZ.
1) I am now specifically looking for info regarding deleting emails from backups.
It is my impression so far, that this is not possible?
Delete all backups of <home folder>/Library/Mail, per Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #12.
And exclude that folder from future backups, per FAQ #10.
2) In addition I feel that being somewhat better in control of TM that it would be an advantage to really clean out TH completely and start a new back up, thereby systematically blooking certain matters from backing-up since there is no need for doing so.
How would I best accomplish this?
If the emails are all you're worried about, the procedure above will be fine.
But if you want to erase the TC's internal HD, see #Q5 in Using Time Machine with a Time Capsule.

I recently did a full reinstall from my time machine and now my MacBook pro won't back up to the time machine. It starts a full backup ignoring the original back up, can anyone help?

I recently did a full reinstall from my time machine and now my MacBook pro won't back up to the time machine. It starts a full backup ignoring the original back up, can anyone help?

Did you follow the instructions on the page linked below?
OS X Yosemite: Recover your entire system

My Time Machine / Time capsule gets the error: The backup disk image could not be mounted

My time machine / time capsule gets the error: The backup disk image could not be mounted.

Reboot the TC.
If you normally have multiple computers backing up, under Lion there seems to be some issues.. you need to force other users off the system. You can do that through the Airport utility, manual setup, disks, disconnect all users. Note carefully if you use Lion you probably need to download the real airport utility.. 5.6 to accomplish anything useful.

Time Capsule 4 gen. with iMac OS X Lion 3 Windows PC (XP OS, Vista OS, Seven OS) cable modem with TC as Wi-Fi. Time Machine on iMac found TC for backup easily. Have Wi-Fi access on PC XP with Airport utility but cannot create TC.

Installed today Time Capsule 4 gen. with iMac OS X Lion. I also have 3 Windows PC (XP OS, Vista OS, Seven OS). Internet Access is cable modem with TC as Wi-Fi. Time Machine on iMac found TC for backup easily. Have Wi-Fi access on PC XP with Airport utility but cannot create TC. Does the Airport utility under Windows is way to access backup capabilities with TC ?

The TC is really just an external networked hard disk plus router.. you can access the hard disk and place files on it from any computer. You can backup any computer to the TC but it will have to use a backup software in windows.. there are literally thousands available. The built in msbackup is horrible.. but you can download lots of different software and buy then online for not a lot. Macrium Reflect has a free disk image backup, and when you pay for it includes incremental. I think disk images are well worth it, as they recover much better.. and their is a proper method of recovery using a boot cd.
BTW the TC space is not endless. And it is designed to hold a large number of incremental backups.. so anything you do in backing up several machines will make the number of backups limited. Remember you can also use a usb hard disk plugged in as a Network accessible disk. But it has to be formatted HFS+ or Fat32.. the later being highly undesirable.

Sudden Time Machine & External HDD Problems -*All Backups gone

I really hope someone can help...
Today, I went to backup my MacBook Pro files using Time Machine and my external HDD, as usual.
Until today, Time Machine and the HDD have been running fine, and today I saw all backups in the HDD going back to September 2011.
However, today when I tried to backup an error message came up saying there was not enough disk space on the HDD. Here's the error message:
>>>
Time Machine could not complete the backup.
This backup is too large for the backup disk. The backup requires 299.79 GB but only 50.95 GB are available.
Time Machine needs work space on the backup disk, in addition to the space required to store backups. Open Time Machine preferences to select a larger backup disk or make the backup smaller by excluding files.
<<<
Nothing would work. So I deleted 1 backup to free some space, but the same error kept coming. I deleted another backup...no go.
Then all of a sudden all HDD in Finder is showing NO backups/files/folders...nothing!!!
Time Machine still thinks all the old backups are on the HDD. So does finder, which shows the following for the HDD:
Capacity: 159.7 GB
Available: 50.95
Used: 108,747,599,872 bytes (108.75 GB on disk)
Yet NO backups/files/folders are showing on the HDD under Finder and Time Machine won't recognise the old back-ups — ie, it says "Oldest Backup - None, Latest Backup - None"
I've tried all sorts of things... including restarting, shutting down, repairing the HDD via Disk Utility etc and the tips here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthre...t=time+machine
But nothing is helping.
I really don't know what to do next.
(BTW, by chance, i did keep two of the old backups that I copied over today from the external HDD to my internal HDD)
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thank you.

