MBP Advice: hard drive failure/time machine problems

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Hey guys. I'm in a bit of a bind...

Basically my MBP became extremely slow last week and when I open disk utility and look at the internal drive, I get an error saying that the drive has a hardware problem and must be taken to an apple shop.

I understand that this means my HD is about to die, and so I have been trying to back up using time machine. However, it keeps cancelling and giving me an error "unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume." I tried reformatting the backup drive to GUID, instead of apple partition map, as I heard that this could be the problem, also restarted the machine, but the problem persists and I fear it may just be because the drive is on the way out.

So here's my main question: even though time machine keeps stopping and giving me the above error, when I reboot the machine and start it again, there is less data to back up, suggesting that it is in fact backing up data, but that the error is stalling it. So can I simply back it up in stages?

It might be worth noting, that when I try to back up things 'manually' (like my iPhoto library) the process also halts with an error message saying that certain files cannot be copied or something to that effect.

Thanks for reading, I hope this makes sense! any advice or insight would be fantastic. I know I should have backed up to begin with, but I'm sure others here have been there and can understand my predicament!
 

cwa107


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Yeah, that drive is definitely failing - and quick.

It probably has nothing to do with the destination (i.e. the external), but the source (the failing drive). Time Machine can't grab files because the file system is damaged.

If you can't run Verify/Repair Disk in Disk Utility, then you'll need to try a different utility for backing up. I recommend SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner.

And if it gets worse, you might want to check out Paragon Rescue Kit (free), or perhaps DiskWarrior or Drive Genius, which should help you to recover at least some of your data.

Good luck!
 
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It sounds like your internal hard drive is just failing and when it the backup (or copy) procedure reaches files that are in those locations on the hard drive that have experienced a failure, the backup (or copy) procedure is failing to complete its operation.

Although it may appear that TM is backing up your data and less and less is being copied each time, I wouldn't feel comfortable with the backup being of useable quality.

If it were me, I'd get another external hard drive and copy as much data as I could to it prior to the internal drive failing completely and being unusable.

Now, that said, in the future I'd suggest - once you have your boot drive fixed - to regularly backup your machine and not wait until you're in an emergency state because at that point it may just be too late to recover your data.

Note: Lol - CWA beat me to the post - I gotta work on typing faster in the morning ;)
 
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Thanks guys. I've not tried running any kind of repair procedur inside disk utility for fear of making the problem worse. Is this a possibility?

Time machine has nearly finished now, when it has, is there any way I can verify if the backup has actually worked? If not, I'll try the other suggestions for backing up.

Thanks again for your help, it is very much appreciated!
 

cwa107


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Thanks guys. I've not tried running any kind of repair procedur inside disk utility for fear of making the problem worse. Is this a possibility?

Yes. Any time you have a failing disk, simply having it powered on and spinning can further degrade it, let alone running I/O intensive procedures upon it.

Time machine has nearly finished now, when it has, is there any way I can verify if the backup has actually worked? If not, I'll try the other suggestions for backing up.

If it says it completed successfully, then it's OK. If you want to be certain, I'd recommend cloning the drive rather than using TM, which stores backups in Apple's own database format (where you can't actually look at the files, except by going into the Time Machine interface).
 
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Ok so my fears were correct and time machine never successfully completed the backup. I've just installed superduper! and that is now attempting to clone the drive. I just know that it's gonna have the same problem as time machine though, as surely the faulty drive will still prevent it from grabbing files?
 
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chas_m

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Yes, that's quite likely. You can but try, however. That's about all you can do at this stage.
 

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