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Time machine problems

T

tommy060289

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 20, 2011
148
21
Hey Everyone, I have recently set up my new imac and im having a bit of a problem with Time Machine.

I have my imac wired to a belkin router that is attached to a Western Digital MyBook World edition to work with time machine.

Ive reset the NAS back to factory setting and cleared it and when ever I set the time machine to create a back up (currently about 80GB) it gets to somewhere between 75 and 79GB done and comes up with a message saying something like calculating changes and then whenever I try to back up again after this the back ups are rediculously slow. I mean like after 5 minutes it might have done 10KB, YES KB!!!

Also, strangely, whenever I start these back ups it says something like preparing xxx items and it reaches about 40,000 items before it starts backing up and then only wants to back up about 15MB or something small which obviously cant be right.

time machine worked fine before on my MBP

Any ideas?
 
Is your iMac SSD equipped?

I ran into the same issue shortly after receiving my SSD+HDD equipped iMac. At the very least, your filesystem is corrupted, so the hard link reference counts are being perceived as incorrect by the backup daemon (backupd). It's also possible that the drive being backed up (not the Time Machine target) is failing.

Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility. Select Macintosh HD and click "Repair Disk". Repeat the Repair step for as many volumes you have.

It may detect nothing. It will probably detect something such as "keys out of order". It may tell you that you need to boot off the restore utility and run Disk Utility off of that. If that's the case...

  1. Insert OS X Install DVD that came with your iMac
  2. Restart your iMac while holding down the 'C' key until you see the spinner while it boots up
  3. Choose a language then click the next arrow
  4. Do NOT hit Continue. You do not want to reinstall OS X.
  5. From the menu bar, choose Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
  6. Similar to the previous directions, perform a Repair Disk on all of your volumes (Macintosh HD, Macintosh HD 2, etc.). It may tell you that your disk cannot be repaired and will prompt you to immediately back up your files and reinstall OS X. If this occurs, call 1-800-MY-APPLE, and get through to Apple Care.

If the volume could be repaired, continue until you see the problem resurface. If it resurfaces, odds are that your SSD or HDD (whatever is in the iMac) is giving up the ghost.

If your iMac is SSD equipped, you have run into the exact same problem I did. Odds are it's a sign that the SSD is a dud and will fail. Even if it's not SSD equipped and just has a hard disk, there's a chance that the hard disk may be on its way out. I'm currently in the process of waiting for the infamous CAPTURE box to be shipped from Apple -- my iMac is going to engineering in Cupertino, and I'll be shipped a brand new iMac when it's received.
 
Thanks for the solid reply.

You guessed right, my iMac is SSD+HDD.

Not too happy bout possible sign that the SSD is a dud, only had the machine 2 days! :'(

Ill run the disk utility as soon as I can and see what I run in to!

Cheers,

Tom
 
The ultimate issue is this isn't a Time Machine problem, but an SSD problem. If you can fix the filesystem corruption, odds are it'll crop up again in a few days. I was also experiencing random I/O stalls. Here's a question -- can you successfully burn any DVDs? I burnt 13 different coasters on three different types of media, whereas my 2011 MacBook Pro burnt every DVD successfully.

Unfortunately, the whole exchange process will take a bit. The upside is you're not getting your iMac repaired -- you'll get a brand new one if your original one ends up going back to Cupertino, CA in the infamous CAPTURE box. The unfortunate reality is going to be the wait -- I ordered my iMac on May 3rd. It's June 28th. It'll nearly be July before the CAPTURE box shows up, and probably mid-July the earliest until iMac 2 arrives.

-----

As any FYI, doing a secure erase on a 2TB hard disk takes ~4.25 hours per pass. I don't yet have runtimes for Secure Erase on the 256GB SSD, as I'll be doing a 7-pass erase after the HDD finishes this pass.
 
Last edited:
my imac is new anyway so that wont be much difference (If anything a hassle of having to install everything again)

Ive just clicked repair disk permissions and it seems to fiddle quite a lot but if I click verify disk (NOT verify disk permissions) it says everything is ok. This can only be a good sign surely? Hopefully the disk permission repairs will have fixed the problem and ill try the time machine again now.

I havn't tried any DVD burning as I dont really have much to burn. What would you recommend, are songs fine?
 
