Problems with Time Machine

Roughly three weeks ago I began having problems with Time Machine not backing up on its own. Sometimes I would check it in the menu bar by pulling down the menu and it would display the last backup being done many hours earlier and no indication it was running or attempting to run. It seems to hang on "Preparing to backup" mostly. When it does this, if I try to reboot, the machine will not successfully reboot. I must power it off and turn it back on. Once I do, I can manually run Time Machine and it works fine. When Time Machine is hung up, other unfortunate behavior of the system occurs such as Parallels will not start until I reboot which does not work so I have to turn off the computer and restart it. Or Finder will crash if I try to look at the drive where the backups are (a Seagate USB drive). I noticed when I try to look, the icon next to the drive in Finder is spinning like something is happening but it just goes on forever.

Stuff I have tried so far:

Ejected the disk and removed it then plugged it back in. This did not help.

Called Apple support who had me reset the PRAM, run disk utility on both the Macintosh HD and the backup HD (it found no problems) and finally, completely reinstall OS X (10.8.2). This did not work.

Called Apple support again who had me repartition the drive and format it exclusively for Mac (with option to boot an OS X install if desired but there is ONLY the backups on the drive). This did not work.

Ran Disk Utility and fixed permissions on the Macintosh HD. This did not help.

Downloaded a utility from Seagate that checks the USB drive (it passed) and also turns off its power saving feature. It is turned off now. This did not help.

Since the problem seems to always occur after my iMac has been asleep, I turned off the option for OS X to put hard disks to sleep. This did not help.

Lastly, I tried turning off all power saving features on my iMac except for making the display sleep. THIS WORKS. Backups run every hour on the hour just fine. I tested for over 24 hours and it worked flawlessly.

I forgot to mention that the system is a mid 2011 27" iMac i5 with 12 gigs ram and 1 TB HD. The Seagate drive is a 2 TB drive and is used ONLY for Time Machine.

Everything was working fine for many months. I have no idea what changed so that it never works after sleep now. I always have to try and reboot, which always fails, then turn off the computer, turn it back on, then Time Machine works fine until the next time the computer sleeps. Once it wakes up, Time Machine is screwed again and seems unable to see the drive even though it is actually turned on.

I've been tempted to try replacing the Seagate drive which was purchased when the iMac was but I'm not made of money by any means and I am confounded by the fact that the drive works just fine if I restart the iMac.

Any ideas guys? I'd be grateful for any assistance with this problem.

Oh, one last thing. I am not running any sort of utility software or any kind nor any anti-virus, etc. And I have tried leaving all apps I normally use (Safari, Things, EverNote, Mail) closed. It made no difference.

NikMac said:

That's very odd.

I believe there is a free dashboard app you can download called "Time Machine Buddy" - it displays all the relevant log files produced by Time Machine during a backup. When I had a problem with the backup freezing at a certain point (see thread https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=14592831#post14592831 ) it helped identify what was causing the problem, maybe it will be useful to you.

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Thank you. I will take a look for that on App Store and maybe it will shed some light on this situation.

Well, I did not find Time Machine Buddy on the App store but there was another app that does the same basic thing, displays the logs and highlights any error messages in red text. It is called "Logviewer for Time Machine" and was only 99 cents so I bought it and ran it to see what I might see.

Unfortunately, when Time Machine dies as described above it does not log anything. The logs are always two lines (without errors) just indicating it is starting as normal. Then it stops logging at the same time it stops working.

I would expect that if Time Machine encountered some issue accessing the USB drive it would return an error and log this. But no! So I remain in the dark, as does Apple support thus far, as to what is really going on here.

smirk said:

My first thought was that something on your backup drive became corrupt, but you reformatted it and the problem persisted, so it can't be that.

To get more information about what Time Machine is doing, you can run Console.app, select the log for "all messages" or "system" (I can't remember the exact wording, I'm not in front of a Mac), and then filter by "backupd" (without the quotes). This will show you all the Time Machine messages.

If you can find the point in the log when the issue occurred, you can click on one of the log lines to select it, then clear the "backupd" filter to reveal all messages again. Your point in time in the log will still be selected, so then you can take a look at the messages from other processes around the same time to see if anything seems "funny". Maybe USB errors or some sort of disk error.

Good luck, let us know if you find anything!

