I'm new to Mac and have been using my MacBook Pro (10.6.4) for about a month, so I figured it was time to get backups working. I am using about 150 GB on my HD, but a lot of that is Parallels 5 images, which I excluded from the Time Machine backup. This leaves me with 65 GB that should be backed up. I had an existing 500 GB WD "My Book" external USB hard drive (Disk Utility labels it as WD 5000AAV External Media), that was formated NTFS, so I had Time Machine reformat it.
I was a little naive when I started the initial backup on Friday afternoon at the office. I realized I had to go home, so I stopped the backup. I brought the MacBook and external drive home. I started another backup and checked before I went to bed. The MacBook was is sleep mode, and when I unlocked it, the backup had stalled a litter over 9 GB. I didn't want to try again without making any changes, so I rebooted (old Windows habit), reformatted the external drive and started over. I woke up this morning with it stalled out around 8.5 GB.
I am basing the fact it is stalled out by two things: the external activity light on the external drive quit "moving" and the Activiy Monitor app, Disk Activity tab has 0 bytes data read and written per second while I am writing this.
Question: How do I figure out why this is stalling out? Is there a log? Could it be something with sleep mode and the drive being "green" and powering down?
Bonus Question: This should probably be a separate question, but with 65 GB data, and 80 GB of parallels images, should I change my time machine backup drive into a different partition scheme? Maybe 300 GB for time machine, and 200 GB for snapshots of my images?
Update: I just installed the WD Macintosh +TURBO Drivers and am going to try again. I tried to Update the Drive Firmware, but that app didn't detect my drive as an Elite or Essential.
Update 2: Reformatted the HD and tried again overnight and once again stalled out at 8.5 GB. Nothing in the Console log messages. Maybe I need to find another HD?
.Backup.log
file on the backup disk itself, within the folder with the backup date. See also Verifying Time Machine backups.