Not necessarily a good sign.

Do a Repair, not a Verify. I've had Verification come up OK, but Repair find problems. I've also have Repair find problems and tell me to boot off the Restore DVD, to then not have Disk Utility find problems to repair when I booted off the Restore DVD. After 3 or so actual repairs over 9 days, Disk Utility told me to back up everything ASAP and call Apple. This was after multiple wipes and full backups of the Time Machine volume, with the "Processing 24,000 files" before backup up 2 files going away... to eventually have that problem return without fail within 48 hours.

For posterity, go to Applications -> Utilities -> Console. Select "system.log" in the left-hand side. Then filter the results with the search box in the top-left hand corner by searching for "backupd". Post those results here.
 
the repair disk option is blanked out and no selectable for some reason.

My Log for last hour or so...

Jun 28 20:57:14 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[3749]: Copied 92300 files (15.0 MB) from volume SSD.
Jun 28 20:57:23 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[3749]: Copied 92302 files (15.0 MB) from volume HDD.
Jun 28 20:57:56 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[3749]: Backup canceled.
Jun 28 20:57:57 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[3749]: Ejected Time Machine disk image.
Jun 28 20:57:58 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[3749]: Ejected Time Machine network volume.
Jun 28 21:04:53 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: Starting standard backup
Jun 28 21:04:53 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: Attempting to mount network destination using URL: afp://WD_Backup@MyBookWorld.local/WD_Backup
Jun 28 21:04:55 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: Mounted network destination using URL: afp://WD_Backup@MyBookWorld.local/WD_Backup
Jun 28 21:04:55 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: Warning: Destination /Volumes/WD_Backup does not support TM Lock Stealing
Jun 28 21:04:55 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: Warning: Destination /Volumes/WD_Backup does not support Server Reply Cache
Jun 28 21:04:55 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: Creating disk image /Volumes/WD_Backup/Tom's iMac.sparsebundle
Jun 28 21:05:51 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN
Jun 28 21:05:54 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: Disk image /Volumes/WD_Backup/Tom's iMac.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
Jun 28 21:05:54 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
Jun 28 21:05:54 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: Ownership is disabled on the backup destination volume. Enabling.
Jun 28 21:05:56 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: Detected system migration from: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Toms-MBP/2011-06-27-154221/Macintosh HD
Jun 28 21:05:57 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: Backup content size: 73.7 GB excluded items size: 1.3 GB for volume SSD
Jun 28 21:05:57 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: Backup content size: 635.9 MB excluded items size: 572 KB for volume HDD
Jun 28 21:05:57 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 87.69 GB requested (including padding), 927.62 GB available
Jun 28 21:05:57 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: Waiting for index to be ready (101)
Jun 28 21:05:57 Toms-iMac mds[43]: (Normal) DiskStore: Creating index for /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
Jun 28 21:51:38 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: Copied 179590 files (20.1 GB) from volume SSD.
Jun 28 21:51:39 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: Backup canceled.
Jun 28 21:51:43 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: Ejected Time Machine disk image.
Jun 28 21:51:45 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[4010]: Ejected Time Machine network volume.
Jun 28 22:01:43 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[7213]: Starting standard backup
Jun 28 22:01:43 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[7213]: Attempting to mount network destination using URL: afp://WD_Backup@MyBookWorld.local/WD_Backup
Jun 28 22:01:45 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[7213]: Mounted network destination using URL: afp://WD_Backup@MyBookWorld.local/WD_Backup
Jun 28 22:01:45 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[7213]: Warning: Destination /Volumes/WD_Backup does not support TM Lock Stealing
Jun 28 22:01:45 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[7213]: Warning: Destination /Volumes/WD_Backup does not support Server Reply Cache
Jun 28 22:01:48 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[7213]: QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN
Jun 28 22:01:50 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[7213]: Disk image /Volumes/WD_Backup/Tom's iMac.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
Jun 28 22:01:50 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[7213]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
Jun 28 22:01:50 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[7213]: Detected system migration from: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Toms-MBP/2011-06-27-154221/Macintosh HD
Jun 28 22:01:51 Toms-iMac com.apple.backupd[7213]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 64.12 GB requested (including padding), 906.73 GB available
 
tommy060289 said:
the repair disk option is blanked out and no selectable for some reason.
Click to expand...

