What is more worrying than this ridiculous error, the backup volume has been quite busy for the last 15 minutes or so, trying to make a new backup. Methinks this may not end well.

I should note that time machine seems to have been working properly up until today; that's several months of complaint-free operation. The drive has been full, meaning that time machine has been discarding the oldest backups, for several weeks now. Nothing special about today that I am aware of.

All right, this is the way it all turned out. I turned off time machine, and for about two hours, the Mac continued to read the drive at about 5 MB / sec. Mostly. Wrote a little bit here and there. When I came back from dinner, it had stopped, so I turned time machine back on, and at the next scheduled backup, it did its usual thing without any extra time, error messages or etc. Since then, it's done quite a few backups, and all appears to be well.

My guess is that the drive had a problem, time machine was forbidden to do whatever it was trying to do while the OS dealt with the problem, time machine posted an error message having more to do with what it was doing when it was locked out than the actual state of how much free memory was left on the drive, and that was the sum total of the event.

But that is a guess. Apple doesn't answer posts in the forums over there, and no one else has even ventured an opinion, so who knows.

I'm delighted to see the thing working, though, and without otherwise fouling anything up. My Mac and I spend a lot of time together and I don't like seeing it acting fun-wah.

#apple

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