Ever just have one of those days….?

Error (12): Link of previous volume failed for DVR Storage.

Time Machine is a very reasonable backup package included with Mac OS 10.5, but every now and then there are some issues…  I changed out a drive (DVR Storage), with a larger SATA drive, and then I started receiving these errors…  According to the Apple Support Forums, this occurs if you don’t clone the drive (eg. You just copy the files to the new drive).  I presume the “.com.apple.timemachine.supported” hidden file in the root of the drive maybe related to this issue…

But I have found a workaround / solution to the issue, assuming there is no critical backups contained on that drive.  Enter time machine, and select the drive in question, from the action pull down (the Gear Shaped icon in the Time Machine Browser), choose “Delete All Backups of <drive name>”.  Time Machine will ask for your administrator password, type it in, and wait a few minutes for Time Machine to purge the backups of that drive.

Once it is done, Time Machine will be able to backup the drive….

But I need to stress that this will purge all the backups of that drive’s content.  So this is not something you will want to do if the old drive has backup data that you need to preserve… If there is critical backup data, instead use SuperDuper! to transfer the drives content to the new drive.