Time Machine Gone Wild

I noticed yesterday that TM was running continuously (icon in top of screen) even though my USB HDD was quiet. The only thing I can recall doing that may have caused this was that I drug a folder off my XP machine onto my MBP for b/u purposes.

I tried everything I could think of to shutdown TM or eject/dismount the HDD but nothing worked. I then tried to restart the MBP but it hung up and showed nothing but my desktop art and the mouse was responding. Finally I held down the on/off button until it shutdown. Restarted and everything is fine but I'd like to avoid this problem.

Was putting the XP file on the MBP the culprit?

If I were you I'd get the latest version of Onyx and run all the maintenance routines. That should clean things up, and make sure that permissions, etc. are all correctly set. Then I'd just wait and see how Time Machine performs. I don't think moving a folder over from a PC would cause any problem.

if you open TM from the systems menu there is a status bar telling you how far along it is in the current backup in process

Was putting the XP file on the MBP the culprit?

Click to expand...

Could be, but to be quite truthful, sometimes TM can get into the state you are seeing. 9 times out of 10 it's best to let TM finish what it is doing regardless of how long it is taking. Sometimes TM can be incredibly slow to finish what seems to be the most basic of tasks.

If you really do need to cancel the backup and the GUI controls are not functioning (many times it simply doesn't work), you can always open up

/Applications/Utilities/ActivityMonitor

and look for the backupd process via the filter box on the right. When you find the backupd process, select it and click Quit Process from the toolbar. This will terminate the backup daemon. When your next backup interval arrives, the daemon will restart. However, if you use this approach TM will have to re-backup all the work that was doe for the failed backup interval so this could end up taking longer and longer.

For this reason, I recommend using the above approach only as a last resort.

Time Machine was created to backup all files that have changed since the previous backup and do so on an hourly basis ( unless you tweaked this setting )
Dragging a new folder on your hard disk indicates that some files have changed since the previous backup and TM will recognise this.

The time it then takes for TM to backup the new folder depends on how large the new folder is.

Every time you interupt a TM backup will increase the time for the next backup to complete.

So .... let TM finish what it started, no matter how long it takes.

You can monitor the logs to see how much TM needs to backup and you can see a real time progress in the TM menu bar icon.

Be patient ;D

Cheers ... McBie

Thanks for the feedback, guys.

The folder I moved is about 11 MB so I felt that TM running all day and part of the next day was excessive especially since the external HDD was not being accessed. Maybe I'll try that folder again to determine if it was the problem now that I've got some better ways to back out of TM if it chokes again.

Keep in mind that TM keeps it's own internal bookkeeping. Just because the folder you mention is only 11MB, that doesn't necessarily mean that that's the only thing TM is currently backing up at that time so it's often tough to judge exactly what TM is doing at any given backup interval.

where do i get onyx from and what does it do?

ah hang on... found it but it says 10.6.... im using 10.5? can i still use it or is there another clean up type prog i can use..

found onyx for 10.5!

lookmanohands said:

found onyx for 10.5!

Click to expand...

Please share the linky!

Titanium Software

hope that helps !