4 Solutions to “The backup volume is read only” Error when Using Time Machine on Mac

Data Backup, Data Recovery, Outlook Data Recovery January 17, 2018

Mac users must be familiar with Time Machine, which is an excellent inbuilt backup tool on Mac system. But, Time Machine backup can fail, too. Now, this post will look at the “The backup volume is read only” error when using Time Machine and offer 4 solutions.

Time Machine is an admittedly handy and easy backup application for Mac users. Nevertheless, similar to the other backup software, Time Machine can be subject to errors and failures as well. For instance, the “The backup volume is read only” error is one of them. In general, when encountering this error, users will be panic and fear that the original data in drive may be damaged, like corrupt Outlook file.

4 Solutions to "The backup volume is read only" Error when Using Time Machine on Mac

In reality, most of time, this error simply indicates that you aren’t allowed to back up new data to the drive. Your original drive data are probably fine. Hence, your next step is to fix this issue as soon as possible to restore the Time Machine drive. At present, thereinafter, we will expose 4 solutions to you.

1. Eject Drive

  1. First off, access “System Preference”.
  2. Then, open the “Time Machine preference pane”.
  3. Next, move the slider to “OFF” to quit Time Machine.
  4. Subsequently, locate the drive mounted on the Desktop, right click on it and choose “Eject” option from the menu.
  5. After that, power off the drive and disconnect it.
  6. Later, wait a while and re-connect the drive to your Mac.
  7. When the drive is mounted on Desktop, you can turn on the Time Machine.
  8. Finally, retry backup to see if the error persists.

2. Unmount Drive

When taking the Step 4 mentioned in the above solution, you may discover that the drive isn’t mounted in the Desktop. In this case, you need to unmount it with Disk Utility.

  1. At the outset, turn off Time Machine according to Step 1 to 3 in above way.
  2. Then, browse to “Applications” > “Utilities” o locate and launch Disk Utility.
  3. Afterwards, from Disk Utility sidebar, select the drive and click “Unmount” button in the toolbar.
  4. Next, like the Solution 1, eject and reconnect the drive and attempt backup as usual.

3. Repair Drive

In addition, chances are that the backup drive is malfunctioning. At this time, you need to repair drive via Disk Utility. This built-in tool offers many fixing functions, such as “First Aid” and “Repair Disk Permissions”. You can try the two one by one. After that, you can retry Time Machine backup.

4. Run FSCK

Aside from Disk Utility, Mac also comes endowed with a File System Check (FSCK) command. It can repair many file system issues involving the disk. Hence, you can try it on your backup drive. Launch Terminal tool in Mac and input “/sbin/fsck –fy”. After running fsck, reboot your Mac to try Time Machine again.

Author Introduction:

Shirley Zhang is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including mdf recovery and outlook repair software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com

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