Hey

I love Time Machine. Its a simple way to keep all your files backed up and my Time Capsule is slowly filling up with data. I have, however, come across a problem here the back up process itself does get stuck. This recently happened to a friend and in short of restarting or pulling out the cable I wanted to find a more graceful method. I’ve found two ways to stop a stuck time machine backup.

The first command which you write in Terminal (Applications > Utilities) is

sudo service com.apple.metadata.mds stop

and if you want to restart the service (which you do),

sudo service com.apple.metadata.mds start

This is known to work in 10.5. If however these two commands don’t work, which may be prevalent in the latest operating systems you can try.

sudo launchctl stop /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
sudo launchctl start /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Again written in Terminal. The latter is probably best if you are using Mac OS X 10.6

Hopefully this will solve any stuck time machine backups. I haven’t yet experienced such a problem, I am however assured that these two methods do work.

If you want more general tips and tricks I recommend The Missing Manual or Macs For Dummies. In the mean time I am going to watch The Time Machine since I have time travel related problems whizzing round my head.