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.

Similar Messages

Why am I unable to connect to my airport whenever I put my computer to sleep while the time machine is backing up?

Ever since I installed Lion (version 10.7), I am unable to reconnected to my Time Capsule and get on the internet after I put my computer to sleep and then wake it back up. This doesn't happen all the time -- just when I put my computer to sleep when Time Machine is backing up. If I put my computer to sleep when it's not backing up, it's fine. If it is backing up though, when I wake my computer up again, it is unable to reconnect to the Time Capsule to allow me to use the internet. I have to wake the machine up, click on "Stop Backing Up", wait 30-60 seconds, click "Turn Wi-fi off", wait another 30 seconds, turn it back on and then I am fine. If I just turn wifi off and on without stopping the backup, it doesn't work and I am still unable to connect to the internet. I currently have 10.7.1 but it still has the same bug. 10.6.x did not have this bug. Other than "don't put your computer to sleep when Time Machine is backing up," any suggestions? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

In this case, that hint may help.
According to Apple support, some configuration files may get damaged or corrupt by time, after updates or upgrades and should get deleted ocasionally.
OK ... switch off wifi on the machine.
Then go on and delete the files mentioned below.
You will find the files on your system drive (not your home folder) as follow:
/library/preferences/com.apple.preferences.accounts.plist
/library/preferences/com.apple.preferences.sharing.plist
/library/preferences/SstemConfiguration/preferences.plist
/library/preferences/SstemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist
If there are files in this folders with the same name but additional .orig at the end, delete them too.
It is possible that not all files are on your system. That will be ok.
The files will get newly created by system on reboot.
For that reboot the machine.
Join your wireless again.
If you are using Lion, the Library is hidden. You have to use (menu bar) "go to" -> "go to folder" on finder to access them.
If the problem (unlikely) persists, report back here.
Lupunus
Message was edited by: lupunus (typo's fixed)

I just restored my 13" MBP i5 at the apple store to the newest version of Lion after issues with a previous Time Machine backup from Snow Leopard- this time I created a new account and just ported files and folders, and now MS Office doesn't work. Help?

I just restored my 13" MBP i5 at the apple store to the newest version of Lion after issues with a previous Time Machine backup from Snow Leopard- this time I created a new account and just ported files and folders, and now MS Office doesn't work.
^^ that's the main problem. Here's the full history.
I bought a new 13" i5 MBP, early 2011 edition. I had an old white Macbook 2.14 ghz core2duo on Snow Leopard. I attempted to port over my time machine backup, but encountered problems in that my User was inaccessible from the new computer after the import finished, and I had to go in and change the root password, etc, and for some reason or another, I couldn't install any programs at all from that administrator's account. By "couldn't" I mean I could install them, but upon installation they would never boot. So, I took it to the apple store and did a clean install from the most up to date Lion OSX. Then, I created a brand new admin account, instead of trying to import the old one, and things seemed great. Then, I just imported my old files from the TM backup, but not any system settings, permissions, or user data. Just my Docs, pics, vids, apps, and itunes stuff.
Here's where things get weird again. I imported this stuff under the name "old", but all of these folders have a red negative sign on them, marking them as restricted. So, from my main admin account, I cannot even peruse these folders. Since I didn't import user data, I can't sign in to the "old" account to change permissions. I already tried to change the permissions from system preferences, but that didn't change anything. And now, for whatever reason, of all the apps that were imported then, MS Office is the only set of apps that does not work. When I click on it, it just says there was a problem and asks if I'd like to send a report to apple. I tried reinstalling it to no avail. I'm an English student, so i really need access to Word. Can anyone help? The Apple store is a major detour for me and would like to fix this issue myself.

Most likely you have Office 2004 which are PPC-only applications and will not work in Lion. Upgrade to Office 2011. Other alternatives are:
Apple's iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.)
Open Office (Office 2007-like suite compatible with OS X.)
NeoOffice (similar to Open Office.)
LibreOffice (a new direction for the Open Office suite.)

When Time Machine is backing up, my computer is so slow that it is essentially useless. Backups occur irregularly, and take a long time.

When Time Machine is backing up, my computer is so slow that it is essentially useless. Backups occur irregularly, and take a long time. How do I get Time Machine to work properly?

Hello,
Have you verified both drives in Disk Utility?
See if the Disk is issuing any S.M.A.R.T errors in Disk Utility...
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH7029
Open Activity Monitor in Applications>Utilities, select All Processes & sort on CPU%, any indications there?
How much RAM & free space do you have also, click on the Memory & Disk Usage Tabs.
Open Console in Utilities & see if there are any clues or repeating messages when this happens.
In the Memory tab of Activity Monitor, are there a lot of Pageouts?

