Time Machine wont mount backup, wants to create new one.

I'm running OSX Lion 10.7 on an iMac 27 with an intel i5 2.7 GHz processor.
I received a notification that Time Machine wasn't backing up.
Somehow the external backup drive became disassociated with TM. So I re-selected it and TM began preparing for a backup. A few moments late a warning popped up stating there was not enough space on the disk to complete the backup.
I entered Time Machine to free up space however, TM had created a new backup file and now it won't mount the original one. I've tried deleting the new backup file, hoping TM would mount the original, but it just keeps creating new ones.
I noticed the new backup file name was different to the original. After looking in to it further, it appears as if this was due to some changes I'd made in my file sharing settings, a couple weeks back, while trying to download some photos from am Android phone. I changed the name back, however, TM still want's to create a new file and still won't mount the original.
The last time it successfully backed up was Oct 30th and the good news is, I can manually open the original backup file in Finder, and see all the old files.
I've read through a number of trouble shooting sites and I've already checked for and installed all updates with no luck.
I really could use some help with this. Any and all input would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

No, I don't think playing around with the sparsebundle is very good idea ever.
If you are now down to that level. Move the old sparsebundle off the TC. Either delete the whole thing and start over.. or save it beforehand.
It is possible to archive off the old sparsebundle, although it is pointless if it is corrupted.
You can copy it to a USB drive on the computer.
See Q18 here. http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
That will take a long long time so be warned.. and do it with ethernet.. otherwise it will take forever.
You can also do the archive directly to USB disk plugged into the TC. You need a hard disk at least as large as the data.
And you will need to use v5.6 airport utility because Apple deleted it in the new version.
If you run Mountain Lion (Lion is easy) you can download it and install by a trick.
That will then give you access to archive and you can use that to save the present hard disk info.. then erase it and start over.
How to load 5.6 into ML.
1. Download 5.6 for Lion.
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1482
Click to open the dmg but do not attempt to install the pkg.. it won't work anyway.
2. Download and install unpkg.
http://www.timdoug.com/unpkg/
Run unpkg on the desktop.. it is very simple.. drag the AirPortUtility56.pkg file over to unpkg.. and it will create a new directory of the same name on the desktop.. drill down.. applications utilities .. there lo and behold is Airport utility 5.6 .. drag it to your main utilities directory or just run it from current location.
You cannot uninstall 6.1 (now 6.2 if you updated) so don't try.. and you cannot or should not run them both at the same time.. so just ignore the toyland version.. the plastic hammer.. and start using 5.6.. a real tool.
For screen shots see this post.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4668746?tstart=0

Similar Messages

External hard drive partition for Time Machine wont mount

I have an external HD that I've partitioned half for Time Machine, and half for external storage. Today the Time Machine partition wouldn't show up on the desktop. I checked Disk Utility and it recognizes both partitions, but the Time Machine partition is greyed out. When I selected it, in the stat list at the bottom it said "Mount Point: Not Mounted." I then clicked on "Mount" at the top, and after a bit a popup told me it couldn't mount and I should attempt to repar the disk. So I clicked "Repair Disk," and after a while, I finally got the message "Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files."
Why is only one partition affected? Can I reformat one petition but leave the other untouched? Are there any other options before I do this?
One other item that is probably related: I've been having an issue with a flash drive that seems to constantly unmount itself, giving me "error, disk ejected improperly" messages. Earlier today I believe I had the same thing with my external HD.

Why is only one partition affected?
The drive malfunction that caused the problem only affected that partition.
Can I reformat one petition but leave the other untouched?
Yes.
Are there any other options before I do this?
This is not an option, it's mandatory: start a new backup on another drive. The one you have has lost data once already. If it were mine, it would be in the recycling bin now. You need more than one backup to be safe anyway. Apparently you have no backups at all of the data on the other partition. That means you're going to lose that data, sooner or later.