1. Although I wouldn't recommend what you are asking to do nor do I know if you can do it with the device you are buying (if it has its own RAID card you may not be able to do anything with it.) However, for a software RAID using Disk Utility you would need to partition each drive before creating any RAIDs. Let's assume you partition each drive into two volumes. Call them A1 and B1 and A2 and B2. Then you can create one RAID using A1 and A2, and a second RAID using B1 and B2. Keep in mind that you cannot access two partitions on a single drive simultaneously, so when trying to access one RAID you will find that you lose any RAID speed benefits when trying to access the other RAID to, say, copy data from one RAID to the other or when trying to copy data to both RAIDs from another source.
2. If a RAID is connected to a FireWire port or to the USB port on the AEBS, then it can be used as a TM backup drive. TM can only have one backup volume on any one computer, but multiple computers can backup to the same TM backup drive or to other backup drives, but it would be more efficient for all the computers to backup to the same TM volume. TM will backup each computer separately into discrete folders on the backup drive.
In my opinion I would recommend having a single 2 TB RAID volume that is connected either to a FireWire port on one of the networked computers (and set up as a shared drive) or connected to the USB port on the AEBS. Each computer can then backup wirelessly to the drive except for the computer to which the drive is connected via FireWire, if that's how you choose to set it up.

Time machine fails backing up with a "backup disk not found" error after upgrade to Lion 10.7.2

Time machine fails backing up with a "backup disk not found" error after upgrade to Lion 10.7.2. I've erased and reformatted the drive; reconnected Time Machine(it saw it) and began a new backup. The backup starts again but fails before completing with backup drive not found error. I used the 10.7.2 combo update. Any help on how to fix this problem would be appreciated.

Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!
After waiting since October for a fix, I have now upgraded the firmware on the Time Capsule and installed the new Airport Utility, released yesterday, and the situation is even worse.
Up until now, the Airport Utility had an option to disconnect all drives manually and the Time Capsule would then work until the next reboot – a temporary (?) work-around.
Now that option does not exist in the new-look Airport Utility. And the Airport Utility installation can’t be rolled back and the old utility won’t restore.
The sparesbundle is still not accessible. Anyone worked out a work-around in the new environment yet?
I have another Time Machine backup working fine to a trusty old Lacie Drive so erased the one on my Time Capsule to see if that works. I have renamed the Capsule and the Time Capsule Drive. But to build another full backup will take at least two days and I shall be away from tomorrow and am reluctant to leave the Capsule and computer up and running for a week. And I’ll bet the sparsbundle will still be nowhere to be found.
How can Apple screw up so badly when they are to become the richest company in the entire world and – soon – will have more cash in the bank than the entire United States? Can’t they afford someone who really can sort this out? Especially when a Firewire connected hard drive – my trusty and simple LaCie – works fine.
Words, almost, fail me.

A Macbook/Time Machine/Time Capsule epic - still in progress. Please help!

I'll try and keep this to the point.
I decided to upgrade my Macbook's 160GB Hitachi hard drive to a 500GB Samsung model. I also have a 500GB Time Capsule that has has an ongoing Time Machine backup going back to June 13, 2008.
I figured that I would change out the HD, then use the 'restore' function in Time Machine to bring the system back to where I left it. I figured that's exactly why I purchased Time Capsule in the first place.
The drive installed and formatted (using 'zero fill' to check for drive errors) just fine, and the restore kicked off great. The estimation was for something like 28 hours (for 49GB of data) which was a bit alarming but apparently not unheard of.
A day later, I found it stuck at 71% or so, and checking the install log revealed that I was getting 'error -36' messages for several music and video tracks in iTunes. It literally got stuck for about 8 hours, taking about half an hour to realize that each song was going to be an 'error -36' before moving on to the next one, and so on.
It was clearly never going to finish, at least not this year.
I clicked on stop, clicked to confirm that I was sure...and then it hung. I tried quitting the installer, which also hung, so in the end I was forced to do a hard power down. When I rebooted using the Leopard DVD, I attempted another restore, thinking I'd choose another date from which to restore. This time, however, opening up the Time Capsule drive hung.
OK, Time Capsule's Time Machine backup file is now toast. End of story.
Here's my question: I figure my next step is to figure out whether the HD in Time Capsule is faulty or whether the backup file itself is corrupt. I'm now 'zero fill' erasing the TC's HD. Does this give you a surefire way to tell that the drive is in good condition? If it fails, I guess it's under warranty. If not, I'll start a new backup from scratch (I don't see what else there is to do at this stage, frankly) and try to restore that and see how that goes.
Does anyone know what an 'error -36' is, anyway? Can anyone tell me if I've missed something, or some reason why this may not have worked as well as it was supposed to? Or anything that I should do next that I may not have thought of?
Thanks so much,
Michael.