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Thank you very much for telling me about Console. I didn't think to go looking at the utilities that come with a Mac. I found a mixed bag of clues poring through the system log. Most interestingly, on some but not all occasions where backup failed, there was a series of four function calls on the drive object which each in turn timed out then the attempts stopped. It wasn't quite clear from the naming what the function call was attempting to do but I am guessing it involved waking the drive from sleep. Of course, with all power saving turned off the drive should not have been asleep to begin with and I was not attendant at the time so I can't know for sure if it was. Just the same, this appears to be what happened in some cases.

The fact that Time Machine melts down in this scenario, taking Finder with it is disconcerting and confusing. I would expect error handling for a case this common to be in place and to handle a failure to access the drive for any reason, be it power, disk failure, read or write failure, etc. I would also expect an error message to the user to indicate this failure, preferably including the nature of the problem encountered. But no!

At one point, the drive appeared to be asleep when Time Machine was not scheduled to run and I noticed this. The drive light went off so I assumed it was asleep. I ran Seagate's own simple diagnostic test on it at this point and it failed. I ran it again and it failed. In fact, the test never seemed to begin. Normally a progress bar appears and it takes maybe two minutes to run. So I ejected the disk with Finder which worked. Then I unplugged it, waited a moment and plugged it back in. It was recognized and mounted in short order and visible in Finder. I ran the Seagate diagnostic again and it ran fine and passed the test. From this I am somewhat inclined to think the drive itself is flaky and erratic perhaps about sleeping when it isn't supposed to and reluctant to wake up when asked to. That is just guessing though.

I ran that Seagate test again just now where I noticed the drive light was off. It ran just fine and passed. The light never flashed or came on. Perhaps the light does not indicate power status but just disk access. It doesn't flash at all, it just emits a steady glow, so who knows?

I know I've just about had enough of this!

I am going to run a test for the next 24 to 48 hours with power saving features on the way I normally had them since buying this computer and USB drive and see what happens. I expect it to fail at some point and then I will use console to take a look one more time. Beyond this little experiment I think it is time to call Apple Support again and suggest that an engineer qualified to review my system log do so and diagnose the problem. I need someone who understands exactly what those failing function calls are doing. That will probably explain what is going on here.

smirk said:

Sounds like a plan. I suspect that you'll find that the cause is a flaky external drive. If you have access to a friend's drive, maybe connect that instead and back up to it and see what happens. The fact that the Seagate tools failed at all indicates that something is wrong with the drive (or USB cable, or drive controller, etc... which is the same as saying that the drive is bad).

You're welcome to post the log entries you found and maybe someone here can help interpret them, too.

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Twenty fours plus so far, with multiple periods of sleep including a long one overnight and Time Machine has been running flawlessly, every hour on the hour while the system is awake, including right after it has woken up.

Good Lord. I wonder if this is going to be one of those curious problems where I somehow managed to fix it but have no idea what I did to actually solve the problem. I hope so!

We shall see what the next 24 hours and beyond bring.

Since I purchased an Apple router, I regret now that I did not purchase a Time Capsule. I may do that in the future at some point and pass on my router to my daughter.

Time Machine still hasn't failed but now I've gotten the dreaded: "Disk not ejected properly!" error message when waking from sleep twice in the past day! Arghhhh!!!

So, each time I unplug the USB cable right away and plug it back in. The drive mounts and all is well again. Until whatever goes wrong next I guess...

I should have bought a Time Capsule.

/cry

All of this revolves around the computer going to sleep and waking up.

Maybe I should try plugging the USB drive into the back of my Airport Extreme and reconfiguring Time Machine to see it, etc. and see what happens in that case. I wonder if that would work.

I am afraid to buy another regular USB drive after some Google searching and seeing how many people on Apple support forums have issues like mine with USB drives being problematic, ejecting themselves, failing to work with Time Machine, etc.

luisbedin said:

What I notice too, is that when my iMac is sleeping and I try to connect my iPhone to charge, it doesn't happen. So, I think the problem is when the Mac sleeps it turn the USB off and don't do any backup in the last hours, and when the Mac comes back, it has an error saying that don't exist any recent backup and stops of work properly. I don't know how to fix it, unless never let my Mac sleeps. If you could get an answer at the last year...
Sorry about any english mistakes.

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Well, my solution wound up being to replace the Seagate USB drive I was using with a Western Digital USB drive. It has worked perfectly ever since, more than a year now.