Time Machine IS killing or corrupting disks

I'm having the same issue Ruebezahl, there is definitely an problem with Timemachine.

I have repartitioned and low level formatted a brand new drive mechanism a few times now and within a couple of mount and dismount cycles the filesystem on this drive is corrupted.

I expect that ultimately this problem is going to come down to an issue with certain firewire chipsets, perhaps something to do with the cache. In my case I'm using a Sohotank (U72WB), I'm not sure what the chipset is but I think it's an Oxford 912.

Unfortunately I too am having the same problem with Time Machine corrupting the filesystem on my external drive. I've low level formatted, reformatted (HFS+) and repartitioned 3 or 4 times now and it just doesn't work. The same drive plugged into my Linux box has worked fine for months now...

Enclosure is a generic SATA with a single USB2.0 port.
Disk is a Maxtor DiamondMax 11 (Grizzly) 500GB SATA2 (Model 6H500F0)
Computer is a PowerBook G4 1.67 HiRes 15" with 2GB RAM

Too bad because Time Machine looked pretty cool 🙂

It is pretty clear that TM corrupted two drives, both external SATA drives in USB enclosures. One a Seagate 500GB 3.5" drive and the other a 160 GB Toshiba 2.5" drive.

They were each formatted before TM with Disk Utility as GUID and HFS journalled.

After TM ... they are unmountable and Disk Warrior, Disk Utility and Drive Genius all report them as unrepairable.

I have the same problem also. Firewire 800 connected to a LaCie. First attempt made the drive unmountable. Got it reformatted and zeroed out. Next five attempts end in crashes.

Just a question: those people with corrupted drives, you don't run any third party drive utility in the background, do you?

The thing is, to allow for TM to work, Apple extended the HFS+ format to allow hard-links to folders, and it might be that utilities that are not aware of this feature could try to "fix" a "broken" disk that's actually OK and in the process really mess it up.

I would not use any disk utility that has not explicitly updated for Leopard, and I'd certainly would disable all disk utilities that run permanently in the background until they are fully up to date with Leopard.

For those experiencing the problem, please send Apple feedback, and include your hard drive's make and model (serial #, etc).

I used to work for Western Digital and it's possible that Time Machine is using very low level disk commands and some drive firmware may be at fault. The more information you can provide Apple, the easier it will be for them to communicate symptoms to hard drive manufacturers if they deem it to be faulty firmware.

I had the problem with the Drive not mounting under leopard. It was driving me nuts. Finally, I noticed in Activity monitor that an fsck_hfs was running. I killed that process, and then disk utility could see the drive and repair it. All has been well since. There may be a problem with unmounting (ejecting) external media, perhaps leopard doesnt write that bit to the disk or the cache correctly.

It is good thing that fsck_hfs was not in the middle of rewriting the disk directory when it was forced to quit.

I selected my LaCie 500 (which has Tiger on it) as the backup disc.
Just running routine check with Diskwarrior reported 23% items out of order - on a disc that normally has 1 or 2%. Told it to rebuild - and it stuck on "Building report" for 10 mins then the machine crashed with a "restart your computer" message. can't rebuild - may in fact have to do an Archive & Install ...
But I'll wait and see what Apple come up with - and Diskwarrior is going to issue a Leopard upgrade version - which in turn might fix the problem.
But it's the first problem I've had that Diskwarrior couldn't fix.

I have two WD My Book drives on my iMac one 500GB using FireWire 800 for data and a 1 TB drive used for Time Machine using USB.

I have not had any problems with this setup. There is a firmware bug with WD My Book drives that causes problems when daisy chaining the disks on FireWire but they have n update that claims to fix the issue. Maybe the corruption problem will be solved by updating to the latest firmware, for MyBook drives, at least.

I've been using Time Machine on a 500 Gig WD IDE drive in a generic external FW400/USB2.0 Enclosure. (I use the FW400 interface for speed). Set it up on the night of release, and haven't had any problems since then.

I'm not surprise that Disk Warrior crapped out on checking your TM drive. There are some major changes in the way HFS+ handles directories and hard linking that are leveraged by TM to work its magic. I wouldn't expect for a second for these changes to work well with any disk verification/repair software that hasn't made a Leopard specific release.

Hi to everyone !

I'm not the big expert user but I think that the first problem by analyzing this issue is that all are sure that the HFS or HFS+ (and the Apple or thirdyparts Tools) File System are the right underground for TM. I think that more and more TM works on an extra Device because its secret is to use zfs ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zfs) for the "magical-Backups"
If this is correct, all the utilities (NOT APPLE or BETTER NOT LEOPARD) will work bad ... very bad perhaps creating more or new problems with the drive.
Apple have given to few Infos about TM and using of TM with Drives.
I'm sure the Apple Developers are hard working for this Problem ... but too late
Leopard really clean GM needs more time and was given free too soon
To use again a with TM corrupted Drive I suggest to make a LOW-Level formatting via Terminal and NOT USE IT again for TM before Apple gives Instructions or new Utilities.
Good Luck

Massimo

I can virtually guarantee that TimeMachine drives do NOT use zfs - yet. TimeMachine could greatly benefit from zfs in the future, but if you read the "rumor" sites, you will see that zfs as implemented in 10.5.0 is read-only, and that developers need to install a special seed kernel driver to write-enable zfs. So a writable zfs isn't even a hidden feature of the OS, it requires an extra install.

However, HFS+ and just about any other unix file system does not/did not support hard-links on directories. This is functionality that has been added for 10.5 AFAIK. Utilities not aware of this change will report issues with multi-linked folders, and consider that a corrupt drive, when in fact now this is a regular feature and no indication of any file system corruption. Trying to fix the multi-linked folders will thus break you TM drive.

For more information on how time machine works, check out this article:

http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=3297