Time Machine killed my HD-help!
 

I have a LaCie 1394 external 200Gb Disk drive attached to my G5 iMac,which has worked perfectly for backing up stuff until I installed Leopard today.

Time Machine started backing up to it as arranged,and then stopped halfway through the initial backup,and I got an error message saying that the 'operation couldn't be completed'.I looked at the contents on Finder,but although it showed my old backups,there was only a single Backup file relating to Time machine.
So I quit everything,ejected the HD,and connected it again-only to find that the G5 is giving me a message 'Unable to read Disk' with 3 options-Initialize/Ignore/Eject.I tried Initialize,and tried to run a Disk Repair/Verify,but I got this-
(Repair Disk)
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume
Invalid B-tree node size
Volume check failed
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed

(Verify Disk)
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume
Invalid extent entry
Volume check failed
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed

The HD contains a fair bit of stuff (c. 50Gb) I put on it before I used Time Machine,which I don't want to lose.What can I do?
I tried ejecting and reconnecting again and now the G5 won't even 'see' the external HD-no messages,no Disk Image.
Can someone help me here? I'm not at all technical so I'll need plain English,please!

The fact that this happened while using Time Machine is almost assuredly nothing but coincidence. You have significant file system damage, to the point that Disk Utility can't fix it. I'd recommend that you purchase and run DiskWarrior on the drive. DiskWarrior is an industrial-strength filesystem repair program that will fix things that Disk Utility cannot.

http://alsoft.com

Trevor

Firstly if you are not sure what you are doing then NEVER Initialize without thinking long and hard as this will wipe the drive.

Diskwarrior should sort this problem out if you have not wiped the disk.

All 'Initialize' did was open Disk Utility,so I then tried a disk repair from the various options.
I'm currently debating whether my files and the HD are worth another $100 for Diskwarrior on top of what I paid for Leopard...:rolleyes:

Diskwarrior will get you out of trouble on more than one occasion...but hey its your choice.

I have fixed 100's of computers with DW and i have fixed my own on several occasions in disastrous situations....god i sound like a salesman.....not the case...not a bad maintenance tool as well. Keeping your directory optimised can help performance and reliability.

Diskwarrior is the best application in existence for fixing file system corruption. I once had a hallmark free lancer come to me with her mac and needed like the 25 greeting cards she made (or whatever it was) and her mac wouldn't boot. I fixed it in about 25 minutes with DW, then burned her projects to DVD and told her to back up her data. She went across the street to the liquor store (this was back when I worked for an AASP) and bought me a case of Guiness. Any computer application that can canvas up me some Guiness is one that I will always highly recommend.

I concur, I have fixed 100s if not 1000s of macs with DW over the years in my profession.

The way you express it, it sounds like you are still connecting this with Leopard. As Trevor has said, it is extremely unlikely that this is anything other than a coincidence. Time Machine doesn't do anything unusual with your drive - it just copies files onto it. Of course, especially initially, it is copying a large number of files and hence is exercising your hard drive more than usual and that is what might show up or aggravate a pre-existing problem.

Well, my brand new FireWire drive has just failed with the same reported error.

Verify and Repair volume “disk2s3”
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Invalid B-tree node size
Volume check failed.

Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.

My Macbook started acting up - apps being unresponsive etc.. So I forced a reboot a few times. Boot disk checks OK. But the Time Machine disk is now borked.

It's a Seagate 320GB IDE drive in a Vantec Case connected via FireWire400.

Thankfully there was nothing else on it. I'll see if it will reformat....

Just for some perspective:
There were apparently 2 million copies of Leopard sold in the first weekend.
Suppose that 10% of those purchasers have an extra hard drive and have enabled Time Machine on that drive. That's 200,000 people.
Pulling a number out of the air, let's say that 1% of hard drives have some hardware or software problem (e.g. a common software problem is turning off the drive without properly unmounting it first), then we might expect 2000 of those people to have some problem with the drive they are using for Time Machine.
And the first run of Time Machine is likely exercising the drive more than it has been used so far and hence is likely to make any pre-existing problem evidence itself.
So don't be surprised if there are many more people who report problems with their hard drives.

