Time machine problems

[poppi]

I recently had to update my operating system from 10.6.8 to 10.11 El Capitan. Since then I have had periodic problems with Time Machine backups. When trying to make the hourly backups I get a message " Backup failed. Time Machine couldn't backup to G Drive 2. Unable to complete the backup. An error occurred while creating the backup folder".

My backups have always gone to an external hard drive and I never had a problem before the S/W update. Also, it has not been a total failure - I had some backups along the way with the latest a week ago.

Suggestions will be appreciated

poppi

 

[chscag]

First thing to do is run a First Aid check on your Time Machine external drive to see if there are any errors. Let us know.

 

[poppi]

First thing to do is run a First Aid check on your Time Machine external drive to see if there are any errors. Let us know.

Tried that. Clicked disk utility > G-2 > first aid > run. Message - First aid progress has failed. Updating boot support partitions volume for repair operation failed. Ran Repair disk on the other EHD and there was no problem with that one

 

[harryb2448]

There is your answer poppi one failed drive.

 

[poppi]

There is your answer poppi one failed drive.

I am confused. I can go into the "failed" drive, go back to the last backup (4/24/18) and open the files as they existed on that date. Is that consistent with a "failed" drive? If failed is there anything that wold resurrect it? If I move time machine to my other EHD will it then work?

Thank you

poppi

 

[chscag]

The reason that is (being able to open a recent backup) might be because the drive is not all bad. In other words, there may be some corruption or bad sectors that are preventing First Aid from completing. You may be able to erase it and reformat for Time Machine, but I personally would not trust that drive for my backups any longer.

Your second question about moving the Time Machine backup to the other drive is possible, however, in my experience it doesn't always work right. Also, keep in mind that you would be attempting to move the backups from a drive that has errors to one that is OK. That's another reason it may not work right.

You may have no other choice but to use the one good drive you have for Time Machine. We highly recommend using cloning software in addtion to Time Machine. Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper are excellent backup tools.

 

[MacInWin]

+1 for what Charlie has told you. And using Finder to look at the backup on a Time Machine drive doesn't tell you anything about the drive at all. Finder will show what you THINK is a file, but which is a hard symbolic link to the actual file and the actual file may be damaged. If TM is having problems with the drive and DU says the drive has problems, then the drive is failing.

 

[Slydude]

I'm trying to find the specific reference for this but I think there might be something relevant here. I think I remember reading several years ago that different disk utilities don't always test a drive in exactly the same way. IIRC one of the differences is in the number of times a utility will attempt to write to a block of the drive before reporting an error. Some programs tried as many as 20 times. If any of those attempts worked no error was reported. Other utilities were much stricter and reported errors after only a few attempts.

I'm not sure where the thresholds are set for Time Machine and Finder but they could be very different. In theory, this could result in one program reading a file and the other failing to do so.

 

[pine man]

If I move time machine to my other EHD will it then work?

Apart from the potential problems pointed out by others be advised that moving TM to another drive is no mean feat. I had two years of TM on a drive that I copied to another drive and it took nearly two days!

 

[IWT]

@pine man

I am genuinely interested in your response and mean no offence at all: but may I ask why would anyone want to keep 2 years' worth of backups on Time Machine?

I ask because, strictly speaking, TM is not an archive.

It performs incremental Backups (BU) and, as I understand it, is principally there to recover an accidentally deleted file or recover a previous version of a file - and, of course, can be used to restore all your data to a new Mac or following an erase/reinstall of an OS.

And in the accepted sense of the word, it is not bootable.

So why not simply erase and reformat the EHD and start a new TM backup?

Which BTW, is what the OP, poppi, should do in my opinion.

Ian

 

[pine man]

why would anyone want to keep 2 years' worth of backups

Probably nobody in their right mind!

For a variety of reasons I needed to change the EHD that had been used for TM for the previous two years. I made the assumption that I might as well just copy the contents of the old disk to the new one and then carry on with all that went before still available - belt & braces! It was then that I found out what an extremely slow process it was but having started I just left it copying and the rest is history - it took about two days!!

I hasten to add that I still have TM but running alongside CCC.

 

[MacInWin]

Ian, there are many reasons to keep backups for more than two years. Business files, tax files, maybe even personal files of research on a thesis, or any school work, would be worth saving for at least that long. And TM does that without consuming tremendous disk space each time.

 

[chscag]

All good points Jake, but I'm not sure I would trust those things to Time Machine. I keep some very old archives of things (that you and I previously discussed) but I have those saved in several places, not in Time Machine.

 

[MacInWin]

Well, the trust factor is one concern, but TM is better than nothing. Another alternative is to never take any of those files off the internal and use CCC or SD to clone them to a second drive as a backup. I have lost TM, but every time it's because the drive on which TM was located had issues, not that TM itself failed. Now, a network mounted TM, on the other hand, where sparcebundles are used instead of files and links, is a horse of another color. I wouldn't trust that to store anything. I've had two of them lose integrity and there is no way to recover from it.

 

[Rod]

Since i would not really trust that EHD again as my one and only backup my best advice would be to put it aside somewhere safe (especially as it seems to be still functional) and perform a new Time Machine backup on a new EHD. That way if you ever discover that you are missing something you need from 2 years ago there is a chance you may be able to restore it.
I run CCC and TM on separate EHD's and I've adopted a process of erasing my TM at each new macOSX upgrade so my current TM backup only covers High Sierra.
But then I don't keep email older that a year or attachments I didn't already save to file.

 

[IWT]

I don't dispute any of these comments and replies. We all have different views and needs and these can be served in various ways,

My question was in the spirit of genuine interest.

My personal view is that Time Machine is not an archive, but is an extremely valuable asset for the reasons I mentioned - I have 2 TM backups in case of EHD failure or corruption. And, like Rod, start new ones after an OS Upgrade when I'm satisfied that all is running well.

Similarly, I have 2 cloned BUs.

But for longer term archiving of valuable/precious data, I use a variety of EHDs.

I respect and acknowledge that there are different and genuine views on this subject.

Ian