Things that make Time Machine cranky

TimeMachine has been driving me crazy with my MBP. I bought a brand new external Firewire 750G drive and repartitioned it to have 2 GUID partitions.

It did the full backup and ran fine for a couple of days. After that, it would start each backup, but never actually succeed writing data to the disk. I keep seeing errors like "MDBackupBegin() returned result (906) > 0, waiting" in my syslog. I can't find info on this anywhere.

I have renamed my internal disk from "Macintosh HD" to "MacintoshHD". I made sure that the external partition that I backup to contains no spaces (its called TimeMachine.) I've also excluded all external volumes, /Library, /Applications, ~/Pictures/Aperture and my VMware & Parallels VM directories.

I gave up today and blew the whole external volume away and started TM over. The full backup is running fine (backing up ~43g in a couple of hours.)

We'll see what happens tomorrow.

Look, meganerds, whiners: Time Machine is like most new Apple features- they don't apply to you. It's for your mom, your grandpa and your friend who just bought her first computer. It wasn't designed to backup your 500GB iTunes pirate-drive, and it wasn't designed to backup every minute of everyday without a performance hit. What did you think? If you need a flawless archive and backup solution, set up a RAID system and stfu.

So, with regard to the mixed environment...
I have a ppc powerbook and my gf an intelbased macbook.
I also got a 1 tb external for backing up stuff with time machine (and without for stuff like music etc). I got both of them backing up on my Apple partition mapped drive without problems. I had the macbook first backup to a GUID formatted drive, then copied the backup folder over to the Apple Partition mapped drive, where I had backed up my powerbook on a separate partition. I suppose the partition scheme only plays a role in the initial backup where volumes of 10gb or more are created. on both machines I have several backups now. Works like a charm...
Also it works for the networked backup - (ie. with unsupported drives)
http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/10/how-to-enable-time-machine-on-unsupported-volumes/

note that you need to open the drives under shared in finder to be able to direct time machine to them

Forgot to mention that Carbon Copy Cloner is actually uncrippled donation ware. So if you try it and like it, be sure to kick some money their way.

I've had no problems with time machine here (backing up to a firewire HFS+ hdd).

> Time machine blows. What are you supposed to do if you don't have
> enough room to back everything up? For example my itunes is on an
> external 500gig drive. And I have another 500 gig drive for time machine.

I have a similar setup: 120 GB hdd in my laptop, 250 GB external 2.5" hdd for extra media, and a 500 GB external hdd for backing stuff up. I backup the lappy to the 500 GB hdd with time machine nightly. Once/week I also copy everything from the 250 GB hdd to the 500 GB hdd. Would be nice if time machine could backup external volumes but I don't see this as a big deal with freeware programs like Carbon Copy Cloner out there (which work fine for things like media files while Time Machine's search interface comes in handy for documents).

I haven't had any problems with it's functionality except that I can always tell by my machine's performance when it's backing up. Every thing slows down a bit.

(G5 dual 2.0, 3.5 GB RAM, external firewire Seagate 750 GB backing up an internal 320 GB, all HFS extended & journaled)

#1 -- I have heard that the real problem might be with Disk Utility in leopard. When you change the filesystem from FAT32 to HFS+ on an external drive, the drive sometimes does not get formatted with the HFS+ format. Moreover, the partition table might NOT get updated to show that it is a HFS+ partition (even though Disk Utility may say it is a HFS+ partition). As a result, Time Machine treats it as a FAT32 partition. Since FAT32 has a 32 GB maximum size, Time Machine fails when it gets close to the 32 GB limit.

I have heard of one workaround. Create two partitions on the external drive. (WARNING This will destroy all data on the external drive). Then delete the second partition and create only one large HFS+ partition. This apparently will overwrite the partition table with the right info. Give it a try.

Or the easiest way, buy a decent external (i got a mybook premium II firewire) format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and point time machine to it.... works fine since.

What, was this programmed by Windows programmers? Seriously, these are stupid, BS type things that I used to see only from Windows programmers back when I used to manage programming teams. Mac programmers never did this kind of stuff.

Cheers
FL

@7- I'm not sure what you want it to do, create a rift in the time-space continuum so a smaller external HD can be used to store more backup data?

In your particular case, I'd recommend excluding your iTunes library from your Time Machine backup, and backing up your music collection manually to another hard drive.

I bet there are more sophisticated 3rd party options. But for 98% of the Mac user base, the single backup drive model for Time Machine is adequate (and simpler to manage.)