I will remember to try to repair the TC disk via Disk Utility next time - I didn't even know you could do that until now! Thanks for that. In that case, I agree that I wiped the drive, because it would have been a great opportunity to try out the repair function and see if it could have made it work.
Well, the good news is that I have succeeded with my original intention, which was to replace my internal HD with a larger one, using Time Machine/Time Capsule to bring everything back. It worked perfectly, and I now have a Macbook with a 500GB drive. Awesome! By the way, I can recommend the Samsung drive if anyone is thinking of making the switch. So far, excellent performance, near-silent operation, and loads of storage space - for now!
The solution to the problem became clear once I erased the TC's HD and wanted to start over. My idea was that I would make a complete Time Machine backup, then change out the drive, then restore.
After the erasure, I found that the backup would not start, and everything about the Mac was sluggish! I cycled the power on the Time Capsule, and everything was like new once again. I restarted the backup and without delay, it started backing up - and fast.
Once this completed, I did a restore, and the estimated time was 8 hours. Big improvement from 24! After just 80 mins, it had restored 25% of the system - and this is wirelessly (using 'N')! Clearly, everything had become jammed up and during my previous restore attempt, it pretty much ground to a halt.
So everything is great now. It is possible that I didn't even have file corruption after all, perhaps just a refusal by the system to go any further. I won't know now, but should it happen again, I will power cycle first as well as run repairs on the disk via Disk Utility. I suspect that this is all that was needed.
Thanks for the responses again, and hopefully this post may help someone in the future.

Time Machine - strange behavior while deleting old backups

Not sure if this is the right place, because this is actually not on Time Capsule, but on a Time Machine on an external USB drive.
In any case, I searched the web for "time machine delete old backups" and found many discussions of various aspects of this task. My objective is to clean up a partition on a the external drive that I no longer use for active TM backups, but to retain a small set of backups in case I need to go back to them. The partition now has other uses and I need the space. My main TM backup is now on a separate Time Capsule.
So again my objective is not to remove all backups, but just most of them.
It appears that the well-discussed procedure is the following:
Go into Time Machine.
Select the Macintosh HD.
Go back to one of the oldest backups.
Click on the Gear > click Delete Backup.
This procedure will remove one Backup at a time, and it seems to take 5 - 10 minutes for each backup.
Here is what I noticed that was "strange":
You could delete a selected backup using the above procedure.
For the first selected backup so deleted, there is a confirmation dialog with a warning message that it is not undoable.
After clicking OK on the warning message, the display backs up to the "Present" backup, and the administrative password is requested.
After the administrative password is entered, the backup starts but control is passed back to the user interface, and another backup can be selected to be deleted.
However, after the second backup is selected and deleted, there is no warning dialog, and no request for the administrative password. At this point the user interface is busy and nothing more can be done until the backup delete is completed. Except that the Time Machine can be exited by first pressing Escape, then Cancel on the lower left of the screen.
If the time machine is exited, there is a Delete Backups progress dialog with a progress bar for each backup so far requested. If the second backup was requested, as in the steps above, there would be two backups.
I discovered by playing around that either you had to wait within Time Machine for the deletion to complete, or alternatively exit Time Machine. While I was not sure what was going on, I kept starting one backup, then exiting Time Machine and re-entering Time Machine and requesting another delete operation. Each time after entering Time Machine, the warning/admin password sequence occurred and I was able to exit. And then immediately re-enter Time Machine and request another backup. Only by exiting and re-entering could another delete request be made.
When out of Time Machine, I thus saw the Delete Backups dialog with any number of concurrent "Delete One Backup" progress bars.
Because of the nature of the hard links used to indicate backups, I was wondering if these multiple delete operations could possibly be hung in a deadly embrace, so I decided to only do one at a time. Some further study to see if the multiple delete operations were all able to complete would be needed to know if this would be a good way to "queue up" multiple delete requests.
Bottom line: seems like kind of an odd implementation. Would be really nice if you could select many (say 30) individual backups and delete them all at once, rather than taking 5 - 10 minutes each. Again, this is because I am trying to reclaim disk space, but not delete all the backups from a Time Machine backup set that is not in active use.
Also, the method of "queuing up" backup delete requests is kind of odd, but seems to work, with the proviso that I have not yet confirmed that doing more than one at a time actually works.

