Thanks for the speedy response. I actually read that one prior to finding your blog.

I really appreciate the suggestion though. I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the new iOS 10.5.2 and the now defunct app resulting from the upgrade.

Good luck!

Very long story short, trying to reload a previous version of iTunes application back on to my laptop from Time Machine. I am able to open, view & select iTunes. Everything seems to work just fine & the Restore process seems to be working . . . . then I get an error message telling me I don’t have permission.

I am setting up a two disk mirrored Raid for time machine and I would also like to use the same HDD to stash my photos and itunes library. Is this a safe thing to do? I was going to split the disk into two 500 gig partitions and use one for music and photos and the other for Time machine.
Will this cause an issue should I have to use the disk utility to “fix” stuff? I think that I read that rebuilding permissions can cause issues with Time Machine files.

Thanks

John

I also learned alot about TimeMachine while spending hours to find a workaround for the problem with automatic backups.

My Setup:
External USB harddrive (simple and effective :), one Partition with HFS, journaled, case-sensitive
on this disk a crypted sparsebundle with the hosts MAC address as name (i don’t like the idea of “loosing” the external disk somehow and exploiting all my personal stuff :)

a while ago it stopped making backups automatically, but it worked perfectly when starting a backup manually (mounting the sparsebundle automatically). This became very annoying, because the best feature of a backup tool is doing it silently and regularly – automatically.

I fiddled around really alot with all tools I found on my mac and came up with a workaround that triggers a backup automatically, but one still has to click once – but at least it asks regularly automatically :)

Thats the deal:
The time machine would ask “use this backup” and then mount and use the sparsebundle automatically, when the DestinationUUID in the TimeMachine.plist was set to the HFS Partition/Disk of my external drive. After accepting this question, the DestinationUUID gets set to the UUID of the mounted sparsebundle – and with that, automatic backup could not find the backup disk anymore – whether mounted or not.

So I created a cron that resets the DestinationUUID to the UUID of the external Disk regularly (the command “defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine DestinationUUID” prints the currently set DestinationUUID of TimeMachine).
And it works great! TimeMachine asks me about every hour and I just click “use this disk” and it starts backing up…

here’s my cron: copy this into a file and start it every 50 minutes (using “crontab” or CronniX App for example)
——–
#!/bin/bash
# reset DestinationUUID to external disk, this enables automatic backup again, but with questioning
# uuid of external disk (set this to the value set by selecting the external disk in TimeMachine)
backup_uuid=”63008BAB-DA4E-38DE-84F5-DF9561E8A31B”
# query current uuid
uuid=$(defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine DestinationUUID)
if [ -z "$(ps ax |grep [/]backupd)” -a $uuid != $backup_uuid ]; then
echo “setting UUID = $backup_uuid”
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine DestinationUUID $backup_uuid
fi
——–

I hope this is of help for anyone out there :)
Muc

PS: I heard that OsX Lion supports encrypted backups on external disks by default. I’ll try that soon I think :)

Time Machine Results are stored as a numeric code in:
/var/db/.TimeMachine.Results.plist

All error codes are listed in:
/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Localizable.strings

You can test with the following commands:

# Returns the numeric result code, 0=No Error, 19=The backup disk is not available…
defaults read /var/db/.TimeMachine.Results RESULT

# Returns the last complet backup date
defaults read /var/db/.TimeMachine.Results BACKUP_COMPLETED_DATE