Time Machine Error
 

From time to time, a Time Machine backup fails on my G5 machine. If I do nothing it fires again later and succeeds. If I choose "Backup Now" that proceeds without difficulty too.

Here's what the console says about a typical failure:
Do I (or should I) care? The disk checks out as it should and anytime I have retrieved a file (usually to rescue a bad scripting attempt) it's been fine. The Disk Utility verify disk says "... Appears to be OK" and the SMART reporter agrees that the disk is physically OK.

So what gives?

Does Time machine always hiccup on a DS_Store file?

Is it possible that you are doing something in your Downloads folder that would affect that .DS_Store file while the backup is ongoing?

Yes -- I run an app called Hazel which moves downloads through an archiving system of folders depending on age. I hadn't thought of that. I've stopped it to see if that matters.

Vis-à-vis "hiccup cause" here's another sample again involving a .ds_store, but not the same one. I should point out that all of the hourly backups after that preceded normally. Hazel is not involved in the Library in any way.

More people with the same problem: http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/.../t-491015.html and always with DS_Store files. Nobody seems to be reporting any problems so it's probably benign - but could be a problem if turns out that a successful backup is critical.

It is out of date but the old Mac Error code list I've got says that Error: -43 means "File not found" As it seems to be always the DS_Store files, I wonder if the problem is due to the way Finder saves them. Will do a couple of experiments here.

If it turns out that this problem is reproducible with the same .DS_Store file, then it might be interesting to use the 'dtrace' facilities to watch what is happening with this file.
(Run 'man -k dtrace' to see the various dtrace scripts that are available.)

Ah, not quite true. It seems there are some people on that thread I linked to who reported problems with other files and folders. The last poster seemed to think it was a synchronising issue.

At least in my case, however, it has so far always been a DS_Store file (since I started looking, anyway).

Yet another example:

Again, a DS_Store file balks

It matches the DS_Store file that caused the failure you described in post 4. Might pay to see whether the same file continues to cause problems.

Last night's failures:

Seem to me to be the same file, though the long code following inProgress is different.

So, since it's always the same .DS_Store file, if you'd like you could just try deleting that file and see if Time Machine will do it's job without any glitches.

.DS_Store files are just not THAT important.

Trevor

I could if I understood which instance to delete: the original, or the stored copy. If the stored copy, which instance since it appears in every backup.

Related question. How do you delete all instances of a backup of a disk that is now excluded from Time Machine, and has been for some time? It appears as a folder in the backups, and I'd like to free up whatever space it consumes on my backup HD. Absent some simple way, I'll just erase the backup disk and let Time Machine start over with the one drive it's supposed to follow, but that's not terribly attractive.

I'm pretty certain the file causing the problem is on the original.

I do not have Leopard yet - but I thought Time Machine allowed you to exclude certain files from the backups. If I'm right can't you just set Time Machine to exclude DS_Store files from the backup?

Yes, and it seems to work collectively as well -- exclude one, exclude all. We'll see what happens.

In Time Machine, you can remove all backups of an item. You might try that with the volume itself selected in the Finder window inside the TM interface. The command is located in the Finder's action menu.

Thanks, Mikey, but trashing the volume folder was not allowed.

@trevor: excluding .DS_Store files from TM backups did the trick; no more failures in 24 hours, used to be 2 | 3 per day.

I would be curious to know what happens if you deleted the pesky .DS_store file instead of excluding it. Perhaps that file is corrupt somehow?

D'oh. Worth a shot. I guess you could just select everything in it and "delete all". (Or nuke the partition, if there's nothing else on it.)

Would you mind sending me a copy of this .DS_Store file (or posting it here)?

Back at it again!

And

No harm done, so I'm going to ignore it from now on.

I'm getting the same error
 

I'm always getting time machine errors as well. At first I was told that the partition map was wrong and it should be GUID instead of apple partition map. Apparently apple partition was for non intel based macs. So i reformatted with GUID and then found out I had to do some driver updates on my WD mybook, as it kept randomly ejecting. Since then it was staying mounted, but I am still receiving errors. It still backs up but it gives an error.

Here is my error (which is like yours) in the console.

http://www.litemediadesign.com/Picture1.png

This bothers me, anyone got a clue?