Personal

Replaced drive on Drobo and time machine gone crazy again

One of my 1TB WD Green drives failed earlier in the week while I was away. The Drobo emailed me indicated the fault and that it was low on disk space. I got home today and bought a black WD 2TB drive this time for 204USD plus tax. I pulled out the 'failed' WD 1TB drive and popped in the new one. The drive was hard to pull out. I ended up using a metal pin under the drive to get it to come out, the springs in the Drobo don't work anymore for that tray.

So, that solves the immediate problem of getting the Drobo working again. It'll take probably 2 or 3 days now to relayout the data using the new drive. It's currently got 3 x 2TB drives and a 1.5TB drive giving 5TB of usable space.

The next problem is why is the Drobo full? It looks like my time machine is gone crazy again and is continually backing up the whole drive again. Last time, this was the spotlight metadata so I'll try that again but maybe thats a symptom of my USB drive failing also. I think I'll check the smart status of my 1TB USB drive and the failed drive this evening. This is a problem with USB drives or the Drobo, you cant easily see the SMART status. I put the drives in a PC desktop that I have for games to see them.

Time machine doesn't seem to deal well with backing up external drives

My home iMac has an external 1TB USB drive where I keep all my iPhoto, iTunes and iMovie stuff. I use timemachine to backup both my main HD and that drive to my Drobo. But, recently, it's going a little crazy. MY machine goes to sleep every night and wakes up every morning. Sometimes, the 1TB drive doesn't reappear on my desktop and I need to unplug/pluug it back in to get the drive to appear. This looks like a MacOs bug but what ever, this is what happens.

Lately, timemachine is making crazy sized backups. I just watched it do a 700GB one and as I type, it's doing another 900GB one. The only drive getting any traffic right now is the 1TB one so I'm assuming timemachine is doing a full backup of everything on that drive which is crazy as 99% of it hasn't changed since yesterday.

So, the question is, if a drive that is backed up by time machine isn't available when a backup is scheduled, does timemachine then think it's gone? And then later when you reattach, does time machine then decide to back the whole thing up again? For me, this is a rhetorical question as that seems to explain whats going on at least here. I'm on MacOs 10.6.4. Any one any ideas?

For now, I turned off the scheduled sleep/wakeup stuff thinking maybe thats when the 1TB drive gets 'lost'. But, thats tomorrow, today, it's backing up over 800GB as I watch it...

Time machine cant resolve destination problem fixed

I use an external USB 1Tb drive for my time machine backups. I back up maybe 750Gb of data on this. It works when I do it first but then after a couple of days, it says that it can't resolve the time machine destination and the time machine backup fails.

I went googling this morning and discovered that if this happens then you just need to select the time machine disk again in time machine options and then it starts working again.