Time Machine: Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup directory

Question

I recently started getting this error message in Time Machine:

Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup directory.

My configuration: Unibody Macbook Pro 15" (circa September 2008) & Western Digital Passport 500GB (USB HDD), OS X 10.5.7 (up-to-date).

I couldn't get rid of this problem through unplugging/replugging my external HDD, and eventually rebooted the machine. The problem is gone for the time being but I'd like to find a better solution than "reboot and pray".

Solution

What is in your Console log, if you filter for "Backupd". Can you post the last dozen or so lines, that will give us some more information to make an educated decision on.

Please keep in mind, failure messages in Time Machine could simply be that a document was unable to be copied. Time Machine is very binary, the backup either completed 100% or failed. So an archive file from NetNewswire (*.html) page not being backed up, means that it failed...

Comments

[Pauk]

I've had the same issue as well and a bit of tinkering like you've said seems to "fix" it for a while. I'd like to know the cause of too. +1 for your question.

[Chealion]

What shows up in Console? Specifically anything from backupd or is that the error from Console (/var/log/system.log in this case)?

[Arjan]

I'm sure there's more details in Console?

[pix0r]

Did you try rebooting? =P I really don't want to lose my Time Machine data. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of using Time Machine in the first place?

[pix0r]

The console log showed that I was getting "error 11". I noticed that several files in my Movies folder were erroring out just before the "error 11". I excluded the Movies folder from backups and it works fine now. (Obviously not an ideal solution, but I don't have any original content in there currently.)