Wifi hangs on wakeup if Time Machine running

OS X Lion: If time machine is running when I lift the lid on my MB Pro sometimes, but not always, the wifi shows as having no connection. Networks are visible but none are current, selecting one quietly does nothing. If I turn wifi off from the menu bar it quietly shows wifi as off but checking in System Prefs shows it's still running. Turning it off in System Prefs sets the waity spinny icon going forever. If I stop Time Machine backing up, when it finally cleans up my wifi comes back again and everything returns to normal. Obviously this is frustrating, it can take sometimes 5 minutes to get wifi back again.
Thoughts, Suggestions?
thanks.

Just wanted everybody to know that I'm running 10.7.1 and I have the same exact problem on both of my MB Airs (13" 2008 and 11" 2010 models). All is fine if lid is not closed while time machine is running. I'm not patient enough to wait time machine to stop running since that seems to take forever without connectivity to backup disk. I have instead resorted to force rebooting my laptops in problematic cases. Hope it is a known issue and the fix is coming in near future.

Similar Messages

Time Machine Runs All Night...Every Night.

Ove the past month or so I've noticed Time Machine seems to be running (especially at night) any time I'm not actively using my MacBook. (When I'm using the MB it seemed to operate normally backing up every hour or so.)
I initally thought that after a year's worth of accumulated back ups, the Time Machine file was getting too large to efficiently manage. So, not needing all those backups I wiped the hard disk that contained the back ups and started from scratch. (I back up to a hard drive, via wifi, through an Airport Extreme.)
I also Verified/Repaired the disk through Disk Utility.
This seemed to help for a coupe of days, but eventually it was back to the same, Time Machine chugging along seemingly all night. And now, the MB was getting warm when it really should be mostly idle.
So, I did some more research and found this webpage below that suggested if all else fails do a "Full Reset of Time Machine". The proceedure involves deleting the Time Machine ".plist" file and resetting your preferences. Your back up files will stay intact.
http://pondini.org/TM/A4.html
Wow! This really did the trick! Time Machine no longer runs all night long, and even the hourly backups during the day seem to process much quicker. So, if your Time Machine seems to just constantly chug along when you think it should be idle - give this a try.
Thanks to Pondin for putting the info out there that really helped me......
As an aside.....
I'm fairly new to the world of "Mac". I've had this MacBook a little over a year. In that time I've had 3 issues with: IPhoto, Mail, and Time Machine. (The programs just started acting "wonky".)
All these issues were fixed by deleting a ".plist" file (or a group of ".plist" files).
What are these ".plist" files and why are they always getting corrupted? Is this common? Am I doing something wrong? Is there anything I can do to make the files a little more roubust and keep them from getting corrupted?
Seems like one goes bad every 4-months and takes the app down with it.
Q.

Noelle Buscher wrote:
I dont recall this problem a month ago when I first got the Time Capsule. I do remember seeing the Time Machine running quite a bit, but it didnt affect my performance (at least not to the degree that I was going up and turning it off all the time)
Opening a webpage...takes about 10-15 seconds. Of course, I look up at the Time Machine and it is running. Opening a file takes forever...ESPECIALLY a Photoshop or other large file. Time Machine is running.
I will STOP the back-up so I can get something accomplishes...but ultimately have to go up and just turn it off completely, as it starts running again shortly.
Is there a setting for only running a backup once a day? I cant find it.
No, as Time Machine is designed to run hourly, and ordinarily works best that way.
You've clearly got something else going on here. I'd recommend starting by doing a +*Repair Disk+* on the sparse bundle. See #A5 in the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of the +Time Machine+ forum.
If that doesn't help, try all the things in #D2 there.
Once you get it doing regular backups, see if the size makes sense considering the amount of changes you think you've made. If the backups seem too large, see #D4 in the Troubleshooting Tip. You may have an app that's causing extra-large (and therefore lengthy) backups.

HT1277 Mail has gone crazy. Header's and messages are mixed up. New Mac Book Pro. Migrated files from Time machine running snow leopard. Reinstall or new computer needed?

