Error messages on the Mac have always been a mystery, rarely do they tell you anything that can point you in the right direction for troubleshooting. Mac OS X is no different, and Time Machine has plenty of its own error messages to learn and love.

Thankfully, James Pond has put together a pretty good Time Machine troubleshooting guide and made it available for everyone.

I came across the site this past weekend because my Time Machine backups kept failing, and I had no idea why. The site offers a Dashboard Widget that helped diagnose the problem, and in fact pointed me directly to the file that was causing the backup to fail.