Give it a number of hours (perhaps a day) to fix itself, and then see if progress resumes as usual.īeyond these problems, you might be experiencing several issues with Time Machine. If these problems are the case, then you should allow Time Machine's hangup to resolve itself over time. In these cases, Time Machine may take a while to clear out enough of the prior backups to fit any new data to be backed up from your system. If your Time Machine drive is full, then the system should regularly purge files from it to make room however, this may also take time, especially if you have inherited the drive and its backups from another system. The Time Machine status in OS X can be seen here in the system preferences. With messages from this process listed, you can see if the most recent activity involves "deep traversal" or similar deep scans that may be the cause for the hangups. You can usually see this by going to the system console, and searching for the process "backupd" (the Time Machine background process). Therefore, it will perform a "deep traversal" of your system, which may take a long time. If you have not backed up in a while, then Time Machine will not be able to create a quick incremental backup, as it will not be able to verify the existing backups match the state of your system. There are several reasons why this may happen, including if you have not backed up in a while, your backup drive is full, problems with the current backup instance, and faults with the backup drive as a whole. While Time Machine should maintain hourly backups, there are times when it can stall and not progress beyond its status of "Preparing backup." You can see this status show in the Time Machine menu extra, as well as in the Time Machine system preferences. I'm a happy camper! (Although if TM had choked on another file, I'd just repeat the process.Apple's Time Machine is its built-in full-system backup technology, that will back up to networked storage like Time Capsule devices, in addition to locally attached hard drives.
I decided to delete my install of FireFox Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/fault/urlclassifier2.sqlite to (null)" The problem was with this file used by FireFox. TimeMachine aborted with " Error: (-36) SrcErr:YES Copying. Wait until it errors.Įnter !! in Terminal to view the end of the log. If you see a TimeMachine error, great! if not, run TimeMachine now. No need to start searching from the beginning, look at the end of the log.
Open Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal) Firstly, the trick was to understand what file / files was causing TimeMachine to choke. I, too had the same error and was able to solve it without doing anything drastic. I hadn't used Time Machine to recover anything, and its incremental backups were becoming unusually large lately-so I wiped the external disk and started from scratch. Interestingly, the backup was failing on a different file every time, but my patience was exhausted. Specifically, I tried deleting (or, actually, renaming) the Spotlight Stores folder corresponding to Backups.backupdb and running mdimport on /Volumes/Lacie Backup/Backups.backupdb. Porst describes in his article "X.5 Time Warp 2".
Google was minimally helpful, though I did work through some of what Sven-S. I repeated the backup several times with similar results. Jan 11 21:33:00 ralph /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd: Backup failed with error: 11 Jan 11 21:32:56 ralph /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd: Copy stage failed with error:11 Jan 11 21:32:56 ralph /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd: Copied 21765 files (39 KB) from volume Macintosh HD. Jan 11 21:32:56 ralph /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd: Canceling backup. Jan 11 21:32:56 ralph /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd: Aborting backup because MDBackupIndexFile failed
Jan 11 21:32:56 ralph /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd: MDBackupIndexFile returned -1101 for: /sw/share/terminfo/w/wyse160-vb, /Volumes/Lacie Backup/Backups.backupdb/ralph/ Jan 11 21:32:56 ralph mds: (Error) Backup: doBackupIndexFile could not stat backup location /sw/share/terminfo/w/wyse160-vb /Volumes/Lacie Backup/Backups.backupdb/ralph/
Lately, it's been doing some unusually large backups which I was having trouble explaining, but otherwise things were going fine. It works well, though I've never needed to use it. I've been using Time Machine since installing Leopard, keeping my hourly/daily/weekly backups on the 250G Lacie drive that saved me back in October.