Mail has gone crazy. Header's and messages are mixed up. New Mac Book Pro. Migrated files from Time machine running snow leopard. Reinstall or new computer needed?

Ok; I'm not sure what you're doing. 36 hours is rather long. Seems like a new migration. Not what I intended.
Here's what I intended: from the newly-migrated and apparently-corrupt environment, create a new user, not related to any existing user, nor any migration-created user, or any other user for that matter. That is, use  > System Preferences > Users and Groups, authenticate yourself by clicking on the padlock, and then click the + and create a wholly new user. Then log in under that user and establish the mail access.
36 hours? I'm wondering if there's an error or an exceedingly slow network here? Or a really, really slow disk? Or a sick backup? (WiFi isn't the path I'd usually choose, either.)
Failing the attempted second migration, I'd try a different tactic. Does your existing (old) system work? If so, I'd bypass the backup and connect an external (scratch) USB disk drive to the (old) sstem and then boot and use Disk Utility booted from the installer DVD disk or boot and use Disk Utility from the recovery partition or booted from a recovery partition created on some other external storage (details here vary by the OS X version and what hardware you have), and perform a full-disk backup of your original internal disk to (scratch) external storage. (Make sure you get the source and target disks chosen correctly here; copying the wrong way — from the scratch disk to your existing disk — will clobber your data!) In esssence, this will clone your existing boot disk. Then dismount the (formerly-scratch) external disk, transfer it over to the new system, and use it as the source of the migration, by performing a fresh OS X installation on the new system.
Target Disk Mode is also sometimes an option for accessing the disk for a migration, but that requires the right cable, and requires systems that have the same external connection; newer MacBook Pro systems use Thunderbolt for this, and older systems tend to use FireWire. And I'm guessing you don't have compatible hardware.
The details here can and do vary by your OS X versions and your particular Mac systems — if you'll identify the specific models and hardware, somebody might be able to better tailor the above (fairly generic) sequence to your particular configuration.

Trouble with Time Machine (runs constantly). Erase and install?

Trouble with Time Machine (runs constantly). Tried re-installation (equivalent of archive install) of Snow Leopard. Time Machine still unable to complete a back-up. Erase and install recommended at Genius Bar. Have backed up data to external HD using Super Duper. Should be a bootable backup. Last successful backup through Time Machine was 6/1/11. Not sure if I can access this back-up if I erase and re-install.
Computer shipped with Tiger (7/2007). Have original disks. Now running Snow Leopard. So: erase HD, install Tiger, then update to Snow Leopard? Start-up from Tiger disks does not appear to work (starting up holding "C" key). Suggestions? Want very much to transfer data to new iMac, but do not want to carry bugs forward. Very nervous about erasing HD. And have the questions above about reinstalling system software.
Advice desired! Thanks.

Well if you can hold option and boot off the Superdupes clone and it works fine then you should be set to do what you need to do to the original boot drive.
Disconnect all drives and c boot off the Snow Leopard install disk, use Disk Utility to Erase > format HFS+ journaled your internal boot drive.
Quit and reinstall OS X Snow Leopard, setup (do not use Setup/Migration Assitant!) and update to 10.6.8
When you setup the new install, use the same hard drive name and user name as you did before.
Now the free iLife that came on the Tiger disks you won't get naturally, but you can pick them off the disk with the shareware program called Pacifist.
install your programs from fresh sources, this way you don't get the "crap" from the older setup.
Once your machine is up and going. Hook up the clone and transfer your user folders over manually. With iTunes just replace the whole folder. Because you kept the same user and boot drive name as before, the playlists should be fine.
Once your all peachy, take the opportunity to clone this new setup to a external drive, label and disconnect.
Make another clone for day to day, or week to week clone updates and your just a hold option boot away for recovery.
You know Superdupes and Carbon Copy Cloner both have auto-scedualing/updating ability, so you can leave them plugged in and it will perform a update so your clone stays fresh and recent.
But you should keep a clone timed back about a couple of weeks back just in case you install something bad and don't learn about it right away.

