External Time Machine drive won’t mount

[Rydawg96]

So I’m having a trouble with my external Time Machine drive all of the sudden. When I tried plugging it in, it would not show up on the desktop. So I went to disk utility and tried to mount it, but all I got was a beach ball. Tried running first aid, it said no issues with the drive, but when I used first aid on the Time Machine volume, it gave me an error and said to recover my data from the drive if I could. Eventually tried to reboot my Mac into recovery mode and launch disk utility from recovery mode to see if that would help, when I selected first aid on the drive, it asked me for my password and when I enter the correct password all it does then is give me the beach ball again. Is there anything else I can do other than erasing the drive and starting over with my backups? I don’t have much to lose on that drive other than my backup copies although it would be about 4 years of deleted data I would be permanently losing on that drive if I did erase it, so would be great if I could get it running again without erasing the last copy of discarded data.

 

[Bigwaff]

Certainly sounds like a failed drive. Would be helpful to provide external drive specifications, connect via hub or directly, etc.. stuff like that.

 

[ignatius345]

I'm guessing if you've been using it for 4 years it's probably formatted HFS+ -- which means Time Machine is using the older "hard link" setup it's been using for the past decade or more. The newer APFS version of Time Machine is a lot more reliable from what I've read.

Not sure if this information really helps you, but if you can't get the drive to mount to copy off deleted files if you want to (definitely plug it in directly, try a fresh cable, and maybe try it on another Mac if you can) -- then at that point you might want to cut your losses, wipe the drive and then let Time Machine reformat it and start fresh.

 

[gilby101]

"symlink"

You mean Hardlink. And I agree APFS Time Machine is much more reliable.

Is there anything else I can do other than erasing the drive and starting over with my backups?

If there is any chance it might be hardware problem, I would buy a new drive. Backups are too important.

 

[pup]

I just ran into this exact same problem. I opened Time Machine only to find no backups, the cause being that the disk isn’t mounted.

But the weird thing is that under Time Machine preferences it says my last backup was only shortly before I opened Time Machine.

So unless it’s a huge coincidence, it looks like the act of opening Time Machine somehow was the cause of the disk being dismounted and now not being able to remount.

 

[pup]

So I start work this morning and surprise, the Time Machine disk had decided to mount, and I was able to recover the file I wanted. Like nothing happened. More evidence, I think that Time Machine itself was the culprit - but at least it apparently didn't corrupt the disk like I'd feared.