Time machine wont complete backup,

HI everyone-
I am having an isue with time machine-- I am running 10.7.5 on a macbook pro-- My last backup was on August 15, and I have not created a significant amount of new work since then, nor have I added any new Applications, or changed OS
Essentially, the Time machine backup is running extremely sluggish- I started it at 9:50 this most current time, and it has backed up 9.64 of 143.76 GB.
I have tried the following:
stopping and re-starting the backup
Stopping the backup and re-starting the computer
Letting the backup run all night (it failed last night)
I ran the disc utility and repaired permissions on both the external drive (passed)
I did the same for the hard drive - It passed the repaired permission, and had one error that it repared.
I cleared out my external drive in the hopes that it would fix itself-- it didnt--
I am now going to make a cloe of the drive for saftey... any one have any thoughts??
does this seem like an issue with the drive, or the OS itself?
Charlie

Cancel the backup.
If you have more than one user account, you must be logged in as an administrator to carry out these instructions.
Launch the Terminal 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 Terminal in the icon grid.
Triple-click the line below to select it, then drag or copy into the Terminal window — do not type — and press return:
sudo launchctl remove com.apple.metadata.mds
You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up. If you don’t have a login password, you’ll need to set one before you can run the command.
Start a backup, or wait for it to start automatically. If the issue is resolved, reboot.

Time Machine Wont Mount

Hi,
Hopefully someone can help here, I have a mid-late 2007 Al 2.0 Ghz iMac, and I had the weirdest thing just happen. I was watching a video on quicktime and decided to plug in a jumpdrive, it didnt mount so I unplugged it.
The OS then told me that it was unplugged without ejecting and it unmounted all of my disks (one labeled videos, my TM and the jumpdrive i guess). I got an error about the Videos disk when it auto remounted saying it needed repairing, but Mac Os could not (Fat32 format). I rebooted to see if that would correct the mounting error, and then neither of my two disks would mount.
I rebooted with the leopard dvd to check the os drive to make sure it was not corrupt, and the TM hd was mounted there as a generic drive, HSF+ formated, but would not verify or get any details. It also would not eject at all.
I rebooted again back to the regular os (start up disk returned no errors when checked) and the Videos disk mounted without a problem, but the TM disk wont. It wont show up in Disk Utilities either. It does however show up in about my mac as an external drive.
The output of my /dev
/dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local)
fdesc on /dev (fdesc, union)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, automounted)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted)
/dev/disk2s1 on /Volumes/VIDEOS (msdos, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners)
and the info on system profiler of the TM drive
External HDD:
Product ID: 0x0910
Vendor ID: 0x1058 (Western Digital Technologies, Inc.)
Version: 1.06
Serial Number: 574341505A30363236353239
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer: Western Digital
Location ID: 0xfa430000
Current Available (mA): 500
Current Required (mA): 2
now if i list my /dev I do get a retun of the following disks
disk0
disk0s1
disk0s2
disk2
disk2s1
disk3
disk3s1
disk3s2
if i try to force mount the drive in terminal I return
Nobodys-imac:~ admin$ mount /dev/disk3
mount: /dev/disk3: unknown special file or file system.
So im thinking I hosed the drive, but it wasnt reading/writing when it was force unmounted earlier.
Its spinning and it sounds like the drive is seeking or reading/writing.
Any thoughts are appreciated.
Thanks for reading,
Brian
Message was edited by: brian.parker

It figured itself out I guess, I rebooted for the third time and time machine kicked in and started back up, no problems for several days now.

Time Machine questions: Handling backups for multiple Macs to one FW drive

I am reviewing the Time Machine thread and seeing a lot of helpful information, but I would like to ask something I haven't quite found yet.
We have 2 Leopard Macs, a MacBook Pro and an intel iMac... with plans to upgrade another MBP from Tiger to Leopard at some point.
In planning for Time Machine, we set up a 1 TB drive, attached it via FW 800 to the iMac, partitioned it GUID for Intel, and made 3 partitions, one for each planned Mac we want to back up to it.
I started Time Machine on the iMac first and the first backup of about 100 gb took maybe 4 hours.
Then we tried to start the Time Machine backup for the MBP over the network (wireless). It was understandably much slower and quit with some error last evening, so I took advantage of the pause to move the notebook to a wired ethernet connection. It got even slower so this morning I directly connected it FW 800, erased what had been backed up, and started over. So far, so good. 6GB out of 100 in 10 minutes or so. The idea being, if we can get the first backup completed faster over wired connection, maybe doing the incrementals over wireless network will be okay. Sounds like some folks are doing that successfully. I am hoping that works out.
Questions: Was it necessary to partition my 1TB drive into a partition for each Mac's Time Machine backup? I did make each partition bigger than the hard drive it is designated for.
To get the MBP to mount the external FW drive on its desktop, I had to disconnect the drive from the iMac. Is there any way I can connect the FW drive to both the MBP and the iMac (the drive has two FW 800 out connections, so it is physically possible)? I'm thinking (from reading posts of others with notebooks) that one strategy is to connect your notebook to your Time Machine drive at night and let it back up, but it'd be great if I could leave the iMac connected while doing so. Is there a way the volumes on the drive can mount on both desktops?
When I try wireless again, I'm seeing mixed posts regarding whether the MBP will need a password to log in to the remote volume each time, or only the first time when the Time Machine backup is established... if I could get clarification on that, it would be helpful.
Thanks!
thanks

