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Backup question

T

todd2000

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Nov 14, 2005
1,632
34
Danville, VA
Ok all you uxix geeks out there, I have been using a little script that automatically mounts my external HD, copies all my files using ditto, and then unmounts the drive for a month or so now, and it has been fine. I run the script using cron. So this morning I wake up to a terminal winow with a bunch of errors like this in it

ditto: "file path here" input/output error

what could be causing that, all of my HDs both internal and external are less then 5 months old.

As a side note in the middle of typing this thread my comp froze, and I had to turn it off and back on. I hope it's not dying :)
 
Heres an excerpt from my system.log for the back up

Apr 21 08:53:45 todd-sullivans-power-mac-g4 kernel[0]: AppleFWOHCI_AsyncTransmit::allocateCommandElement - no free elements
Apr 21 08:53:45 todd-sullivans-power-mac-g4 kernel[0]: AppleFWOHCI_AsyncTransmit::allocateCommandElement - no free elements
Apr 21 08:53:45 todd-sullivans-power-mac-g4 kernel[0]: AppleFWOHCI_AsyncTransmit::allocateCommandElement - no free elements
Apr 21 08:54:16 todd-sullivans-power-mac-g4 kernel[0]: disk3s3: I/O error.
Apr 21 08:56:51 todd-sullivans-power-mac-g4 kernel[0]: disk3s3: I/O error.
Apr 21 08:59:26 todd-sullivans-power-mac-g4 kernel[0]: disk3s3: I/O error.


and it goes on like that for a few pages.
 
I'd recommend you to check your file system with fsck.

If the data is not on your system HD, just unmount the disk and use fsck within the Terminal (use man fsck for more info).
If the data is on your system HD, you first haver to boot into the single-user mode.
 
I am not a terminal junkie quite yet but I like to backup, alot. Thought I'd better add some non terminal backup solutions should anyone stumble over this post.

I bought a lacie external hard drive, which is great, and it comes with some free software called silver keeper. Just a simple one click backup, sync, compare and restore seperate "sets" of folders or it can do all the sets at once. Its quick to as it only writes modified files and just checks the rest. (No I dont work for Lacie)

You should be able to download it for free here.

http://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper/

I hope this helps anyone.

Nicko
 
Silverkeeper is nice software but doens't do what I want to do, I have yet to be able to find a graphical way to mount a drive backup files, then unmount/spindown a drive. Any thoughts?

P.S. How do I boot into Single User Mode? I've never done it. Hold S at bootup??
 
Cmd-s.

At the prompt, type:

fsck -f [return] including the space before the -f

When it's done, at the prompt, type:

reboot [return]
 
Ok I managed to run fsck on Macintosh HD with single user mode and everything was fine, but I can't seem to run it on my other volumes, I tried fsck /dev/diskas12 and it said BAD SUPERBLOCK:MAGIC NUMBER WRONG. I did check the other volumes with disk utility, and got not errors. Im going to attempt to run the backup script again by hand and post results when it's done.
 
Well I added the -V option to my script, and rand it by hand, and it seems to be getting stuck on random files, sometimes it gives me I/O errors, then once it just stopped copying with no errors, I hope the external drive isn't dying. I ran a repair with Disk Utility, and it repaired the Header, and that didn't fix it, so I re-partitioned and formated the drive, and still no luck. I knew I shouldn't have bought an Acomdata. But they got good reviews.
 
Well the script ran automatically last night with no problems, so I guess it's working now. I don't know what happened, but I think I fixed it.
 
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