MacBook Air Portable Genius, 4th Edition

Time Machine No Longer Backs Up to an External Hard Drive

Time Machine is a real lifesaver when you need to recover a file or folder, but only if it consistently backs up MacBook Air. If Time Machine works for a while, but you then start getting errors and Time Machine reports that it can no longer back up to your external hard drive, what could be the problem?

The most likely culprit is that Time Machine has backed up 10GB of data to the drive, but that drive is configured in such a way that it can’t store more than 10GB. Specifically, it means the drive is configured with the Master Boot Record partition type. To store more than 10GB on that hard drive, you must change the partition type to one that supports more data. Follow these steps:

1. In Finder, press Shift+ +U to open the Utilities folder.

2. Double-click Disk Utility. The Disk Utility window appears.

3. Click the external hard drive.

4. Click the Partition pane.

5. In the Volume Scheme menu, choose 1 Partition.

6. In the Name text box, type a name for the partition. The standard name is External HD, but you can use something more descriptive, such as Time Machine Backups.

7. Click Options. Disk Utility displays the partition scheme options.

8. Select the GUID Partition Table option, as shown in Figure 12.14.

9. Click OK.

10. Click Apply. Disk Utility warns you that all the data on the hard drive will be erased ...