What do you see on your notebook when you click on your TimeMachine icon in the Dock?
My notebook is mounting the backup drive on an hourly basis, running a backup, and looking like it is doing something... but when I then look at TimeMachine, I can't see the backups. (On my iMac with the drive directly attached, I see a progression of windows showing all the hourly backups the last 24 hours, etc.) I just called Apple to ask why this is so, and they told me they couldn't help me because wireless Time Machine backups aren't supported.
I know backups to a hard drive attached to an Airport Express Base Station are not supported. But when they say "You can designate just about any HFS+ formatted FireWire or USB drive connected to a Mac as a Time Machine backup drive. +Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices+"... well, how can you DO that?

When I tried to back up my computer, Time Machine says 'an error occurred while creating the backup folder.' When I check the side of the partition where I manually saved old files, the folders are there, but NONE of the files are.

I haven't backed up my computer in over a year. When I tried to back it up today, Time Machine says 'an error occurred while creating the backup folder.' When I check the side of the partition where I manually saved old photos and documents (including all the pictures from the year I studied abroad/traveled a bunch), the folders are there, but NONE of the files are.
Does anyone have any idea what the problem might be, or how I could fix it? I really don't want to lose all those photos

So you were doing a time machine backup to another partition on the same hard drive? Just trying to gather some information so i can provide a helpful response.

Time Machine wont backup

I bought an external hard drive and put files from my old computer on it before I bought my iMac. Now I want to use it for backing up my iMac but Time Machine wont backup to it without erasing the contents. Is there a way around this? Or will I have to buy a new EHD? Or is there a way to backup to cyberspace?
Thanks

jmhoskin wrote:
I bought an external hard drive and put files from my old computer on it before I bought my iMac. Now I want to use it for backing up my iMac but Time Machine wont backup to it without erasing the contents. Is there a way around this? Or will I have to buy a new EHD? Or is there a way to backup to cyberspace?
The drive is probably set up with the MBR (Master Boot Record) partition map, that Windoze uses. To use it for TM you must completely reformat it, which will erase it. If you have enough space (or can borrow another external temporarily), you can copy the data off, reformat it, then copy the data back.
TM works best with it's own, exclusive space, so you should partition the drive anyway. If you're going to use the other data with a PC, make the other partition MS-DOS (FAT).
For formatting instructions, see item #5 of the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip* at the top of this forum.
Also see #1 of the FAQ Tip for size considerations.

I had a repair done at the apple store where the replaced my hard drive and copied my other hard drive over to the new one. Everything is fine except the time machine wont reconnect to my old file and is trying create a new file but not enough space?

I had a repair done at the apple store where the replaced my hard drive and copied my other hard drive over to the new one. Everything is fine except the time machine wont reconnect to my old file and is trying create a new file but not there is not enough space for both files files? Do I need to do something to have it continue to update my old file instead of recreating a new one?

Depending on what version of OSX you're running, and how the data was transferred, you may be out of luck.
If you're running Lion, and your backups were made to a directly-connected external HD (ie, not a Time Capsule or other network location), you may be able to get Time Machine to "associate" the new disk with the old backups. See #B6 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting, especially the pink box there.
If you're running Snow Leopard, you might be able to do a full system restore of your backups to the new HD. See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #14 for detailed instructions. That should leave a "trail" that Time Machine can follow to "associate" the new drive with the old backups. Unfortunately, that doesn't always work, and there's no way to do it manually, as there is with Lion.

Time Machine warning: An error occured while creating a backup folder. What to do???

Time Machine warning: An error occured while creating a backup folder. What to do???

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 that corresponds to an abnormal backup. Now
CLEAR THE WORD "Starting" FROM THE TEXT FIELD
so that all messages are showing, and scroll back in the log to the time you noted. 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 to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste (command-V) into a reply to this message.
If all you see are messages that contain the word "Starting," you didn't clear the text field.
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.