Do I need to have "Time Machine" running in the background all the time or can I turn it off and on say once a week?

Do I need to have "Time Machine" running in the background all the time or can I turn it off and on say, once a week?

Robert Kempner wrote:
Do I need to have "Time Machine" running in the background all the time ...
It is how it is designed to be used. How Time Machine Works its Magic
Robert Kempner wrote:
... can I turn it off and on say, once a week?
Why..?
Perhaps TM is not for you... See Time Machine vs. Clones and Archives
More Info here > http://www.reedcorner.net/guides/backups/ch2.php

Time machine running slow and slowing network access

I have had and continue to have issues with wifi on my MBP. Those are pretty well summarized in https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5535320?start=30&tstart=0. I've been able to make mt system usable with some of the less dodgy workarounds in that thread ( like keeping a ping on my router running )
That thread really doesn't mention the issues I've been having with time machine though, so I thought I'd bring this up here. Whenever time machine starts up, Safari and mail become unresponsive. It's worst when TM is "preparing" of "cleaningup", though barely usable during the actual backup. Mostly, I can work around that too, but occationally, TM will find GB of data to be backed up and lock up my mac for a day. Here's a recent example:
2/16/14 12:30:27.952 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Starting automatic backup
2/16/14 12:30:28.466 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Attempting to mount network destination URL: afp://;AUTH=No%20User%20Authent@MyBookLive._afpovertcp._tcp.local/TimeMachine
2/16/14 12:30:33.866 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Mounted network destination at mount point: /Volumes/TimeMachine using URL: afp://;AUTH=No%20User%20Authent@MyBookLive._afpovertcp._tcp.local/TimeMachine
2/16/14 12:31:44.678 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Disk image /Volumes/TimeMachine/sparky.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
2/16/14 12:31:46.613 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Backing up to /dev/disk2s2: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
2/16/14 12:34:07.904 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Will copy (1.66 GB) from Macintosh HD
2/16/14 12:34:08.004 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Found 83487 files (1.66 GB) needing backup
2/16/14 12:34:08.738 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: 4.16 GB required (including padding), 445.21 GB available
2/16/14 1:32:33.579 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 534.6 MB of 1.66 GB, 28317 of 83487 items
2/16/14 2:40:02.513 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 564.1 MB of 1.66 GB, 30225 of 83487 items
2/16/14 3:46:20.853 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 593.2 MB of 1.66 GB, 31631 of 83487 items
2/16/14 4:48:19.461 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 621.8 MB of 1.66 GB, 33182 of 83487 items
2/16/14 5:00:31.968 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Bulk setting Spotlight attributes failed.
2/16/14 5:54:51.036 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 658 MB of 1.66 GB, 34773 of 83487 items
2/16/14 6:17:20.839 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Bulk setting Spotlight attributes failed.
2/16/14 6:56:27.566 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 688.2 MB of 1.66 GB, 36246 of 83487 items
2/16/14 7:57:07.076 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 704.8 MB of 1.66 GB, 37267 of 83487 items
2/16/14 8:58:52.469 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 730.7 MB of 1.66 GB, 38724 of 83487 items
2/16/14 10:09:42.807 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 760.5 MB of 1.66 GB, 40291 of 83487 items
2/16/14 11:21:25.825 PM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 803.8 MB of 1.66 GB, 42462 of 83487 items
2/17/14 12:30:58.322 AM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 834.1 MB of 1.66 GB, 43513 of 83487 items
2/17/14 1:45:28.495 AM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 846.1 MB of 1.66 GB, 44160 of 83487 items
2/17/14 2:45:36.010 AM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 868.6 MB of 1.66 GB, 45485 of 83487 items
2/17/14 3:57:29.939 AM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 890.6 MB of 1.66 GB, 46729 of 83487 items
2/17/14 5:07:30.971 AM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 926.7 MB of 1.66 GB, 48695 of 83487 items
2/17/14 6:15:49.283 AM com.apple.backupd[11557]: Copied 963.7 MB of 1.66 GB, 50583 of 83487 items
This is on an AC router. My peak throughput shows 19 Mb/s on menu meters, so, not great, but not this slow. Mostly, the network activity is nothing with short bursts of higher throughput.
I'm hoping this will be addressed in 10.9.2. In the mean time, are there any workarounds to get past this issue short of turning off TM?
Thanks,
Horst

