Time Machine "Backup failed with error: 11"

[Nick Naym]

After working quite nicely for several weeks, last night TM suddenly began
to fail due to (as before) "error: 11." I suspected that last night's
failures were related to a folder that TM was attempting to back up (a
folder containing a backup of my Entourage Identity), so today I "refreshed"
that folder, and subsequently TM successfully performed its backup.

I've tried before to find out what the hell a TM "error: 11" is, but without
success. I tried again today, but still came up empty. I did, however, find
two identical suggestions for handling TM "error: 11" failures:

One was in a post -- the 4th in this thread: ( http://is.gd/4PMsc );

The second was in a blog, located here: ( http://is.gd/4PMux ).

Essentially, the "remedy" is to delete the ".inProgress" file on the TM
drive ( /<TM drive>/Backups.backupdb/<drive being backed
up>/<date>.inProgress ) that remains after the initial TM failure.

So, for what it's worth, this is the (supposed) way of dealing with such
failures -- though the idea of deleting something from the TM drive via the
Finder makes me uncomfortable.

(<grumbles to self> I still don't know what the hell a TM "error: 11" is!)

--
iMac (24", 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 320 GB HDD) � OS X (10.5.8)

[isw]

In article <C71B65DD.4B436%nicknaym@[remove_this].gmail.com>,

I had a Time Machine failure a few weeks ago, but I don't recall the
error number. I ran Disk Utility on the Time Machine volume, and it
found some problems that took it a goodly time to fix, but everything
has worked fine since.

Isaac

[Nick Naym]

In article isw-4D889E.20165307112009@[216.168.3.50], isw at i...@witzend.com
wrote on 11/7/09 11:16 PM:

I never heard of -- much less had -- TM "error: 11" failures before; they
only began after my recent update to 10.5.8.

[P. Sture]

In article <C71B65DD.4B436%nicknaym@[remove_this].gmail.com>,
Nick Naym <nicknaym@[remove_this].gmail.com> wrote:

According to the macerror command line utility, an "error 11" is:

macerror 11
Mac OS error 11 (dsMiscErr): miscellaneous hardware exception error

Is the hardware barfing?

That doesn't mean that your workaround of deleting the ".inProgress"
file isn't valid of course.

--
Paul Sture

[Nick Naym]

In article paul.nospam-6BAE...@pbook.sture.ch, P. Sture at
paul....@sture.ch wrote on 11/11/09 10:34 AM:

I don't believe it's the same "error 11."

[David Empson]

Nick Naym <nicknaym@[remove_this].gmail.com> wrote:

> In article paul.nospam-6BAE...@pbook.sture.ch, P. Sture at
> paul....@sture.ch wrote on 11/11/09 10:34 AM:
>

> > According to the macerror command line utility, an "error 11" is:
> >
> > macerror 11
> > Mac OS error 11 (dsMiscErr): miscellaneous hardware exception error
> >
> > Is the hardware barfing?
> >
> > That doesn't mean that your workaround of deleting the ".inProgress"
> > file isn't valid of course.
>
> I don't believe it's the same "error 11."

It isn't.

I don't know what the Time Machine error numbers mean. They are defined
internally by Time Machine.

The postive values in the range 1-15 listed by macerrors are the old
68000 processor exceptions, which were also used on PowerPC Macs.

Negative error numbers (as listed by macerrors) are reasonably
consistent across the system and in native Mac applications.

--
David Empson
dem...@actrix.gen.nz