Time Machine No Longer Working

[atacinus]

So I use an external USB harddrive with my airport to backup my computer. The harddrive is 250gb and the computer is 250gb (with about 40gb free space) - previously this worked for backing up just fine...then one day it stopped and started telling me it required "251.46gb" but the drive only has "249.05" - umm...why if I'm at only about 210gb of actual space being used?

So I reformatted the drive and tried again - same error...anyway to make this work again...seems so odd that it was always fine and then just quit one day.

 

[puckhead193]

try a different drive. Maybe the drive is failing.

 

[atacinus]

The drive is fine and can hold information copied to it normally. I even reformatted it...this seems to be an issue with time machine - did apple make any changes to it in a recent point upgrade?

 

[satcomer]

Nope. If you launch /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility and open it. You and "repair" a sparsebundle in the Time Machine. Do that and then see if Time Machine can back up to it.

 

[atacinus]

Tried repairing the sparsebundle - but no, still the same error message about the size difference.

 

[Vantage Point]

Is it possible that previously you have 'excluded' certain things from being backed up by TM and now they are included making the required backup size larger? That happened to me a while ago and I got the same message about needing a larger backup.