But have you read this?-
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?...71024094829561

Well ok....

but in that case put diskwarrior on your other computer and plug the drive in and fix it that way !

Yes that had just occurred to me!

And meanwhile,if I manage to fix the drive,what steps do I have to take to get it ready to accept Time Machine? I don't understand formatting/partitioning/whatever.Someone please explain,thanks.

MacFixit's statement on DiskWarrior, which is claiming to be quoting the Alsoft website, is in fact creating doubt and confusion where none exists.

In fact, if you look at Alsoft's website yourself: http://alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/support.html you will see that what it says is very simple and is not confusing at all.

Summary: You can run DiskWarrior from CD, and let it work on a hard drive with Leopard installed, and that will work fine. Don't run DiskWarrior's current version while booted to a Leopard hard drive.

Since that is the way that I prefer and recommend to others to run DiskWarrior--while booted to CD--I don't see this as even the smallest of problems.

Trevor

If you fix the drive with DiskWarrior, it already will be ready to accept Time Machine. You don't have to do anything special--any HFS+ drive will work fine.

Trevor

Any local HFS drive will work fine, if it is networked it has to be over AFP and it has to be running Leopard.

Yes you're right, thanks for the assist. Note that the original poster mentioned that the hard drive was connected locally to his/her computer.

Trevor

To all the naysayers - this IS a problem with time machine. It has happened to me as well with a brand new mybook firewire drive.

Just look at the apple support forum: http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1227

and here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread....10421&tstart=0

This is probably affecting more machines than the blue screen install issue, we just haven't heard as much about it because less people are using time machine.

I don't know of any fix as of yet, but you can expect an update from Apple soon.

Hi gthing. Thanks for the links, however that only shows that some people are having problems on drives that are used with Time Machine. That is not evidence of causality, and I am quite dubious of a causal connection. Hayne's explanation in post#9 above is by far the most likely.

Looking at your links, I see that different people report completely different problems with their Time Machine drives. This hints that Time Machine is not causing a problem, but simply exercising a drive so that pre-existing problems become obvious, and whatever the pre-existing problem was, that's what is being reported now.

On the other hand, if you have some evidence of a causal connection between the use of Time Machine and a problem, I'd be very interested to read it.

Trevor

Yes, I do have evidence of this.

Hayne's explanation of the problem is based on nothing but some random numbers he pulled out of everywhere. Although people are getting different errors when trying to fix their hard drives via disk utility, the overall problem and symptoms are the same. People's drives are disappearing, becoming unmountable, and getting corrupt headers (among other things).

So my evidence is this:

1. Many people reporting the problem are using brand new drives.

Although it is possible that brand new drives can be duds, just look at the number of new drives in the mac support forum. To borrow Hayne's method of pulling numbers out of thin air, I'd say half those people are using new drives. It seems unlikely that so many new drives would be bad.

Then again, we all bought them around the same time - perhaps a bad batch? :D

2. These are the same problems reporting by people doing backups to airport-connected drives.

That's right, this is a known issue already. Only, the issue has traditionally effected only airport-connected drives, and the problem was so bad that they disabled the wireless backup feature altogether in the final release.

Is it so hard to believe that whatever the problem is, it is extending to wired drives?

3. I have extensively tested my drive.

I have run numerous non-TM backups on my drive, both before and after running disk problems. After each major backup I will verify the disk, and everything is fine. I'll use my backup partition and different partitions.

I have run several whole system backups myself, as well as whole system backups for friends. I have also dumped an image of the Leopard install DVD onto a partition on the drive (I bought a family pack and wanted to have a copy handy).

All this, and everything has been fine.

Yet every time Time Machine runs, it fails halfway through and then I find my drive full of errors.

Given all this, and the frailty of the argument in #9, it seems highly unlikely that its all just a massive coincidence. There are a lot of things out there that "Exercise drives" a lot - for example, installing a new operating system. Yet, you don't see a lot of complaints that "installing Leopard corrupted my hard drive!"

