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Issues with Time Machine and External Hard Drives

W

wfernley

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 24, 2010
7
0
Hi everyone,

I am having some issues with time machine on my MacBook Pro. I have been using time machine on an external hard drive which worked for a month or so and then time machine said it could no longer backup to the drive as it needs to be repaired. When I try to repair the drive, disk utility says it cannot backup the drive and it needs to be formatted.

I thought it was a hard drive issue so I picked up another external drive. Again, after about a month, I got the same issue.

I can't keep erasing these drives. Is this a common problem? Is there a solution? Is it possible the drives are faulty or perhaps not being "ejected" correctly?

I hope someone here has faced this issue in the past.

Thanks in advance for your help!
 
Have a look at the logs in the console about the issue with Time Machine and the external drive you're having.

the one you looking for is backupd and the kernel in the console logs.
 
I'm using Lion 10.7.2.

Sorry, but which directory could I find the log files for time machine?
 
Applications > Utilities > Console

The Console has all logs. Open up Console once you found it and type in backupd in filter search. Do the same thing for kernel.
 
It gave an error 19 and then stated that it is read only. In disk utility, it says it cannot be repaired.

Is it possible this could be caused by not properly ejecting the disk?
 
Backup failing - can't see external drive or eject it

I have been using an external drive to do my backups. It was working fine for a while, however now the backups fail.

I plug the external drive in when I need to do a backup. So I repetitively plug/unplug it.

I was looking at this thread, which pointed me to the console. I see several messages which may be relevant, but don't know whether/which are, and further, what steps to take now.

Samples of Error messages:

11/2/12 2:48:57.950 PM com.apple.backupd: Error -35 while resolving alias to backup target

11/2/12 2:49:07.968 PM com.apple.backupd: Backup failed with error: 19
Those are the first occurrences, and they repeat.
Today there is a new one:

11/7/12 9:40:31.593 PM UserEventAgent: get_backup_share_points no AFP

When I look at the hard drive, under Devices there is a "Remote Disk", however, I cannot eject it. Also it has no content, so it is not my hard drive.

Any suggestions?
Thanks!
 
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