time machine backup fail

[bluethunder]

A while back Time Machine failed to back up and gave me an error message suggesting I use disk utility to repair the external hard drive. I tried that and it said the drive didn't seem to need repair. The next thing I figured was that the external hard drive had gone bad. It's three years old. I bought a new one and I'm still getting the same error message. I did some digging around on here, downloaded the Time Machine Buddy widget (I think that's what it was called) to log errors. Below is what I'm getting. In between the two pieces is a long list of picture names. I can't find anything that tells me what an error 11 is or what to do about it. I don't know what to do at this point. I haven't made a backup in a couple months now as I just haven't had time to mess with it. But if I happen to crash and lose some of what I have on here now, I'll be in heap big sheep dip. Help? How do I get this going again? And thanks in advance.

I think all this started when I moved a bunch of pictures from one folder to another, if that's any clue.


Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/My Passport/Backups.backupdb
Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: HD 10-19-2010
Node requires deep traversal:/ reason:must scan subdirs|new event db|
No pre-backup thinning needed: 31.24 GB requested (including padding), 229.63 GB available

Copied 46154 files (1.1 GB) from volume HD 10-19-2010.
Copy stage failed with error:11
Backup failed with error: 11

[harryb2448]

Good luck however personally prefer to clone to the external rather than use TM. CarbonCopyCleaner will clone all to drive, including Recovery partition. SuperDuper does not clone recovery but this is no problem if OS X.7/8 is copied to a USB thumb drive before running the Installer.

[osxx]

Have you run Repair Disk Permissions on the internal drive?

[bluethunder]

I'll try that right now. Estimated time is about an hour and I'm seeing a lot of differing permissions already. I'll let you know the outcome.

[chscag]

I don't believe repair permissions is going to work. It appears the backup image is (are) corrupt. I would do one of two things: Follow Harry's advice above or wipe the external drive clean and start Time Machine over again. Personally, I keep two backups: One using Carbon Copy Cloner as primary, and the second being Time Machine.

[bluethunder]

I had tried a brand new and freshly formatted hard drive and I got the same error.

[chscag]

Now that I'm looking a bit more closely at the error it appears it's not with the external drive but with your internal hard drive. Repairing permissions may in fact be what is needed; member osxx may be right. Let us know how that went.

[bluethunder]

It's done. It didn't take an hour. There was a long list of permissions repaired. I've rebooted on the internal hard drive now and have started a TM backup. We'll see if it finishes this time.

[bluethunder]

No luck. It has failed again with the same error. Rats. Now what?

[bluethunder]

I'm repairing disk permissions on the internal hard drive again and it's finding a whole lot more of them. Could the internal hard drive be so messed up that I should replace it?

[chscag]

Let's not try to repair permissions again. Most of those so called errors don't really mean anything anyway. However, I did find something interesting in the Apple Community Forums. Take a look at this discussion and try what he did to solve the problem as it sounds familiar to what you said in your first post. Discussion LINK

[bluethunder]

Wow, thanks for digging that up. I'll exclude the folder where those pictures are that are causing the problem and see what happens. There are some 22 GB of pictures there.

[osxx]

Do you have iPhoto installed?

[bluethunder]

That did it. It finally got through a backup and just now finished. It's the first one in three months. I didn't realize it had been that long. I'm glad that's going again.

I have iPhoto. I don't use it for much.

Now how do I get this folder of pictures to back up again? It has several subfolders in it. Maybe I'll try allowing one subfolder at a time and see what happens. Or with a folder of 22 GB, would I be best to off-load that onto something else and leave it there? Say, a partition on the external hard drive or something similar?

[chscag]

Now how do I get this folder of pictures to back up again? It has several subfolders in it. Maybe I'll try allowing one subfolder at a time and see what happens. Or with a folder of 22 GB, would I be best to off-load that onto something else and leave it there? Say, a partition on the external hard drive or something similar?

I think the idea of off loading those photos on to a separate hard drive or perhaps a flash drive is probably a good idea. I'm sure you would hate to lose that many photos (which are probably not replaceable) in the event of a disaster.

An even more elegant solution would be to buy a Blue Ray burner and disks and burn those photos to Blue Ray. Albeit a bit expensive....

Anyway, I'm glad to hear your Time Machine is working again!