There are enough complaints about this happening to pass it off as a huge cosmic coincidence. Apple needs to look into this.

It is however not too unlikely that for a certain percentage of people, this is their first experience with an external drive and that they therefore don't realize the extreme danger of turning off the drive before unmounting it. (I know you aren't doing this - I'm just talking to the probabilities.)

You should register a bug with Apple - there is a form for doing this - and specify all the details about what you are doing and what checks you have done on the drive beforehand, and the specific errors that show up afterwards.

In most cases, both the number of files and the overall size of the files is likely to be much larger than that for an OS X install. An OS X install is some small number of GB but many people will have hundreds of GB of data files.

That is true, but I'm backing up a clean install. So my TM backup is only a few gig larger than than the osx install disk.

Furthermore, my non-TM backups have been ~160 gig and taken up to 5 hours of constant writing to the hard drive, and those run and verify just fine on the disk.

Be sure to supply this sort of detail when you file your bug report to Apple. Without detailed bug reports, it will be much longer until Apple can diagnose and fix the problem.

Having read the threads in the links gthing provided,I cannot believe that it is pure coincidence that my external HD's demise happened whilst using TM.And,btw,I do know how to eject my external before turning it off.
I'm turning TM off and backing up the old fashioned way until Apple provide a fix.:mad:

It is corrupting disks
 

To all those " This is just coincidence" guys.

I have heard about several people being unable to mount their harddrives,
I had a email traffic with a couple of them and told them to to a manual fsck
everyone of these guys has a corrupted super block...

I work with harddrives for about 10 years now, as i do with unix.

Time Machine IS corrupting, at least, some hard drives.

I have seen TM corrupting the volume headers and super blocks on 3 brand new external hard drives and one internal harddrive

Extended read/write tests on this HD's don't show any errors

Reformating to HFS+, fire up TM and boom, corrupted hard disk

They had the same issues with TM over Airport, and now they turned it off
but... it happens to wired hard drives too.

Apple, fix this!

Links
 

See:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread....14221&tstart=0

and the other links posted before

I agree that it's not necessarily a coincidence that many are having problems with their external drives failing when Time Machine is initiated. I'm betting dollars to donuts that the vast majority of those having problems didn't verify and repair those drives prior to using them. With the amount that Time Machine works the directory structure, any previous problems will most likely show themselves.

I'm beginning to form the opinion that Apple should have delayed the release of Leopard a bit longer (or delayed the release of iPhone, which was the explanation for the late release of Leopard), because it is becoming evident that there are a greater-than-expected number of problems in a greater-than-expected number of places. I have no doubt that Apple will sort it all out, but so far Leopard has not proven to be the advance that Apple built it up to be.

Las_Vegas, I can't verify what ruebezahl reports, but if I read his post correctly, this has happened on new and newly formatted drives. Those really shouldn't require additional verification and repair unless the file structure isn't being created properly in the first place. If Time Machine had any propensity to cause failure in the directory structure, Apple should have either not included it yet, or have the program itself do a check on file system integrity before performing its tasks.

I haven't USED Leopard yet (I will have the opportunity next week), but from the posts I've been reading, it seems that it went out on time (more or less), but not in the state that we've come to expect from Apple, and that's unfortunate.

Joe VanZandt

Arrogance Never Helps
 

This is a problem that IS 100% related to Time Machine and Disk Utility and those who are trying to dissuade others here ought to do a little research before opening their yaps.

Time Machine (like many other aspects of Leopard) is broken from the start.

By default it includes the entire hard drive in it's backup scheme. I added everything to the exception list, except my own home folder. Which was 25GB. I had an external partitioned with 100GB figuring that was more than enough to incrementally back up 25GB for a while, particularly for test purposes.

Hell no.

Once TM was done with it's initial assesment, it informed be that I needed a drive at least 299GB in size in order to function. Which is the same thing it told me when I initially tried TM with my 250GB boot drive (pre-exception list use).

Why add exceptions when you're just going to ignore them?

