Time Machine Acting Weird

My Time Machine backups have been flawless for 2 years since I upgraded to Leopard. I just plug in my external drive and in a minute or so, I see a little icon pop up, then the drive's status light blinks for maybe 5-8 minutes, then it stops blinking and I can close the application. However, tonight when I plugged in my external drive for a backup, no icon popped up but the drive's status light almost immediately started blinking. When I checked Time Machine, it said the "Time Machine Backup Disk Can't Be Found." The status box says the backup is "Delayed" and the next backup will be "When the disk is connected."

Any idea what's going on? The external drive's status light continues to blink like it does when it's backing up. Please help... I can't afford to lose any of my data. Thank you in advance.

Have you checked with Disk Utility to see if the drive can be accessed at all? Does it mount on your desktop? External hard drives are also subject to failure which I know doesn't help you by mentioning that, but it may be that your drive has failed.

Regards.

I went to Disk Utility and found the external drive. The utility told me it needed repair and to click on "Repair Disk." That ran forever and the external drive just kept blinking as it had been doing.

I'm thinking I'll just go to Best Buy tomorrow (this is "Tax-Free Weekend here in North Carolina) and buy another 250GB or maybe a 500GB external hard drive. However...

Do I need to re-configure anything or just bring the drive home and plug it in, letting Time Machine do its thing? Thanks again.

You should be able to plug in the new drive and go into Time Machine's pref pane to let it know you want to use that drive. It will start backing up from whenever you attach the new drive. Make sure that it is formatted HFS+ with journaling.

If you could salvage the info from the other drive it might be possible to kinda pick up where you left off. If you have 2 years worth of backups though that could take a while and would probably kill the drive.

BTW if the drive you end up with is reasonably large may I suggest setting things up so that you have a bootable Time Machine drive. That way in the event of a disaster you wont necessarily need the boot DVD to restore.

Thank you. I've been using a 250GB external; today I'll buy a 500GB.

You advised making sure the new external drive is "formatted HFS+ with journaling." I don't know what that means. Is that something I need to do with/to the drive before using Time Machine with it?

If I plug in the new drive, will Time Machine kick on by itself or will it wait for me to do that formatting and select the drive in the Pref pane?

Is a 500GB drive large enough for me to make it a bootable Time Machine drive? 1) Would I still do the HFS formatting journaling and then 2) Make it a bootable drive?

Forgive my ignorance; I'm still trying to rid my brain of 15 years of Windows experience. Thank you again for your help. I really appreciate it.

Let's see if I can clarify some of your questions. All very good ones by the way. Time Machine will not kick in by itself. You must do a bit of prep work first.

1. Most drives need to be formatted before they are used with Time Machine (or with the Mac at all for that matter). Check out these directions fir a How To Disk Utility: Format a Hard Drive. You can skip step 5 (secure erase).
2. If you are going to make a bootable drive now would be a good time. Do this by either "cloning" your existing startup drive or using the Install DVD to install a minimal system on the external drive. If you decide not to do this skip to step 3.
3. Now it is safe to open the Time Machine preference pane select the drive.

Just to give you an idea whether 500 GB might be enough space for a bootable clone let's use my system as an example. If I cloned my system to a 500 GB drive now I would still have over 300 GB for Time Machine use. At that rate I would have about a year of backups.

If you decide to go the bootable backup option let me know I can probably provide a bit more specific directions. I wrote an article about cloning some time ago but there are better tools available now.

BTW the good news is every bit of Mac knowledge you acquire now drives out a piece of useless Windows knowledge.

Thank you very much! I'll be buying a new external hard drive today or tomorrow, then format it and get it onto Time Machine.

Could my present external-drive-gone-bad have made any negative effect to my MacBook? Thanks again.

Other than because of an electrical short I doubt it. I've had a few go bad over the years without affecting the rest of the machine.

BTW I meant to post this earlier. Here is an article I wrote a while back covering Time Machine. It points out some files that can be excluded fro a Time machine backup. ATPM 15.03 - How To: Time Travel: Introduction to Time Machine

I sincerely appreciate all your help. I'll skip Step 2 of the formatting. Do I still need to follow Step 8, the "Erase"?

Yes. In step 2 clicking the erase tab simply brings up the options in case you need to make changes (creating a Windows formatted disk for example). The erase button at the bottom of that screen is what actually executes the command.

FYI - I bought the 500GB Western Digital "My Passport For Mac" at Staples for $119.95. It's very intuitive and has a really nice graphic representation of all your files, how they're being archived, etc. Very nice, and it's smaller than a standard deck of playing cards! The initial backup was a breeze.

Should I dismantle my old 250GB external drive and destroy its innards?

Thank you again for all your help. I'm that much closer to knowing what I'm doing on a Mac!! Have a great week.