These instructions were taken from Mac OS X Hints at:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050302225659382
The Unix program dd is a disk copying util that you can use at the command line in order to make a disk image. It makes a bit-by-bit copy of the drive it's copying, caring nothing about filesystem type, files, or anything else. It's a great way to workaround the need for Norton Ghost.
Normally, in order to make a disk image, the disk you're copying from has to be able to spin up and talk -- in other words, it's OK to make a copy if the disk is healthy. But what happens when your disk is becoming a doorstop? As long as it continues to spin, even with physical damage on the drive, dd and Mac OS X will get you out of the fire.
We had a situation recently where a friend sent a disk to us that had hard physical errors on it. It would boot in Windows, but then it would hit one of these scratch marks and just die. We fired up dd, and it started OK, but stopped at the same physical error location -- complaining about a Hard Error.
So the workaround was to designate the dd mode as noerror -- which just slides over the hard stops, and to add the mode sync, which fills the image with nulls at that point. We did it on BSD Unix, but as long as you can get the hard drive attached to your Mac, the command is the same:
dd bs=512 if=/dev/rXX# of=/some_dir/foo.dmg conv=noerror,sync
The bs=512 designates block size, and the if=/dev/rXX# is the UNIX path to the actual disk device. Make sure that the chosen directory (some_dir) has enough room to take the entire disk image -- which will be equal to the size of the drive. Since dd doesn't care about the contents of the drive, it copies every bit on the thing, so you get an image equal to the disk's capacity. A really big file. One workaround is to put it on a RAID array.
Once you've established the disk image (in this example, foo.dmg), you're almost home. Here's where your Mac OS X box is far and away the best thing to have. In this example, the dd output file is foo.dmg. You have to realize that this is an exact copy of a busted drive, but the "holes" are filled with nulls. As long as the damage isn't to the boot sector, though, when you double-click on it, Mac OS X mounts it without breathing hard ... who cares if it's FAT32, NTFS, whatever.
Due to the size of the image that we were copying, we put it on a RAID array, and had to access the image over the network -- it still mounted fine. In straight UNIX, if you try to mount a disk image, it complains that there is "no block device" and fails. Once your image is mounted, it appears in your Finder, and then it's easy work to retrieve the critical files from the image -- usually things like .doc files and .xls files and the lot.
Finally, since your disk is actually dying, once you have your image, you can drop it to tape or something and you've not only recovered your files, you've made a viable backup as well. Once again, that which destroys a Windows box becomes a play thing to a Mac OS X box.

Why does ext HDD / time machine run slow?

Apologies if this is answered else where, but I can't find any answers.
I have a MBP running OSX 10.6.8. Connected to it as a Time Machine is a Freecom 400GB 28147 uk, external hardrive connected over USB 2.0. I also have a Mac Mini running 10.6.8.
When connected to my MBP, I have found that it is extremely slow to read files. I gave up using it for Time Machine a while ago as I thought there was a problem Time Machine software causing it to run slow. I have also tried to read the time machine backups through finder and they are still slow to read.
Today (don't know why i didn't do it before now) I plugged it in to my Mac Mini with USB 2.0 and found that I can read all the time machine files at lightning speed, far quicker than my MBP which can take 2-3 mins to open a folder. I have noticed that the hard drive doesn't make its usual whurring noise when im trying to open a folder using the MBP, right up until the last minute before the folder opens.
Does any one have any idea about what might be causing the problem when the the ext HDD is connected to my MBP?
Any thoughts or suggestions greatly appreciated.

