Time Machine Bug
Philip Hendry believes he’s stumbled upon a rather disturbing bug in Time Machine:
I’ve been a long time fan of yours since your days at TechTV and am glad to see you answering questions again. I would like to inform you and the rest of the community to a bug I discovered in Time Machine on OS X “Leopard”. I have been using Leopard since it’s release (waited in line for 2 hours for one of the first copies) and have been relying on Time Machine for just as long.
Apparently sometime in the last few days, my Time Machine drive filled to capacity. Knowing that it would automatically begin deleting my old backups to free space, I was not concerned. However, this morning my backup failed to this error:
“Unable to complete backup. Unable to create backup directory.”
After exhausting my search of Apple’s support page and trying a few things. I resorted to calling Applecare for assistance. After about 45 minutes of troubleshooting and talking to other reps, my rep came back as dumbfounded as I was. I was told that instead of deleting older backups, as advertised, Time Machine instead begins compressing the older ones. If you run out of space before the compression can catch up, Time Machine will fail, as it does not have enough space to create a new backup directory. The only way to restore functionality is to completely erase your backup drive and start from scratch.
Hopefully this bug will be fixed in the next update to Leopard. Just thought I would share this with you and the rest of the community. Congratulations on your recent switch to the Mac. I hope that it goes as smoothly for you as it did for me (Got my first computer at 5 years old. Spent 14 years on Windows).
Or archive the drive and add another, which isn’t a full solution – but at least you won’t have to lose the archives you created already. Figured I’d throw this post out there for anybody else running into the problem (or for Windows users to understand that OS X isn’t perfect either).
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6 Comments
Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants
February 26th, 2008
at 2:41am
Chris Pirillo
VesperDEM
February 25th, 2008
at 3:28pm
Neither guys. I had the exact same situation just last night. I got the same error after my drive was out of space. I had less than 20GB’s left on a 1TB drive.
My first thought was to run Disk Utility to see if I could scan it for errors. I wasn’t able to scan it because the program wasn’t able to “unmount” the drive.
So, I turned off Time Machine, shut down my system, disconnected the drive and restarted it. Once the system was restarted, I plugged the drive in again, and started Disk Utility. I was then able to scan the drive and found no errors. I started Time Machine and all is good again.
I didn’t have to wipe the disk or do anything other than disconnect the drive and reconnect it.
Mind you, this may be a different problem than the one that Philip had, but from the sounds of the error and the symptoms, his problem and mine sound identical.
I hope if this happens to someone else, that they at least try my solution before wiping the backup drive.
Jon
February 25th, 2008
at 8:45pm
I believe I ran into this problem a while ago. I too was a little confused. My workaround was to delete just the oldest backups and restart. Has been working fine since. (That way, you wouldn’t have to delete all of your backups)
Phil Hendry
February 26th, 2008
at 5:12am
I tried disconnecting and reconnecting the drive to no avail. I was able to run Disk Utility though and it found no errors. The support rep I spoke to did assure me that the issue is now logged and will be reviewed by the dev. team.
VesperDEM
February 27th, 2008
at 1:04pm
Wow, so I guess what happened to me was different than what happened to you. I’m sorry to hear that you had to wipe the drive in order to get the drive working again. Kind of defeats the whole purpose of Time Machine.
Lets all hope that they get this one fixed soon.
Sandrs Poppers
May 4th, 2008
at 3:28pm
I got this error and the process of turning off time machine, shutting down, disconnecting and reconnecting worked for me. Thanks for the tip