I recently had an issue with my Time Machine back up on my QNAP 419P and immediately dived into the forums here to blame QNAP for the issue! After James Wu from the admin team remoting onto my machine and kindly sitting there for a long time while my Time Machine ran! It turns out that the problem was with OSX and some corrupted files that I had in my HD rather than anything to do with QNAP. So I thought that I'd post up some info here that I've learnt after going through all this and hopefully will help some of you guys if you run into any issues with Time Machine and figers cross it might get people in a good starting point when they contact that Admin's!
So firstly - CONSOLE
If you search for Console in spotlight or you can find it in Applications > Utilities. I'd never used this util before and I was amazed at the amount of info that was posted in there - including a log from Time Machine! So go ahead and open it up. You should see a Window a bit like this one:
If you click on "All Mess15/01/2011 23:20:39 com.apple.backupd[1244] Starting standard backupages" at the top then you will see everything that's posting a log. Now I'd go ahead and quit all other open apps to reduce the number of veriables that there could be that could cause and issue with Time Machine plus it also makes the log in Console easier to read as the only running app should be Time Machine's back up. Once you've quit all your apps (except Console) then Ctrl+click on the Time Machine icon in your dock and select "Start Back Up Now" and then head over to the Console window and take a look. Check out the processes "com.apple.backup" and you should see something like "Starting standard back up" and your QNAP being mounted. An easy way to see just the backup info is to type "backup" into the search bar in the top right.
Now let Time Machine run and keep an eye on console to see what info gets posted there. And there should be quite a detailed log of why your Time Machine failed. In my instance it was some files that I was storing on one of my HDs for a friend from his Windows laptop when he was re-formatting it. It turns out a couple of his files weren't in too good a shape and that was causing my Time Machine issues. So I just zipped up those bad files into a nice new zip file and restarted Time Machine and hey presto - it worked all the way through ! Until .....
Secondly - A tip for if Time Machine is stuck on "Finishing Backup"
This was because it was 3 months since I'd been able to back up and I'd backed up about 30 GB of new music tracks and I think Time Machine got a little upset that I'd left it so long! So I canceled my back up and ran it again, this time it only backed up 3MB worth of files and then still got stuck/hung again at "Finishing Backup" . So at least I knew that my files had been backed up (only wanted to back up 3MB the second time I ran it, rather than 30GB) but Time Machine was getting itself a bit stuck. So I did some searching and found the following guide:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?s ... 5025816745
So I started Time Machine backing up again so that my "Time Machine backups" drive (blue/green icon with the circular arrow on) and I then went into the drive in Finder. I found the file called '.inProgress' - deleted it and then rebooted. Then on reboot I started Time Machine back up now again and this time it went all the way through, completed and shut itself down !!!The essence of the solution is to open up the backup media and find the file ending in '.inProgress' and then deleting that file. This will be on the backup volume inside the Backups.backupdb folder, and then in the subfolder for the machine and volume which was being backed up at the time of the hangup. These folders may be inside of a Sparse Disk Image if the backup goes to a Time Capsule or other network based backup volume. After rebooting the Mac Time Machine can then startup normally and perform its operations.
I hope this helps some of you guys out - console is a real winner and should at least point you in the right direction of why your back ups are failing!
Good luck!
