Time Machine on the Blink

[hrj]

The hardware is being annoying. At some point Wednesday night, the "Time Machine" automatic backup stopped recognizing the drive (both from the laptop and desktop). I've been trying various things (including getting distracted by downloading some new iPhone apps, having iTunes seize up on me, figuring that if I was going to reboot I might as well run the software updater first, etc. etc.) with no luck yet. Since the wireless network that's run by the same piece of hardware (Timecapsule) is working fine, I'm not horribly worried. The next obvious step is rebooting the Timecapsule but I'm sensibly waiting until I have a period of a couple hours to mess around with it. I.e., the weekend.

Tonight's Cal Shakes play was Noel Coward's "Private Lives" -- full of Coward's usual witty, brittle, dysfunctional characters. Quite funny, but in a "wouldn't be nearly as funny if these people were in your social circle" sort of way. thread_walker and I both took off on-time and directly from work to go up to the site, so we had a nice relaxing picnic dinner (picked up from Berkeley Bowl on the way) ahead of time with.

Comments

[kahnegabs.livejournal.com]

If you have not done it already, try unplugging and re-plugging the usb cable. Re-start the computer and see if that helps. Perhaps the directory has forgotten the disk.

When was the last time you repaired disk permissions? It's in your utilities folder as disk tools. You should run that frequently, just to tidy things up.

If you can get it open after the above, try deleting the earliest saves. Possibly your disk is too full.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

As it happens, simply turning the drive off and back on again seems to have done the trick. The drive is wireless -- no usb. And I'd already tried rebooting the computer. And TimeMachine automatically weeds out older backups as necessary to free up disk space. It's all wonderfully self-contained ... when it works.

[kahnegabs.livejournal.com]

Twenty-some years as the local school techie have taught me that the most frequently successful "repair," -- no matter what the problem seems to be - is a check of all the connections and then a reboot of each part of the system.