{"id":992,"date":"2013-04-04T09:11:07","date_gmt":"2013-04-04T15:11:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=992"},"modified":"2013-03-10T09:27:51","modified_gmt":"2013-03-10T15:27:51","slug":"solution-for-time-machine-error-unable-to-complete-backup-an-error-occurred-while-copying-files-to-the-backup-volume","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/992","title":{"rendered":"Solution for Time Machine error “Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume”"},"content":{"rendered":"

My SO has a Mac, and she was using Time Machine<\/a> to back it up. \u00a0As someone who cut his teeth with Amanda backups<\/a> back in the day, Time Machine is a beautiful, intuitive backup solution. \u00a0Really, it is.<\/p>\n

However, a while ago the backups stopped working. \u00a0She saw this error message:\u00a0“Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume”.<\/p>\n

I googled around for it and saw this KB article<\/a> from Apple, which wasn’t too helpful, as the only troubleshooting suggestion was a reboot (hmmm, sounds a bit like Windows). \u00a0I tried doing that multiple times, and still saw the error message.<\/p>\n

So, we tried a different hard drive. \u00a0That still didn’t seem to work–same error message.<\/p>\n

Finally, I did some more googling and ran across this forum post<\/a>\u00a0(yes Jeff Atwood<\/a>, forums are indeed the dark matter of the web<\/a>), which gave me additional troubleshooting tips.<\/p>\n

Basically, if you are seeing this error on time machine:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. connect your time machine disk drive to your Mac<\/li>\n
  2. turn off time machine by opening the time machine prefs and select ‘none’ for the backup disk<\/li>\n
  3. open up your console<\/li>\n
  4. click on ‘system.log’<\/li>\n
  5. click ‘clear display’<\/li>\n
  6. turn on time machine by opening the time machine prefs and selecting your disk drive<\/li>\n
  7. watch the system log for errors that look likeMar 9 12:14:14 computer-name \/System\/Library\/CoreServices\/backupd[905]: Error: (-36) SrcErr:YES Copying \/path\/to\/file\/file.name to (null)<\/li>\n
  8. remove those files<\/li>\n
  9. restart time machine by repeating steps 2 and 6.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I am not sure how to fix the issue if you can’t remove those files. \u00a0The files that were causing issues for our Mac were imap mailabox files from Thunderbird, so I just uninstalled Thunderbird and removed the mailbox files.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    My SO has a Mac, and she was using Time Machine to back it up. \u00a0As someone who cut his teeth with Amanda backups back in the day, Time Machine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","category-thunderbird"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=992"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":993,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/992\/revisions\/993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}