Sunday 23 January 2011

Fixing Time Machine Backup Errors



Recently, I had been getting an error from my Mac's Time Machine as follows:

The backup was not performed because an error occurred while copying files to the backup disk. The problem may be temporary. Try again later to back up. If the problem persists, use Disk Utility to repair your backup disk.
That pretty much kept telling me that it couldn't perform the back up.

At first I thought it was a problem with my back up disk as Time Machine had mentioned. So I did the following:
  1. Deleted the Time Machine partition on my back up disk through Disk Utility
  2. Repaired the back up disk
I tried the process again, but it still gave me an error. 

After searching for similar problem, I came across some posts that advised to disable spotlight indexing, but that didn't seem to help. Finally, I stumbled across a post that mentioned the use of the OS X console application to see what was wrong. 

Through the help of the Console application (which can be found in Applications > Utilities > Console), I was able to determine that what happened whenever I started a back up was that it would give me a error message whenever it tried to back up a particular file. Turns out that the file was locked, and could not be copied by Time Machine, so it kept saying that there was a problem with the back up disk.  Deleting this file fixed the problem, and it seems like Time Machine is backing up things just fine right now.






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2 comments:

  1. I get the same errors. I have viewed the console log, and I can't seem to see where the error is with regards to time capsule. I so see several errors though, one which is syncing to my gmail account but I can't tell what file is the error. Would this sync issue also cause a problem with time capsule?

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