Heinz-G?uenter Arnold wrote:
since the upgrade to SL it seem that Time Machine has problems to completely remove old backups completely. The "removed" backups do not show up in Time Machine anymore, but the backup folders and part of their contents can still be seen in Finder.
Hi, and welcome to the forums.
That happens occasionally, in both Leopard and Snow Leopard, sometimes after something was deleted from the Finder, but also after an abnormal shutdown or improper disconnection of the TM disk.
Run a +*Repair Disk+* on it via Disk Utility, in your Applications/Utilities folder. If it finds errors, but can't fix them all, run it again (and again) until it either fixes them all, or can't fix any more.

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.

HT201250 Is there any way to schedule backups on Time Machine? I hate it that backup happens every dang hour. I would like to have it back up at night.

Is there any way to schedule backups on Time Machine? I hate it that backup happens every dang hour. I would like to have it back up at night.

Richard Campbell2 wrote:
I hear you, I do. But the problem is that with my Mac, I have to stop and postpone whatever project I am working on while the backup occurs. It just slows down my computer.
Then something is wrong with your backups. Changing the interval will only deal with they symptoms, not the actual problem, and you won't be as well protected as with hourly backups.
If the backups are much larger than they ought to be, see #D4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
If the sizes are reasonable, but it seems to take too long, see #D2 there.

Getting this error: Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you.

I keep getting this error on my new Macbook Pro w/ Retina.
"Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you."
Connected to a wifi network and QNAP storage system. There are 5 computers on this network, and each backs up just fine. The issue is isolated to this one machine.
This error shows up every week or so.

A third-party NAS is unsuitable for use with Time Machine, especially if it's your only backup. I know this isn't the answer you want. I know Time Machine accepts the NAS as a backup destination. I know that the manufacturer says the device will work with Time Machine, and I also know that it usually seems to work. Except when you try to restore, and find that you can't.
Apple has published a specification for network devices that work with Time Machine. None of the third-party NAS vendors, as far as I know, meets that specification. They all use the incomplete, obsolete Netatalk implementation of Apple Filing Protocol.
If you want network backup, use as the destination either an Apple Time Capsule or an external storage device connected to another Mac or to an 802.11ac AirPort base station. Only the 802.11ac base stations support Time Machine, not any older model.
Otherwise, don't use Time Machine at all. There are other ways to back up, though none of them is anywhere near as efficient or as well integrated with OS X. I don't have a specific recommendation.
If you're determined to keep using the NAS with Time Machine, your only recourse for any problems that result is to the manufacturer (which will blame Apple, or you, or anyone but itself.)

Time Machine/Time Capsule issues

I have had a never ending series of Time Machine/Time Capsule issues. There's little to configure, so there's not much I could be doing wrong.
One thing I have especially noticed, is that Time Machine is interfering with iTunes. iTunes has frozen for a time or locked up when Time Machine is backing up.
Another problem I have seen is the console log flooded with some sort of waiting for index error. Yet another are messages like -
"Jul 14 14:43:56 MJBook /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder[176]: StatusMonitor::volumesChangedCallBack returned -47"
The only thing I have ever found odd about my situation is that I am running a Time Machine and three other Airport Express devices. One of the Airport Express units uses WDS, and I heard that could create issues.
Any ideas?

I have the same question and I see you posted yours in March. So this forum is REALLY helpful...
My Mac consultant doesn't use either so is not much help. He says to erase T.C. and start over, but it also contains all my backups for my other Mac which have worked perfectly. When I select T.C. in T.M. the only option is to Remove Disk; I want to save the MacBook backups. I also tried wireless as he suggested but got the same warnings as above so went back to Ethernet. Plus nobody can tell me how to access T.C. in Disk Utility to try to fix it.

Time Machine/Time Capsule problems - won't backup

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