This is bad. Very bad. You *need* to do the following:

  1. Insert OS X Install DVD that came with your iMac
  2. Restart your iMac while holding down the 'C' key until you see the spinner while it boots up
  3. Choose a language then click the next arrow
  4. Do NOT hit Continue. You do not want to reinstall OS X.
  5. From the menu bar, choose Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
  6. Similar to the previous directions, perform a Repair Disk on all of your volumes (Macintosh HD, Macintosh HD 2, etc.). It may tell you that your disk cannot be repaired and will prompt you to immediately back up your files and reinstall OS X. If this occurs, call 1-800-MY-APPLE, and get through to Apple Care.

Also, notice how the number of files it claims to back up is the same for the SSD and HDD. I bet they don't have the same number of files, correct? This is exactly what happened to me, and also had originally perplexed Apple Care. Multiple repairs, completely wiping the Time Machine volume and doing full backups... the problem came back within 48 hours every time. Until I couldn't repair the disk any more.

For the record, a 7-pass Secure Erase on the SSD should take 2 to 2.5 hours if you choose to do a Secure Erase before sending the iMac in for repair/replacement.

After you do the repair off the Restore DVD, do let us know what happened. Odds are good that tomorrow morning you should be calling Apple Care first thing. Mention the Time Machine problem, mention the disk repair issue (that you couldn't repair the volume, and the fact that it had a fit when trying to repair off the Restore DVD), and mention that someone else you know has had the *exact* same problem and his iMac is going back to Apple as a CAPTURE.
 
Ive booted it from CD and for some reason it seemed to take a long time to boot up (and the CD sounded like it was having a fit to) but when I ran disk utility it says that the drive is fine when I try to repair.

The only slight error im getting is if I click repair drive permissions it seems to move one directory about (and not the same each time) tho im wondering if I come and try it again tomorrow morning will the extra time give it more time to accumulate some errors.

out of curiosity, what is this CAPTURE process, and also, will my imac still to to CA since I live in the United Kingdom?

not a great first experience of SSD if it is FUBAR.

Would it be worth booking in at the genius bar at an apple store rather than phoning support and letting them take it away there?
 
CAPTUREs don't always happen, but since SSDs are fairly new to the Apple lineup, I expect SSD-equipped iMac failures to be CAPTURED fairly often. Yes, they always end up back at Cupertino, as that's where Apple's engineers are. Apple sends you a box, pays for the shipping, helps arrange pickup via your carrier, etc. When a machine is CAPTUREd, it is not repaired. It will never be returned to you. Hence why they ship you a brand new (whatever you ordered).

Genius Bar certainly would work. Bring it in, explain your problem. Odds are they're going to tell you to reinstall OS X and see if it fixes the problem. Odds are it will, at least temporarily.

If the problem resurfaces (and odds are, it will), it's no longer a Time machine issue. It's an impending drive failure issue. Take this from someone who dealt with it for 10 consecutive days (including four time machine volume wipes, and 2 OS reinstalls).

-----

I deal with SSDs by the hundred in data centers. Pricy SLC SSDs (not MLC like consumer-based models) that are installed in EMC Clariions. Trust me when I say SSDs fail (and in my experience, catastrophically and without warning). Unfortunately, S.M.A.R.T. isn't at the level of maturity for SSDs as it is for HDDs, and diagnostic tools overall are still immature.
 
thanks very much for your help. Its been a great help.

Im currently watching a back up now and seeing how it goes and im going to keep an eye on my SSD over next couple of days to see if any further problems crop up.

If it is a faulty drive, how long would you say before the drive becomes kaput?
 
Unknown. Could be in 20 minutes. Could be the kind of trouble you're having now, constantly being a total @#^&ing nuisance for several hours out of every few days, for years. My SSD still "works". I can still wipe and reinstall an operating system on it. However within 4 to 48 hours, problems will crop up again (some apps being unable to launch, total I/O stalling, Time Machine wonkiness). I can then reinstall the OS again. To have the problem show up again. Rinse, repeat.

In data centers, we don't tolerate this stuff. The SSD is pulled, confirmed to fail our requirements, and is either returned to the vendor or crushed (if it can't be returned).

