Time Machine/HFS question

[Justin C. Walker]

Hi, all,

This is a bit involved, since I'm not sure what is useful information.

My backups stopped working recently, and I don't know why.  There  
doesn't seem to be anything in the system logs, but I did find this  
entry on the Apple support site:
     <http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306932>

I have been backing up using Time Machine from a 10.5 MacBook Pro  
(Core 2 Duo) to a 10.4 Mac Pro (Dual Quad Xeon) using a 1TB Western  
Digital MyBook FireWire drive.  It was fine from October through  
early February.  Then I took the laptop on the road.  I plugged it  
back in last week and didn't notice til today that backups weren't  
happening.

In the past, I would just mount the (remote) firewire drive on the  
laptop, and Time Machine would begin chugging away (or would  
dutifully schedule a time to start chugging away).

Now, I mount the device, Time Machine remains 'off', and when I turn  
it on, I get a drop down window where, presumably, the available  
drives are given.  This window is empty, and there's nothing in the  
logs to indicate what's happening (other than the mounting of the  
drive over AFP is logged).

Following the suggestions in the above article, I copied all the data  
off the firewire drive, reformatted it as GUID, and copied it back.   
Same story.

This may be linked with the upgrade from 10.5.1 to 10.5.2 (the last  
'band' on the drive is 2/4; the upgrade was on 2/5).  The appearance  
of the Time Machine prefs pane may have changed in 10.5.2, but that's  
a bit hazy...

A little more extraneous info.  My backup volume has two directories:
    Backups.backupdb/laptop
    laptop_...bundle

The Backups directory has a half-dozen directories from 10/29 (when I  
first started trying this out) and that's it.

The 'laptop...bundle' directory has a bunch of "bands" dating between  
10/30 and 2/4.

If I try to "restore", the alert tells me that there's no backup  
location.  I can open the prefs, which gets me back to the above  
problem (no drive to select) or I can use a "previous" disk, which  
gives me access to the 10/29 backups only.

A clue for the clueless?

Thanks as always.

Justin

--
Justin C. Walker, Curmudgeon-At-Large, Director
Institute for the Enhancement of the Director's Income
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The path of least resistance:
it's not just for electricity any more.
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