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Re: Another TM problem - what now?

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jbrennand <brennand@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Doing a TM backup tonight (MBAir/10.15.6) to a external HD that I have 
> used several times this year and got some strange behaviour.  About 2/3 
> through it - for no apparent reason it all went pear shaped. The main 
> issue was an error message about not being able to "load System 
> Preferences".  I couldn't do anything.  Sys Prefs wouldn't force quit 
> and "shut down" did nothing".  I had to bomb out and restart.
> 
> When all was back up, I looked in the TM disk and saw the backup was 
> there as "in  progress".  I thought the best option was to delete that 
> and start again.  So tried that but the waste basket has been deleting 
> for >1 hour.
> 
> Is this normal ?  Any suggestions?  I would like to get to bed tonight :-)
> 
> Cheers  JohnB

<bemused> So you’ve started a backup to a suspected iffy drive, wondered
why stuff is crashing, deleted the ‘in progress’ backup process, and wonder
why that’s taking so long? Seriously?

My tips
 • Start with a known good drive to backup to. Make sure it’s formatted
HFS+ (Journaled).
 • Make sure the cables enclosures, and any hubs are known to be good (any
of those could cause random read/write errors).
 • Is the source data good - if your source is corrupt, then you’ll backup
corrupt data.
 • If you suspect the source drive is iffy, get your data off that as
quickly as possible (Disk Utility ‘Restore’ is a reliable and free way to
do that, or SuperDuper, or Carbon Copy Cloner if you prefer), and onto a
known good drive. You may copy some corrupt data, but you can deal with
that better if it’s on a good drive, and not continuing to add to the
problem.
• If you get past that point, then start your Time Machine backup, on the
first run it can take a long time to complete, many hours (it used to run
into days on older machines). So be patient. If it shows ‘In Progress’,
then it probably is, when you tried to delete it, it might have been many
GB of data still being updated, so would have been cleaning up before
deletion, and could have taken hours again. By trying to delete it, you
were probably just screwing it up completely - if you want to clear a drive
completely (and you should for Time Machine) it’s quicker and less wear and
tear to reformat.
 
You maybe also should consider additional backups too, cloud storage, other
drives using different software (aforementioned SD or CCC). IME TM is quite
hard on drives, so be prepared to replace it at intervals (I dunno, about
every three years for me here).

Just my thoughts anyway.

-- 
Andy H

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Another TM problem - what now? jbrennand <brennand@ntlworld.com> - 2020-08-05 20:31 +0100
  Re: Another TM problem - what now? Andy Hewitt <thewildrover@icloud.com> - 2020-08-05 19:54 +0000
    Re: Another TM problem - what now? jbrennand <brennand@ntlworld.com> - 2020-08-05 21:09 +0100
  Re: Another TM problem - what now? jbrennand <brennand@ntlworld.com> - 2020-08-05 23:40 +0100
    Re: Another TM problem - what now? jbrennand <brennand@ntlworld.com> - 2020-08-06 02:07 +0100
      Re: Another TM problem - what now? David_B <DavidB@nomail.afraid.org> - 2020-08-06 07:33 +0100
      Re: Another TM problem - what now? Jaimie Vandenbergh <jaimie@usually.sessile.org> - 2020-08-06 10:03 +0000
        Re: Another TM problem - what now? jbrennand <brennand@ntlworld.com> - 2020-08-06 11:44 +0100
          Re: Another TM problem - what now? Jaimie Vandenbergh <jaimie@usually.sessile.org> - 2020-08-06 11:54 +0000
            Re: Another TM problem - what now? jbrennand <brennand@ntlworld.com> - 2020-08-06 13:28 +0100
  Re: Another TM problem - what now? Jaimie Vandenbergh <jaimie@usually.sessile.org> - 2020-08-06 10:02 +0000

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