larryfromjackson wrote:
I'm backing up to a Drobo with four 2-Gig drives.
How are you connected to it? Network problems could explain at least some of what you're seeing.
More often then not I don't know how long the backups take because when it becomes to annoying I stop the backup.
That guarantees that Time Machine will have to do a "deep scan" the next time, comparing everything on your system to the backups. That does take a while, but if there are no other problems shouldn't have a major impact on performance.
All of that said, I can't say for certain that there isn't something else going on. Generally the way I notice the slowdown is when my keyboard inputs come out screwy -- ingB instead of Bring, pplAication for Applicaton for example. When I know that this is happening I can work "around" it by typing the first letter, pausing for a second or two, then typing the remander. Does any of this ring an bells?
I've not heard of that specifically, but if you're connected to the Drobo wirelessly, and using a Bluetooth keyboard, there are reports of interference between the two. Try a wired keyboard temporarily, and/or different WIFI channels.

Time Machine runs huge backups all the time. Any Idea Why & How to Fix It?

Right now System Preferences for TM says there is 881MB of available space on my Time Capsule with 998GB of storage. The TM system preferences has been stuck for hours saying it's backed up 31GB out of 68GB. No error messages. My wife and I only use the TC for TM backups.
Any idea why I'm not getting the much smaller incremental, hourly backups that I"m expecting? This is really slowing down my system.
Thanks,
Bob
Late 2008 MacBook, Mac OS 10.7.4

bobair1 wrote:
Thanks for the info. Yes, I am running Windows XP with VMware Fusion. I keep my data files segregated from the "dark side". So if I opt out of backing up VMware, will my data files still be backed up?
Yes. See #D4 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting

Wifi issue - Sleep/resume when Time Machine is active results in lost connection

I was having issues with wifi connectivity to my Time Capsule since upgrading to Lion. I've narrowed down the scenario to having my Macbook go to sleep when Time Machine is backing up. When I later resume, my wifi connection is dead and I have to disable/reenable to connect to the Time Capsule.
Running early 2011 Macbook Pro 15" with OS X Lion.

I am having the same problem.
The only short term fix I have found is to Force Quit Finder (press Alt + Cmd + Esc, or go to menu bar Apple Logo -> Force Quit then select Finder and click Force Quit). Finder then quickly restarts and I am able to reconnect to my WiFi.
I was hoping the latest update, OS X 10.7.1, would have resolved this but unfortuately it has not. I hope Apple can resolve this issue quickly.
Dan
p.s. I can't confirm that this problem only occurs when my mac goes to sleep during a Time Machine back up, simply becuase I have not checked for this. I will try and check and report back.

WiFi does not connect whilst Time Machine backup occurs at startup

This is a problem I've had since the beta test session and does not seem to have been fixed.
If I shut down the computer in the middle of a backup or a backup strats immediately on opening the lid of my computer (MBA late 2010), the WiFi does not connect. If I am patient, eventually the backup will terminate and I can then connect. My router is a Time Capsule, and all software is up to date.
I don't recall having this problem with Snow Leopard.

You can't - once posted in a particular discussions area, that is where it remains - unless a moderator moves it to the appropriate area, or a more appropriate area.
You start here, and then narrow your choice down to the appropriate discussions area.
http://discussions.apple.com/index.jspa?categoryID=1
Since you are running Leopard, go to the Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard area, and below this category is a Time Machine discussions area.
http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=235

Is there a way to put system to sleep after Time Machine runs?

I don't need to run Time Machine every hour, especially since my TM disk is on Firewire and not built in (had a disk fail with TM volume on same disk - bad idea)
When TM runs, it has to spin up the Firewire external disk, so I just run TM by hand now. I'd like to do this when I go to dinner or to sleep etc
Is there a way to have the Mac system sleep after Time Machine finishes running? An AppleScript perhaps?
thanks