What to do when time machine seems stuck on "Preparing Backup"

This issue is happenning on my macbook pro, mid 2010. My drive setup is that I have a partition which I dedicated to time machine backups. The total size of my drive is 500GB, and I partitioned about 100GB for time machine. The reason for that is I only needed a few space since I setup time machine to include only the system and the apps, and NONE of the libraries such as itunes or photos. This means that the only backup will be for the system, profiles, and the app. I have been running this for a few months andhas been doing OK until up to now.
My problem is that my time machine seems to get stuck on "Preparing Backup". The latest backup was done last Nov 8, 2011, whcih is about 11 days from now. I am also aware that the time machine drive has only about 200 mb space left, but I am not worried at all because I've always TM to delete the oldest backup to free up space. My oldest backup was still Sept 8, and I'm ok if that will be deleted.
So I'd like to find out why it still stuck on "Preparing backup" ,and I am wondering if deleting a backup can solve it. Can it? what do I do to solve this?
Also, I use my computer alot , so it is basically running for about 18 hours a day, but still time machine didn't quite work well. I have tried reparing the disk using disk utility, but that didn't help.

Comments inline below.
Pondini wrote:
joshua raphael wrote:
This issue is happenning on my macbook pro, mid 2010. My drive setup is that I have a partition which I dedicated to time machine backups. The total size of my drive is 500GB, and I partitioned about 100GB for time machine. The reason for that is I only needed a few space since I setup time machine to include only the system and the apps, and NONE of the libraries such as itunes or photos.
You may want to revisit that strategy:
A backup on the same drive isn't very secure -- when (not if) the HD fails, you risk losing everything.
In most cases, if there's a problem with OSX the best way to fix it is to just install a fresh version. But you can't do that from that backup.
Indeed!
Backing-up apps that way will also be useless in some cases. 3rd-party apps that came with their own installers put other files in other places (and sometimes "helper" apps as well). Unless you know what and where they all are, and restore them, too, the restored app won't work properly, if at all.
I think you're confusing each other with terminology. iTunes music and iPhoto pictures are NOT "Libraries", which has a specific meaning when it comes to OS X. "Libraries", in OS X normally refers to /Libraries and ~/Libraries folders. This is not where iTunes music and iPhoto pictures are stored. iTunes music and iPhoto pictures are stored within ~/Music and ~/Pictures, respectively.
I have tried reparing the disk using disk utility, but that didn't help.
Disk Utility changed a bit in Lion. When you select an entire disk, it only repairs the partition map, not all the volumes. You must repair each one separately.
Wow, good to know. (What a stupid change to make, for backwards compatibility, if for no other reason!)
See #D1 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting to figure out why the backups are hanging.
Whew. This editor makes it so hard to make comments inline. The key thing when time machine seems stuck is patience. Sometimes it needs to be left to run overnight. Unfortunately, it doesn't log or report it's progress very well.
Opening Time Machine settings in Preferences plus a command like this left running in Terminal.app is how I monitor progress. And even so, there is very little logging indicating progress.
sudo tail -f /Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb/My\ Computer/2012-07-11-133352.inProgress/.Backup.363731632.496216.log
The parts in italics will need to be adjusted. Tab completion makes this easy, e.g type
sudo tail -f /Volumes/
and hit tab, type the first few letters of the relevant volume name, hit tab...
Also, I have a hypothesis which needs testing.
I know that Time Machine gets confused if one deletes large files from a backup - specifically, Time Machine doesn't recognize that the size of the backup has changed.
I know because this made restoring a thinned out time machine backup ("thinned out" by deleting files from within the GUI while inside the Time Machine) to a small SSD harder than it should have been. I had to restore to a big disk and then clone that volume to the SSD - even though the SSD had enough space, Time Machine didn't think so; it didn't "understand" that it had been thinned.
My hypothesis is that Time Machine also gets confused if the Time Machine partition is resized. I shrunk a Time Machine partition (no it wasn't on my main disk!) and about that time, Time Machine stopped working. After thinning the volume, it started working again.

System crashing when Time Machine backup starts

My MacBook Pro has crashed 4 times today. The first 2 times I wasn't around to see the crash, I just saw the message that the system had crashed and that I needed to hold down the power button and restart.
The 3rd time it happened I noticed that the Time Machine backup process had just started before the crash. I restarted the computer, manually started a Time Machine backup, and it crashed again.
It seems that the crashes are happening when Time Machine tries to backup to my Time Capsule.
Anyone have any ideas for me to try to get it working correctly, or any ideas on what exactly might be causing it? Maybe a problem with my Time Capsule? I noticed on my wife's MacBook that her Time Machine backup had failed today too. Her MacBook has not had any system crashes though.

