I use a Macbook pro for doing all my software development. Since switching over to Mac, I can't imagine using any other computer to develop with. The combination of the OSX operating system with the power of the Macbook Pro makes for an unbeatable development platform.

I have also eliminated all windows machines from our house now as well. I have a linux server for my websites, an Imac for our 'TV', which also acts as our primary media server for music, photos and family media, and an old 17" Powerbook G4 that my wife uses. I have the three Mac machines backing up to a 1 terabyte Timecapsule.

The Timecapsule is a great innovation on Apple's part, and has already saved my life on a few occasions. Not only does it handle all my media etc. but with the new version of VMWare fusion, I am able to have automatic backups of my local development and document files that I use on the Windows side.

Time Capsule was easy to setup, and had run without an issue until a few weeks ago, when I started getting errors during backups on my Macbook Pro.

These were 'Backup failed - Error mounting volume', or 'Network error during backup'. After digging around a bit through various log files etc. I found that the likely culprit had nothing to do with the network, but was the fact that my hard drive had bad files and directories on it.

Resolving this issue involved booting up from the OSX CD and running the Disc Utiltiy Repair function on the Macbook Pro hard drive. Since doing this, Timecapsule is up and running again without a problem.

It would be nice if Time Capsule/Time Machine could produce a more informative message, or offer to take some kind of corrective action in the event of a failure like this instead of the misleading cryptic message it had generated. Thus this blog post so hopefully the next person who hits the problem will be able to fix it without having to dig through log files...