William Donelson wrote:
Nope, there is an error message and TM does not automatically run when the drive comes back online.
What is the error message?
I have not seen one, and that is exactly how I use TM. Unmount, turn off the drive. Turn on the drive, the backup volume mounts automatically and TM resumes its scheduled backups.
Your Console logs will reveal the times in which TM attempted to back up but could not find the device:
Dec 21 10:23:04 Johns-iMac.local com.apple.backupd[1216]: Starting automatic backup
Dec 21 10:23:04 Johns-iMac.local com.apple.backupd[1216]: Backup failed with error: 1002
Dec 21 10:23:07 Johns-iMac.local com.apple.backupd-helper[1198]: Not starting Time Machine backup after wake - failed to resolve alias to backup volume.
Dec 21 11:23:04 Johns-iMac.local com.apple.backupd-helper[1408]: Not starting scheduled Time Machine backup - time machine destination not resolvable.
The last entry will repeat every hour, until it finds the TM device. Its normally scheduled activity will resume when it does.
" Web pages that refresh themselves can prevent sleep..." such as the NY Times home page...
As if I needed another reason not to read that rag.

Problem with Time Machine, running Snow Leopard

Hi all,
Last week I had a new hard drive fitted into my iMac 8,1, after which Snow Leopard was reloaded (10.6.3 from the disc, updated to 10.6.8), followed by the restoration of data via Time Machine from my external hard drive. Whilst my Mac is now running beautifully, I am having problems backing up with Time Machine.
When I run a backup, it prepares about 100,000 items, then starts to backup, usually about 650mb. It crawls along in kb until it gets to about 1mb, then jumps quickly to the end, but then it adds extra mb on the end. Then it suddenly starts again "preparing x items....." and off it goes again.
I have tried repairing the backup disc, and it appears to be ok. I even erased it and started again. Time Machine did a full backup (139gb) in about 2 hours, then immediately added another 640mb at the end - strange, but I do at least have a full backup from yesterday. But now, everytime I run backup, it looks for the same sort of figure (650-700mb) and then goes round in circles.
Any help would be very much appreciated!
Thanks, David

Hi Eric
Thank you for your reply. Here are the screenshots for each change:
Having prepared about 95,000 items, the backup of 612mb begins
14 minutes later a message appears
Another 3 minutes and another message. You will see from this screenshot that the backup figure has changed to 613.1mb
Another 30 seconds and it all begins again....
And finally, 7 more minutes pass, another 96,000 items are prepared, and another 604.8mb backup begins.
I might add, that between posting this morning, and your reply, I also went into disk utility, chose the top leve of the external drive, clicked on the partition tab, charged current to 1 partition, renamed the drive, erased it, and did a full back up of 139GB. After 137GB it started again, looked for 602mb, backed them up and finished the backup, which is why TM states that the last back up was at 18:16 today.
Thanks again
David

Time Machine running on Linksys WRT600n with external drive.

Hey Folks,
After searching the internet for the answer on how to setup OS X Time Machine on my Linksys WRT600n with storage link, and finding nothing or only parts of what I needed, I finally got it to work. Hopefully this will help you in your setup.(this should work for any linksys routers with storage link.)
1) First you will need to attach your external USB drive to the Linksys Router, and format it using the linksys utility. This will format the drive as fat32 so it can be access by the mac and the router.
2) You now need to create a share on the drive using the Linksys utility (I called mine "TimeMachine") and grant R&W permission to it. I found and article that said you have to create a group called "root" and a user called "root" within that group, then grant the group R&W access to you share. I did this but I am not sure if its required. you may be able to edit the default "admin" account.
3) Once you have the share created you should be able to access the share from your mac by logging into it using your (Linksys) "root" account and password. Make sure you can save a file here. You maybe able to create a folder but make sure you can save a file (.doc for example).
4) Apple has blocked the use of unsupported drives in Time machine so you will have to make a change for this to work. open a terminal window and type the following in one line:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
Hit enter, and close terminal.
5) For some reason Time Machine will have issues creating the .sparse bundle Disk required for the backup over the network. So you will have to create it yourself. Safely unplug the USB drive from the router and plug it into your mac. Open disk utility (applications > utilities > disk utility) and create one the same size as your external drive.
parameters:
- Volume name: "Time Machine" (has to be this to work)
- Mac OS Extended (Journaled);
- No partition map
- sparse bundle disk image
Make sure the sparse bundle is in the share folder. If Time Machine had created this sparse bundle it would named it after your machine. You will have to rename it accordingly. This is the required format 'computername'_'mac address without colons'.sparsebundle
(eg. "joe's MacBook Pro_000000000000.sparsebundle")
6) Once all the above is complete you can reattach the drive to the router, and attach to the share again from your mac. Open Time Machine and you should see your share. Setup Time Machine to use this drive. You may want to be connected using Ethernet for the first backup as it may take a while.
I have found the wireless backup to take a bit of time to prepare and run but it seams to work nonetheless. The slowness could be caused by the difference in mac addresses from wired to wireless. So you may want to change the sparse bundle file name depending on how you are accessing time machine.
Hopefully this will work for you as it did for me.