Hi Garner,
Yes, you'll erase it with Disk Utility (make sure that you don't have any other information on the drive that you don't want to lose!).
So when you try backing up the other machine manually, does it work? If your other backup is actually working, you might want to try just erasing the old backups for the one machine that won't work and see if that helps (to avoid backing up both all over again). Just because my experience was that we had to format the drive doesn't mean that you'll necessarily have to.
And yes, if you don't ever mount the drive outside of Time Machine, that should be OK.
Hope that helps! Enjoy the long, boring backup process (sorry about that...).
—Hazy

Finder Freezing when time machine back up files

I've an 24 aluminium iMac. The finder often freeze (once a day at least) and I noticed that this is often when Time Machine is backing up files.
It's impossible to relaunch the finder and sometimes other mac apps are freezing (preferences etc..). On the dock I can still see that the finder and the apps are active but in fact there are frozen and it is not possible to force quit.
Then if I shut down the computer through the apple menu it doesn't work and the only solution is to shut down manually my iMac with the back button.
Be that as it may it is less frequent since the iMac last software update (graphic card) before everything on the screen was freezing.

I have a 1tb and 540 tb Ultramax Harddrive to support my Mac Pro G5. I originally bought the 650 when the G5 was running Tiger and it worked without fault on a 800 firewire. I partly purchased this model of drive as they advertised its extendibility. When time machine was announced I purchased a second 1tb version and installed the two drives running daisy chained by 800 firewire and they worked fine. Maybe 2 weeks after installing Leopard which had caused me problems because of the application enhancer i was not ready to use time machine so declined to switch it on.
After a few weeks and after the 650 had dismounted itself i started to find after waking from sleep the mac was frozen. There was no way out other than switch it off on the front switch. I later discovered that on powering down the 650 ultramax I could recover my processes but at the danger of corrupting the drive by not removing it properly. As I tried to work out an exit strategy to save data on the 650 I got a system warning to say the Ultramax was beyond repair and was available only to recover files. Eventually it started hanging after a few seconds so i had no choice but to lose data and reformat the drive. That failed and having already contacted Iomega support for advice with little support they eventually agreed the drive had become damaged and agreed to replace the unit.
With the new unit I expected the problem would be gone.. but it was a matter of hours before the symptoms re-emerged, not as bad as before they seemed to allow other apps to continue to run and work it just disabled the finder so i could open an application from recent apps but not through a finder window and if i asked it to open or save a file it would lock the application so much not even a three fingered quit would solve the problem it would close the app in the finder but in the close app window it would remain listed as not responding.. the only way to recover use of the mac was to power off the ultramax almost on loosing power all hanging functions would re-emerge sometimes i needed to switch the mac off.
I decided to risk setting time machine on and although it worked it hung on the first back up and ever since I have woken up the mac as i run a very eco friendly power management policy I would find the hang accompanied by time machine backing up.
I am sure time machine is part culprit in this problem although i cant work out why only the 650 suffers I have tried taking it off firewire and moving to usb and it still does the same....
Any ideas or pointers to an answer of any sort would be welcome

When Time Machine is backing up files, I can't work on other apps

When Time Machine backs up files, I am not able to work on other apps such as Safari. I try to cancel the back up but nothing happens. Then the rainbow-colored wheel appears and I can’t do anything. I have turn off the computer and the external hard drive, restart both and log in. After this happens, I see that Time Machine is no longer backing up anything and I am able to continue work on Safari. What is happening? Should I quit Safari before Time Machine starts backing up files? Please help. Thanks.

to ssis6:
I guess this is something that happens once in a while because Time Machine is backing up files now and I am able to work on Apple Discussions and reply to your post. I just wonder if in addition to your explanation, there is any other explanation as to why what I described happens. Thanks for your help.

When using Time Machine, if I delete items from my computer, will they still be backed up to access later on my external hard drive? In other words, when time machine backs up again, will it delete the files from the back up?

When using Time Machine, if I delete items from my computer, will they still be backed up to access later on my external hard drive?
In other words, when time machine backs up again, will it delete the files from the back up that I have deleted from my computer?

No, I do not believe so. Time Machine would keep all those now-deleted files in previous backups, and as time goes by those backups might be deleted if you needed room, but it would still keep one backup from each day in last month, as well as one from each week forever, as long as you don't start running out of room, then just the oldest would be deleted to make room if needed.
I use a backup drive about double the size of my drive to be backed up, so I would guess it will never get to the point where deleted files being replaced by new ones being backed fill up that drive to the point where backups actually have to get deleted.

How Can I Speed Up My MacBook When Time Machine is running on Time Capsule

My Macbook starts to run really slow and I consistenly get the color wheel when trying to do other tasks when Time Machine is running in the background. I am connected to Time Machine on a Time Capsule. Given this runs every hour its really annoying.

