Time machine not doing backups ....

First, restart your iMac. Next, verify your internal drive with Disk Utility. If it is okay, verify your TM drive. If that is okay, try running Back Up Now from the TM Menuling. Let us know how it goes.

 

This has been discussed in a number of places and I wonder if there are a number of separate problems. The one that fixed it for me was a permissions issue on the /.Spotlight file. Here's the post from the other thread:

--
It turns out that my version of this problem actually pre-dated 10.5.6 (my last backup was 12/12). Anyway, I finally got Time Machine running again.

The last entry details what worked for me:
http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-438148.html

Once I got through all of that it backed up about 5G immediately and then another 2G after that. Now it's running fine.

There was clearly an issue with the permissions of the /.Spotlight file. I couldn't "Get Info" on it -- but i could delete the whole thing.

I'm not an expert by any means but this did work for me. And, while it's in this thread, this Time Machine problem probably wasn't specific to 10.5.6. A friend that is having the same problem confirmed he's still on 10.5.5.
--

Good luck

 

You might want to look at this, it helped me find a group of corrupt mpeg files causing my Time Machine to stall out.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071201084525895&query=startup

Edit: All I did was wait for Time Machine to stall and then I launched Interments and waited for backupd to respawn after timing out on on of the files and go on to the next corrupt file.

 

First sign up for a online ADC account on-line, don't worry it is free.
https://connect.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MemberSite.woa/wa/promo?source=ADCLOG&code=ADCLOG-NEX

Then after that you could be able to go back to that site and navigate to downloads and look for Xcode and download it. It is kinda big.

It will install the developers tools on the root of your HD.

 

I am also having a problem with time machine.

TM stops after a few GBs of data.

I tried:

Disk Utility -> Repair Disk with my internal and external HDD.
Disk Utility -> Repair Permissions with my internal and external HDD.
Added my external disk to the spotlight exclusions
I tried deleting /.Spotlight
I tried other external hdd
I reformatted my external HDD to use GUID several times

I ran out of ideas.

Any suggestions?

Thank you.

 

Well, I managed to solve my issue.

The problem was I had both disks using GUID and not MBR.

I know apple says we should use GUID, but it simply doesn't work.

I think it's because the SATA controllers of my external hdds don't play nice with GUID.

So the solution was to format the disk and choose MBR instead of GUID.

Everything works fine now.