Suppose the copied files or folders are larger than 4GB, and you are striving to copy them to a FAT32 partition. My newsletter will deliver my blog posts to your email as well as infrequent email only content. This is the most common reason behind the error. The files that were causing issues for our Mac were imap mailabox files from Thunderbird, so I just uninstalled Thunderbird and removed the mailbox files. The Invalid MS-DOS function function error, can occurred while copying or move files from one storage media to another. I am not sure how to fix the issue if you can’t remove those files. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts.

restart time machine by repeating steps 2 and 6.watch the system log for errors that look likeMar 9 12:14:14 computer-name /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd: Error: (-36) SrcErr:YES Copying /path/to/file/file.name to (null).turn on time machine by opening the time machine prefs and selecting your disk drive.turn off time machine by opening the time machine prefs and select ‘none’ for the backup disk.connect your time machine disk drive to your Mac.That still didn’t seem to work–same error message.įinally, I did some more googling and ran across this forum post (yes Jeff Atwood, forums are indeed the dark matter of the web), which gave me additional troubleshooting tips.īasically, if you are seeing this error on time machine: A message may appear saying you need to restart Internet Explorer. Underneath, click the Disable radio button. I tried doing that multiple times, and still saw the error message. Click Tools -> Manage Add-ons -> Enable or Disable Add-ons.

I googled around for it and saw this KB article from Apple, which wasn’t too helpful, as the only troubleshooting suggestion was a reboot (hmmm, sounds a bit like Windows). An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume”. She saw this error message: “Unable to complete backup. However, a while ago the backups stopped working. As someone who cut his teeth with Amanda backups back in the day, Time Machine is a beautiful, intuitive backup solution. My SO has a Mac, and she was using Time Machine to back it up.