Time Machine Error: "The backup disk image could not be created." Help.

I have two Macbook Pro's. One is able to backup to the Time Capsule with no problems. The other connects just fine to Airport Utility, but I get the following error after I attempt to backup: Time Machine Error: "The backup disk image could not be created."
I have reset the Time Capsule several times, so that is not the fix.
The first thing I see when attempting to open Time Machine is the following message: :The storage location for Time Machine Backups can't be found." It gives me the option to setup the Time Capsule, which I select. The next thing I select is to Change Disk. The window that opens has the Icon with Three people on it. The name of that Icon is The Moreman Time Capsule. I select it, and enter the password I created. I then choose to Backup. Then I choose to backup now. That is when I get the error: Time Machine Error: "The backup disk image could not be created."
Any ideas? Has anyone encountered this problem?

You have to delete the .dmg file and start over. This happened to me 3 times already, I finally switched to Déjà Vu, works perfect and only once a day instead of 24 times a day.
http://propagandaprod.com/

HT3275 TIME MACHINE ERROR: The backup disk image "/Volumes/Data/Sean McGuire's MacBook Pro.sparsebundle" could not be created (error 1).

I can select a disk (Time Capsule) and initiate the backup. It only "waits to back up" then "making backup disk available" and remains frozen there. I tried to update the software a while back and was unsuccessful, I think that may be the issue.
Any insight would be greatly appreciated. This is the error message I receive.
TIME MACHINE ERROR: The backup disk image “/Volumes/Data/Sean McGuire’s MacBook Pro.sparsebundle” could not be created (error 1).
Thanks

See #C17 in Pondini's excellent support document Time Machine - Troubleshooting
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html

Time Machine will not backup after an error creating the backup folder.

I have TM that will not make backups anymore after getting an error trying to create the backup folder. It wasn't able to complete that backup so it will not create new ones.
I also have a huge file in the backup directory:"dateofbackupattempt.inprogress". It is 231 Gb as if it was trying to do a complete backup instead of an incremental one.
Any idea how to fix this?
Thanks in advance!

georgefrommosman park wrote:
Thank you Pondini.
The Time Machine symbol in the menu appears as a grey ghost, not the black symbol usually seen.
That sounds like Time Machine is turned OFF (on the Preferences panel).
I assume you clicked the TM icon in your menubar or Dock and selected Back Up Now?
It had not saved a thing and the partial file in the folder was dated back to Feb when it all stopped recording. I repaired the disc again. No issues noted.
That sounds like a backup didn't get started at all.
Tried to restart Time Machine. Same grey ghost.
Do you mean moving the big slider button on the TM Prefs panel to ON, or Back Up Now?
Decided to erase and start anew. Got the message cannot erase as disc cannot be unmounted.
Where to next? Help!!!!
Assuming you were doing Back Up Now, let's see what your logs show. Use the widget in #A1 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting to display the backup messages from your logs. Locate the backup in question, then copy and post all the messages here.
Also either tell us what's on the Preferences panel, or post a screenshot of it.

I am getting a Time Machine error "The backup disk image could not mount"

Time Machine message "The backup disk image could not be mounted"

Go to Pondini's Time Machine FAQ for assistance.

Logic Board replaced, Time Machine wont recognize old backups

I just got my Logic Board replaced and obviously having the problem with Time Machine recognizing old backups. I looked at old forums and found the macosxhints page (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080128003716101) on how to fix the problem but when I try to enter cd /Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb into terminal it gives me a message saying "no such file or directory" i dont know where to go from here any help would be appreciated thanks for your time

instead of Time Machine in that command you should enter "name of your TM drive" (put the name of your TM drive there and KEEP THE QUOTES). However, as you seem to be unfamiliar with terminal you will very likely have further problems following that hint. Try this one instead
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20081216145458979&query=%2Bfsaclctl

Time machine won't backup. Says disk is full ( stand alone disk). Souldn't it delete enough to create new backup. Last backup was 7/20/11. When I click "enter time machine' it goes to mail screen and nowhere else.

Time machine won't backup. Says disk doesn't have enough room. Shouldn't it delete old info to make space for new.
When I click on "enter time machine" it takes me to the last backup 7/22/11 and doesn't allow me to go further back.

No idea's?
I'm starting to think I just need to delete the sparsebundle file altogether and start over again...

Time Machine wont mount backup, wants to create new one.

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for