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Tumbleweed666

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Mar 20, 2009
1,761
141
Near London, UK.
I had a USB hub partially fail, took me a week to notice because the devices connected to the affected ports were infrequently used - except for my TM disk, which as a result hasn't been backing up.

My worry is, I saw no errors from TM. I'd have expected/hoped to see, for example, the TM icon up on the menu bar perhaps turn colour to red, or a pop up message, or something.

Even TM error logger just says "no errors to report"

Shouldn't TM post an error message if it can't backup?
 
Is the TM drive still plugged into the hub? If so connect it directly to your Mac and try running the backup again. Usually it will give a notice that it can't back up. Did you check the Console for any messages there?
 
Is the TM drive still plugged into the hub? If so connect it directly to your Mac and try running the backup again. Usually it will give a notice that it can't back up. Did you check the Console for any messages there?

Thanks, I have replaced the hub, and TM is working now, but I didn't check the console before, I have now and its full of messages from the past week regarding TM, of course :)

So obviously I should be checking console regularly, something I haven't been doing, perhaps coming from a PC background I'm used to annoying and intrusive error windows popping up and telling me when something is wrong and it seems OSX doesn't do that :eek:

I have found a couple of apps, consolegrowl and BetterConsole, there must be more, will have a look and see what works for me, preferably something I can put a filter on.

I do think its an design fault that it doesn't put something on the TM icon on the menu bar. At least an option in preferences, "notify of failure to backup yes/no".
 
Unless Time machine backups have been turned off in System preferences it puts an exclamation point inside the time machine menu bar icon, and when you click on the icon it will tell you it has failed. I guess it depends on the error.
 
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