Apple knows how important it is to back up, so they created the Time Machine application. Pre-installed, user friendly, and set to perform seamless automatic backups every hour, Apple users no longer have an excuse to NOT back up their data.
However, as simple as Apple has made it to prevent catastrophic data loss, sometimes Time Machine just doesn’t behave. This becomes complicated because Apple doesn’t advertise immediate solutions on how to resolve the issue of your drive not completing scheduled back ups.
I thought I’d provide a simple solution that can save you a phone call to AppleCare. It’s called Time Machine Buddy — a free download from apple that gets installed within your widgets. What this neat little app does is provide a more in-depth look at the processes that occur during a time machine backup.
You can download the app here.
After you install it and save it to your dashboard, connect your drive and run a Time Machine back up, and watch Time Machine Buddy start logging the activity. Even though most of the computer language may seem foreign to the average user, there is one log in particular that’s worth looking for as your Time Machine progress bar runs on for infinity.
“Node requires deep traversal.” In a more simplified way, this means that Time Machine’s app is having an issue with saving backups to your drive. This can quickly be remedied with a reformat of your external drive, and re-running Time Machine.
Of course, this requires that you either save your most current back up to another destination, or that your current system is up to date with any important data. To reformat your drive, simply open up Disk Utility in the Applications < Utilities folder, select your problematic external drive, select the “Erase” tab. Once it completes the reformat, open up Time Machine, select the freshly formatted drive, and voila! Time Machine will resume its back ups successfully.