I am afraid I have to pour some cold water on your enthusiasm.
Yes, what you say can get TimeMachine working, but there is a nasty snag:
WRT600N uses FAT32 for its external harddrives and (regretably) understands nothing else. FAT32 has two restrictions:
1) Maximum file size is 4GB
2) (a lesser-known one) Maximum number of files in a directory of 65,535.
The first restriction isn't really a problem because Time Machine organizes its data in 8MB "bands", which are files within your sparsebundle directory.
The second restriction, however, will cause Time Machine to eventually hit a brick wall: The sparsebundle bands are given a sequence number in hexadecimal and there isn't really a limit to how many you can have. If you run Time Machine on a large harddrive attached to the WRT600N, you will eventually run into a situation where you are hitting the 65,535-files-in-a-directory limit. Time Machine will, therefore, run for a while and then suddenly fail for no apparent reason.
Given the parameters of Time Machine, you can't run Time Machine reliably on a WRT600N with an external harddrive larger than 8MB * 65535 = 512GB. If that's good enough for you, then great. If not, you can do one of two things:
1) Get something that doesn't format its harddrive in FAT32.
2) Install DD-WRT on your router (thus voiding its warranty), fight with it for a while in order to get SAMBA running on it, and gain the ability to format your harddrive in Ext2.
I hope this helps somebody.

USB hard drive used with Time Machine runs continually

I have a USB SATA external hard drive that I am using for my Time Machine backups. The drive is configured to run on USB power. The drive begins running as soon as it is connected to the port, and runs continually, as long as it is connected. I expected the drive to sleep between TM backups, to save the moving parts. Is there any way to keep the drive sleeping until a TM backup is done, and then go back to sleep?

Kenneth Mclauchlan wrote:
I have a USB SATA external hard drive that I am using for my Time Machine backups. The drive is configured to run on USB power. The drive begins running as soon as it is connected to the port, and runs continually, as long as it is connected. I expected the drive to sleep between TM backups, to save the moving parts. Is there any way to keep the drive sleeping until a TM backup is done, and then go back to sleep?
I believe that is up to the drive manufacturer. In the Preferences Energy Saver see if you have checked "put drive to sleep when possible" and see if the external drive sleeps when you put the computer to sleep. If it does not then it's not a "sleeper." Even if it does, it may not have an internal clock or switch to sleep after so many minutes of inactivity.
Can you use the drive with external power? See if that does anything.
My LaCie d2 quadro sleeps between backups. I don't use USB, I use FW800.

Upgrade Internal Hard Drive and Time Machine runs first back up as new full

I recently upgraded my internal hard drive on my macbook to a larger and faster model, my old one is still fine. I went to run a Time Machine back up and it starts a new back up even though its not supposed to. How do I get it to recognize the old / original back up instead of running a new full back up on the new internal hard drive?

William Beede wrote:
In my case I backed up my old internal hd to my new external 1 TB hd.
Surely you mean you used +Setup Assistant+ or +Migration Assistant+ to transfer the data? Or a "clone" via CarbonCopyCloner, SuperDuper, or Disk Utility?
Now it appears TM wants to ADD the contents of my new internal hd to those already backed up(another 220 gb).
Yes. As posted, to TM it's a new, different drive. TM will back it up. You cannot prevent it.
I wonder if I need to format the new drive and start over??
Yes, that's probably your best bet.

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