Apple Time Machine & Time Capsule prove to be a boon for backup-dorks. And I think most of us belong to that species 😉

Most of the time TimeMachine works well in the background. The only point you may recognize it is the temporary performance loss if the backup is running.
But yesterday, nothing worked any more: Time Capsule reported an error:

“Time Machine Error – The Backup disk image „/***/***/***.sparsebundle“ is already in use.”

Problem: Time Machine and the connected Time Capsule assume, that there is a backup process still running. In my case, a cold (but necessary) restart of my Mac was the reason for the confusion.

Solution: Unfortunately a restart of my Mac did not help. The problem is the Time Capsule itself, which has to release the established connection. You can fix that problem with the AirPort Utility under Programs/Utilities. The brand new AirPort Utility Version 6.1 has only one function you can use: The restart of the Time Capsule. But that did not help in my case. Weird but true: the old AirPort Utility Version 5.6.1 comes with much more features … especially “Disconnect all users …”. This is exactly what we need to solve our Time Machine error! So you just need to open the 5.6.1 version of the AirPort Utility, open the Time Capsule with a double click and open the tab “Disks” and press the button “Disconnect all users …”.

In order to solve the problem like I described before, I had to work around an other problem: How to install the old AirPort Utility version 5.6.1 on my Mac running OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion?! The old AirPort-Utility version works well under 10.8, but the installation routine will not allow to install it. Luckily, Frank Tisellano helps us out with am Automator workflow to extract the App from the installation bundle. In my case I had to open the “AirPort Utility Extractor” Skript in Automator to run the commands in the terminal manually.

I hope, that howToFix saves one or the other some time …

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