Friday 26 October 2012

Backup disk not available - Apple Time machine


After migrating from one Apple MacBook Pro to the next, Time Machine / Time Machine then complained that "Backup disk not available". What follows is details of how I was able to resolve the issue;

1) Turned off Time Machine on and off again to no avail
2) Can access time capsule via finder
3) In time machine options/preferences chose "select disk" and from the available disk I selected my computer "data"
4) It then said "inherit backup history" previous computer will no longer be able to backup - say yes
5) Then there is a long wait whilst time machine is "looking for backup disk"
6) Then it said "the backup disk ***sparsebundle is already in use and cannot backup
7) So I logged on previous MBP and went to Finder and opened the time capsule folder and clicked "Disconnect" at the top
8) I then tried selecting the disk again, error again that it is in use
Checked the log/console by filtering on "backupd" and it showed the sparse bundle was already mounted and it couldn't unmount it
9) So I went to finder on my new MBP and clicked the circular eject button next to it (The Time capsule drive)
10) I retried selecting the disk in time machine preferences and it asked me if I wanted to inherit again
11) This time the log looked better, and the time capsule went into "preparing mode"
Warning, it remained in "preparing mode" for a very long time before it started generating any further logs and doing anything
12) It disconnected part way through over night, I started it again, and it failed without an error message, I kicked it off again this time it started but it wanted to back up 200+GB, so I cancelled it, then I read that it will delete old backups when it runs out of space - so I have restarted the backup again, fingers crossed.
13) The backup is now working and it is logging its progress (occasionally) as it writes the backups

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