This is just one of the many problems with Leopard that has forced me to conclude that Leopard is beta at best, and I'm disgusted with how Apple has foisted it upon unsuspecting consumers (just in time for Christmas) and will from here on out try to positive spin market the time away until they get bug fixes out.

haha! Good story :)

It sounds to me like Time Machine is a bit mixed up (as opposed to ignoring your exception list) - maybe this is due to some other problem with the drive or the filesystem? Did you check the filesystem with Disk Utility's "Repair Disk" or DiskWarrior ?

It appears that Time Machine does have a boolean 'SkipSystemFiles' in its preferences even though it's not in the preferences pane. It's off by default.

I think we are missing the point of time machine. It is meant for those who don't know how to back up their system, and would buy an external HD to do so. Yes, I agree, TM is lacking a lot of features. TM is also not a true snap shot back up system. Which is why it takes up so much space. TM makes hard links to your backed up data, and every time it backs up, it copies that data over. So, if you modify a 200MB file and then back up it up, there will be two copies of that 200MB file.

I haven't tinkered with it quite enough yet, but out of the box I already knew it was a consumer level product aimed at those who had no idea how back ups worked, so I knew that I probably would never use it for my own personal back ups. I still use rysnc over the network to a file server at home. Then anything crucial is backed up to another HD in case one of the drives should fail.

Time Machine is stable for me. But I have a weekly routine of rebooting from external HD and running Disk Warrior on all drives. My external startup system is still OS 10.4.10 until DW is updated.

In preparation for Leopard and TM I got a 500GB G-Drive and created two partitions with Disk Utility in 10.4.10, a 30GB partition for minimal startup system and the remaining 400+GB for TM.

TM use of drive space: Interestingly enough, my 435GB partition used for TM shows more than 337GB available, yet if I Get Info on the individual dated folders for my computer in TM's ".backupdb" folder most of them indicate a size of over 60GB, which would have filled the drive days ago, while Get Info on the partition itself indicates a total of only about 98GB used.

I attribute this to something I read elsewhere, perhaps MacNN, that TM uses "multi-links," a hybrid of hard links and soft links (aliases), to make more efficient use of storage space for its backups. While it may indeed be a "consumer-level" product, it sure makes backups easier for us end users.

I read somewhere (forget exactly where) that you can use Time Machine to restore your whole system, not just bits and pieces, if needed.

I'm sure you read it here! The easiest way to restore any complete Time Machine image is to boot the Leopard Install DVD and select Restore from the bottom of the Utilities menu. All Time Machine backups on the attached backup disk will be available by date.

Actually, if I recall correctly, reference is made to this capability in the video introduction to Leopard that Apple had on their website, though it was not a detailed "how to". It may well have been discussed on this forum (I definitely recall some thread mentioning that the Leopard install had the option of backing up your 10.4.x installation so it could be restored to Tiger if you needed to.)

Joe VanZandt

How is Time Machine supposed to know your home folder is not going to grow beyond 100 GiB? Considering iTunes Music folder and Movies folder are both found within a user's home folder by default, the home Users is typically the largest of the root level folders, using the bulk of available hard drive space.

While I can understand your frustration, since you have the knowledge and understanding necessary to keep your home folder's size down while testing TM, I believe Time Machine is behaving properly when considering that the average user does not share your knowledge.

Personally, I've been very happy with Leopard thus far. Sure, it has some issues, which should be expected of any x.0 release, but they are relatively few and minor. I certainly wouldn't consider it "beta at best". It certainly isn't a mature release at this point, but neither was 10.4.0.

Why should Time Machine be making ANY assumptions about how large the home folder -might- grow to be? The point is, the folder actually -was- only 25 GB. Just why did it calculate 299 GB as the minimum required space available? THAT seems to me to be Yellow's point--it calculated exactly the same space requirements when looking at the whole disk as it did when looking at a 25GB folder. By any accounts, that's a flaw.