This is why I say if you're having problems, contact Apple. ASAP. If things are acting wonky, verify or repair the disk. In my case, I can't even do that anymore while booted off of the SSD -- the fact that you're already at that point is a very bad sign.
 
My Mac shouts "Panic" when I boot from SL DVD! (picture)

Dear all,

I experience several issues with my brand new 27" i7 3.4 16Gb 256SSD/1Tb
- Time machine not working well (slow, strange counting and monitoring info)
- Disk utility not able to verify my SSD

When I tried to boot from my SL DVD to run Disk Utility repair on my startup SSD, I got a screen full of errors (picture attached), starting with:

"panic(cpu 0 caller 0x847fa459): unsupported CPU: family = 0x6" :mad:

...HELP......:confused:

Vincent
 

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ill give it a couple of days and any sign of trouble and ill wisk it off. (which is a bugger since ill have to take my 16GB of ram out and put the 4GB back!)

Im sorta surprised they use SSD in data centres. I know it has advantages but id have thought the cost/storage would make it unfeasible in the vast vast majority of cases!

Once again thanks for all your help and time!
 
tommy060289 said:
Im sorta surprised they use SSD in data centres. I know it has advantages but id have thought the cost/storage would make it unfeasible in the vast vast majority of cases!
Click to expand...
They are unfeasible in the vast, vast majority for cases. They're only used when IOps is the only thing that matters and you have to hit disk (otherwise, cache it in memory). Way cheaper, less space, and less power to use SSDs than to have a dozen enclosures of 15K SAS disks.

TallHalfWit said:
...HELP......
Click to expand...
Call Apple. ASAP.
 
tommy060289 said:
Im sorta surprised they use SSD in data centres. I know it has advantages but id have thought the cost/storage would make it unfeasible in the vast vast majority of cases!
Click to expand...

SSDs have been used in large data centers for over 30 years now, and have always been expensive when measured by $/GB. But cheap if measured by $/IOPS. They have been very popular in high transaction rate systems such as airline reservations systems.

Back in the 1980s, SSDs used RAM chips. Now they use technology like we have in our iMacs, but on steroids. They are far more expensive than the stuff we have, but their write performance is excellent and they have special redundancy and intelligence to handle the wear factor.

In enterprise applications, SSDs get an incredible hammering, far more than you could dream of doing with a Mac, so don't get concerned about SSD wear!

In fact, they don't call these drives SSDs anymore, they are called "Enterprise Flash Drives" (EFD). They have become incredibly popular, especially since the software now exists to automatically put the active data on EFDs and less active data on hard drives and move the data around as the access patterns change.

The reason for this popularity is because hard drives are getting to be too good at storing data but are just too slow and need some help on the IOPS side. Otherwise, enterprises just can't use the full capacity of their hard drives.

Here is an article from www.ibm.com written by an EMC person.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/d...04emcenterpriseflashdrives/index.html?ca=drs-
 
As an aside, this is to where my SSD eventually progressed after 10 days of originally just having issues where Time Machine seemed to process far more files than it backed up.

This was the 4th time I had to "Repair Disk" on the SSD. After 3 repairs, it would no longer allow me to repair it while the volume was mounted in OS X:
l3dGc.jpg


I just finished a Secure Erase. At this point, I can't even install OS X anymore:
HgQhr.jpg
 
tommy060289 said:
Hey Everyone, I have recently set up my new imac and im having a bit of a problem with Time Machine.

I have my imac wired to a belkin router that is attached to a Western Digital MyBook World edition to work with time machine.

Ive reset the NAS back to factory setting and cleared it and when ever I set the time machine to create a back up (currently about 80GB) it gets to somewhere between 75 and 79GB done and comes up with a message saying something like calculating changes and then whenever I try to back up again after this the back ups are rediculously slow. I mean like after 5 minutes it might have done 10KB, YES KB!!!

Also, strangely, whenever I start these back ups it says something like preparing xxx items and it reaches about 40,000 items before it starts backing up and then only wants to back up about 15MB or something small which obviously cant be right.

time machine worked fine before on my MBP

Any ideas?
Click to expand...

I had the same problem over the last 10 days. Today was the first day that I had quick Time Machine(TM) backups.

After resetting MVRAM, PRAM, scanning drives and repairing permissions, still stuck with slow TM backups. Even after trying a second FireWire drive and a USB drive. It would take 30-45 minutes for TM to record 24mb worth of changes.

