Time Machine stopped working? Fix it!
I run Leopard since it came out and Time Machine worked great so far. But yesterday it stopped doing so and threw an error at me: Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume.
Digging around I found some tips on the topic today — including upgrading the hard disk’s firmware to prevent it from shutting down while it’s in use (which I did, I’m using a 1TB Western Digital MyBook Pro which obviously had this problem).
Time Machine? Still didn’t work.
Looking into the backup folders, it hit me when there was a file folder called 2008-01-20-161645.in Progress. It’s the 21st today and Time Machine is set to back up hourly, so there’s no possibility this backup was still in Progress more than 24 hours and a reboot later.
After deleting that mysterious file folder (I had to enter my password to do this) I told Time Machine to create a new backup (right-click on the Time Machine icon in the Dock and choose “Backup now”).
Guess what — it worked!
I think the WD MyBook Pro disk shut down during yesterday’s backup and crashed Time Machine — a) Now I know where to look should it happen again and b) the problem should be solved with the firmware upgrade I installed.
If you like this post, please digg it — thanks!
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Hi,
the mysterious file “2008-01-20-161645.in Progress” is no file,
it’s a folder, like the Mac *.app folders.
After the backup is finished, it will just renamed in the folder name “2008-01-20-161645″ without the extenion “*.in Progress”.
You can verify this in the terminal or with the Finder (Show Package Content).
Cheers,
Stefan
Hi Stefan,
thanks for pointing this out — my fault.
Julian
I have two WD 1TB My Book Home edition disk, one of them I use for TM backing up both the systemdisk and the other HD.
TM was working fine for maybe 3 weeks and then it stopped working. I got the same error message “Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume.” (just the norwegian version..)
I tried to delete the “.in progress” folder and update the firmware for the TM-disk. But it didnt work.
I figured out It stops every time it tries to backup the system-disk. I excluded it in the TM-panel and it backed up my other WD 1TB (identical) HD just fine.
The data on the other disk is the most important, but it would be nice if it could bacup my system disk also.
any ideas what could be wrong?
perarne
What do you mean by “firmware upgrade”? I guess you have downloaded and installed one of the items in the “software to download” list in
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=103&lang=en
but, which one?
Thanks
Jose
@Jose I think I used [1], it offered to update the My Book’s firmware on its own.
[1] http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=104&sid=79&lang=en