Of course, you are right that every first-release is going to have some problems, but I frankly don't -recall- quite as many difficulties moving from Panther to Tiger. I suppose that one my my disappointments is that Leopard has been in the works for much longer than any of the other major released of OS X and that much had been promised. I think there -do- seem to be more problems, and I think the user-visible improvements are debatable, and I don't even -know- what all has been changed that isn't easily visible yet. Microsoft released an OS sort of like that (we call it Vista) and all we did was smirk at the Windows dupes. I'm afraid that Leopard isn't even as well-behaved as Vista (though Vista was a -lot- longer in being shipped, to be sure.) Both certainly -work- in the broadest sense, but neither has proven to be the breakthrough that the companies had tacitly promised, in my opinion.

Joe VanZandt

Time Machine [I]doesn't[I] make assumptions about how large the home folder might grow, including the assumption that it will remain at 25 GiB. Time Machine is a continual solution. It isn't logical to have less space available for TM backups than is available for the folder that is being backed up. Present size is irrelevant.

I agree that 299 GiB seems a bit arbitrary (although there is probably a very logical explanation for that size). But, it seems completely logical that it would pick a size larger than the drive being backed up, even if that drive is not yet full, or folders are selected to not be backed up. To allow any less space is just asking for problems. TM has to be prepared for any eventuality, and that includes the home folder growing to maximum size allowed by the hard drive.

I think Leopard is FAR better behaved than Vista. The overwhelming majority of software that worked in Tiger still works in Vista, with perhaps some minor bugs that are quickly being worked out by developers. The overwhelming majority of hardware is recognized by Leopard, without the need for new drivers. Leopard doesn't require the latest and greatest in hardware to run. My roommate just upgraded his nearly five year old iMac without issue. My other roommate has Vista home basic installed on a more powerful machine, with twice as much memory, and it is so slow (go fix breakfast while it boots up, because you have plenty of time to kill, slow) I don't understand how he can stand to use it. I have another friend who installed Vista Ultimate on his near new gaming laptop, only to see the OS use half his resources at idle. OTOH, applications open more quickly on my MacBook with Leopard than with Tiger, and my idle CPU use is even lower than before. I don't think Vista can be said to be better behaved than Leopard by any stretch of the imagination.

Leopard may not yet be a mature release, but it is a great x.0 release. We just aren't used to dealing with the minor bugs of initial releases, because we haven't had a new OS release in 2 1⁄2 years. We've been spoiled by Tiger's maturity.

Just happened to me too: a TM backup failed and "b-tree"ed my external FW disk. Not even DW can repair it.

Disk Warrior finally completed trying to repair my external HD after THREE DAYS.It showed up the following information-
50,206 (of 51,087 total) files had a damaged extended attribute that DW repaired.(Interestingly ALL these files were created by Time Machine.. :confused: the remaining 800-odd were files I already had on the HD)

But trying to 'Preview' my rescued files,I can't get my external to mount even after DW's work.Is this the end?

I'd recommend recovering only the files that are not part of the Time Machine archives and repartitioning the drive from scratch. I wouldn't trust DiskWarrior to make adjustments to Time Machine files since they didn't exist at the time the current version of DiskWarrior was created.

Trouble is I can't recover them without the 'Preview' working.After it wouldn't,DW suggested I start rebuilding again.I tried it briefly to see if it was going to take the same length of time-and it clearly was.

I wonder if this is a result of newly implemented extended attributes used in Time Machine that may seem like problems to Disk Warrior? I can see no reference to there being a problem from the Alsoft site, but I wonder if using Disk Warrior to repair a Time Machine drive was thoroughly tested? Anyone have a perfectly good Time Machine drive they'd like to test Disk Warrior on to see if it handles a known-good backup properly? This Ars Technica article gives some information about the new extended attribute for Time Machine files: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/ma...4#time-machine
The discussion of the new FSEvents attribute occurs about 80% down in the article. I wonder why else Disk Warrior would see EVERY Time Machine file as having a damaged extended attribute? This could be important information, I think.

Joe VanZandt

In which case maybe I'll save my drive from the trash until DW give me the Leopard update...:)