Plus to pondini..
If possible you can use ethernet.. that speeds things up greatly.
If you are close to the TC make sure it is connecting via the 5ghz wireless.. Check the actual wireless link speed. And transfer rates.. if rates are too slow.. then look at relocating the wireless or putting in some sort of wireless extender.
I guess the other question is what is slow.. the disk on the computer, internet, just overall feel of the computer.. perhaps give a specific.. what is slow.

When Time Machine deletes old backups......

My Time Machine disk is about to be full. I realize that when the disk becomes full, Time Machine will delete old backups.
I am not clear, however, exactly what this means.
Is what are deleted:
1. older disk pseudo-images?
2. files which no longer are on the computer?
Or is Time Machine actually deleting files which are still on the computer (but were in the old now-being-deleted backup)?
I suspect it is #1 and #2. So if you had a computer where files are added over time (without meaningful deletions), this strategy will not help a lot---you just need to get a new disk.
Is another option to just make a complete new full Time Machine backup (losing all the intermediate backups)? How is this done?

Jeffrey Folinus1 wrote:
Is what are deleted:
1. older disk pseudo-images?
I have no idea what that is.
2. files which no longer are on the computer?
Yes. More to the point, files that were changed or deleted long ago.
Or is Time Machine actually deleting files which are still on the computer (but were in the old now-being-deleted backup)?
No.
When Time Machine does it's first, Full backup, it of course copies every file and folder on your system. It also makes a folder in your backups, named with the date and time of the backup. This folder appears to contain all those copied items.
But it doesn't. It contains "hard links" to the backup copies. Think of these as extra-fancy aliases.
Thereafter, TM does "incremental" backups. It copies only the files and folders that were added or changed, and makes another dated folder for that backup. In that folder are links to the new items, plus links to the items that didn't change: so they're cleverly named "multi-links." This is how TM appears to have many full, complete backups of your system when it obviously doesn't.
When TM deletes a backup, all that's really deleted are the folder and the links.
Consider what happens when you do a normal (not secure) deletion of a normal file: OSX basically "forgets" where it was, so the space can be re-used. TM is a little fancier: as long as there's even one link to a file, it isn't forgotten, so it's available to be recovered from any backup that has a link to it, and the space isn't re-used. When the last link is deleted, the copied file is forgotten.
Thus, when you delete a backup, the only actual backup copies that are deleted are the ones that have links in no other backup. So, for example, once you've done a Full backup and a single Incremental, you (or TM) can delete the Full without losing it's copy of anything current.
Another way to look at it is, *each backup is, in effect, a full, complete copy of your entire system the way it was at the time of that backup.*
So much for "fancy." The "extra" fancy part is, TM doesn't necessarily make another link for every single file and folder that didn't change. Instead, if a folder wasn't changed, and nothing in it was changed, TM makes only a single link, to the folder. When you consider that your System folder, for example, contains many tens of thousands of sub-folders and files that rarely change, you see how efficient this is.
For more details: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/10/12/roadto_mac_os_x_leopard_timemachine.html
and: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2007/10/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14

I am getting this error when time machine tries to back up to a time capsule. "The backup disk image "/Volumes/JUDY ARCENEAUX's Time Capsu-1/JUDY ARCENEAUX's MacBook Air.sparsebundle" is already in use." Same time capsule has worked in the past.

I am getting this error when time machine tries to back up to a time capsule. "The backup disk image “/Volumes/JUDY ARCENEAUX's Time Capsu-1/JUDY ARCENEAUX’s MacBook Air.sparsebundle” is already in use." Same time capsule has worked in the past.

First, restart the computer and the Time Capsule. In most of the cases, this should solve the problem.
If it doesn't work, see > http://pondini.org/TM/C12.html

Lose internet when time machine starts backup

Title says it all. I lose internet connectivity (wireless) when time machine starts. If I turn airport on and off from the taskbar, it works and the backup completes itself.

Me too!
It used to work just fine, but ever since I upgraded to snow leopard, I was having these intermittent internet outages, and it was driving me crazy. I finally realized it was happening every time Time Machine would start up. I turned Time Machine off, and now my internet works just fine. But this is obviously not an ideal solution. I'm glad to see I'm not alone.
Anyone else having this problem??

Losing internet when time machine starts backup

is anyone losing their wireless internet connection when time machine starts its automatic backup? if so, do you know a work around?

Problem here too...it's driving me nuts! There must be a solution - but I have a feeling it'll need an airport/OS X update of some sort?

HT3275 Im getting the following error message when Time Machine is trying to backup: backup disc image/volumes/data/mycomputer.sparsebundle is already in use, how do I correct?

Im getting the following error message when Time Machine is trying to back up: backup disc image/volumes/data/my computer.sprasebundle is already in use. What does this mean? How do i correct? Thanks!

90% of the time, all you need to do is power off the Time Capsule, wait a few minutes, and power it back up.
If no luck, then go to the more sophisticated fixes in the link above.

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

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