Today I decided to hook up a USB drive to install SL on it to see how bad the boot times on a USB drive really were. All in all not bad. During the process I unplugged my USB hub and moved the dongle for my USB mouse to the back of the iMac. When I re-plugged the hub to the back of the Imac and the mouse dongle to the USB hub, my Mac froze. I switched things around a bit and got the mouse working again.

Finally I went to shutdown the system and it hung. I held the power switch in until the iMac turned off. I waited a minute and then turned it back on. When the Mac booted I got a message from TM stating that a backup would run the next time my drives were plugged in. Now mind you I hadn't unplugged the TM FiewWire drive at all. I decided to turn off the TM and then turn it back on.

The Mac recoganized the drive. When I looked at messages for 'backupd' in the console I saw the following.

Node requires deep traversal:/ reason:must scan subdirs|new event db​

TM grinded away for about 15 minutes. Once it was done my TM backups started to move along really fast. To backup 1.6gb took about 2 minutes. This is the fastest that TM has worked for me in the last 10 days. For the last 4 hours TM has been working well.

I'm hoping this isn't an anomoaliy. None-the-less I'll be keeping a close eye on it over the next few days.

I did find one really good resource for TM troubleshooting.

In my trouble shooting Carbon Copy Cloner and Finder file copies were never slow. With that I never laid much blame on either the SSD or 2TB HDD in my Mac.

Hope your problem has a happy ending.
 
The issue is in my case (and this thread's OP), deep traversal was never an issue. If that was my original problem, I never would've expected the SSD to bite the dust. Since I wasn't having any obvious documented issues (like deep traversal), it was indicative of far more serious problems.

The issue for me (and the OP) is since filesystem metadata is constantly being corrupted, the hard link counts are never correct. So when Time Machine performs a hard link count, it gets a much larger number than it should, which is why is checks tens of thousands of files... to find that only a handful changed, in which it then backs up that handful.

As for the resource cited, I've been there and it's generally accepted to be the unofficial Time Machine troubleshooting site -- even Apple Support doesn't cover as many problems as he does.
 
The backup completed overnight so I don't really know if it got right to the end, however:

1. If I backup now it just backups a very small file around 75kb which it appears to do successfully, not at great speed, but not at a speed that concerns me. If I then click back up straight away again, again it does a small file, and I also pressed screenshot so I knew there was definitely something new to back up and it made a 3mb file which when backed up said it needed 5.2mb, which I'm guessing is ok. Is it right that time machine keeps backing up very small files when no changes have been made?

2. Is there any way I can find out if something is wrong with my SSD beyond simply waiting to see if things go funny again, when I get home I plan to:

a. Try entering time machine to see if I can actually use the feature
b. Delete the back up and then try creating a new one to see if it works all the way through and this time I'll be at the computer
c. Try burning a DVD disc to see if any problems come up there. I don't really have any videos so will burning some music files to them work?

If I do these things and it all appears fine, would it appear that my SSD is actually ok and just needed a bit of love from the disk utility (possibly due to bringing stuff over from a time machine back up but not bringing everything (apps) as there was '?' in my dock to indicate a short cut to an app that wasn't there!

Also, is the fact that I can't click repair disk on my SSD in disk utility unless I boot from CD still a concern (SSD is my boot device)?
 
basher said:
I thought 'Repair' is grayed out/unavailable since the SSD is your boot disk. At least that's been my understanding and experience.
Click to expand...


Mine is the same...Just for kicks I booted via the install CD and was able to access it through the Disk Utility. But it is definitely not accessible from the OS.
 
thats good to hear, im hoping because it said it was fine when I tried to repair it that everything is good but the imac is backing up now so we shall see!

out of curiosity did you mac take a long time to boot from CD as my iMac did which I was kinda surprised at!

Cheers,

Tom
 
tommy060289 said:
thats good to hear, im hoping because it said it was fine when I tried to repair it that everything is good but the imac is backing up now so we shall see!

out of curiosity did you mac take a long time to boot from CD as my iMac did which I was kinda surprised at!

Cheers,

Tom
Click to expand...

Yeah, felt like forever booting from DVD. In reality it was probably only a few minutes. Every once in a while the optical drive would grunt showing signs of life.
 
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