Time Machine Verification Issue

Infomaniac wrote:
A window just popped up saying: "Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you." It goes on to say, "Click Start New Backup to create a new backup. This will remove your existing backup history. This could take several hours."

What is this???

It appears that Time Machine found something corrupted in your backups. Something that Disk Utility can't fix.

Does this indeed mean that I will lose ALL my backups over the past year?

Probably.

When I selected my Time Capsule icon and chose "Get Info", the "Sparse Disk Image Bundle" says that it is 317 GB. Since my Time Capsule is 500 GB, I assume this is not a full disk issue.

Correct.

If I click on the "Start New Backup" button, will that mean my Time Capsule will be totally erased, and I will start over with a full 500 GB drive?

Probably, depending on the sizes. If a full backup is less than about 152 GB, perhaps not immediately.

One clue: This afternoon I did perform an update from the "Software Update" menu item, and I installed OSX 10.6.4. Could this upgrade be the culprit? If so, have there been any other such reports of a Time Machine issue with the upgrade?

Oh, yes. See #C13 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

This is a crazy error, I took the 10.6.4 update this morning and for the first time ever needed to restore some items from my mailbox deleted in haste earlier.

Now this verification runs and tells me that I need to start again. What is the point, timemachine can clearly do the restore properly, why not a option to archive the 'corrupt' but clearly still working back up. (I am doing this myself at the expense of a lot of diskspace).

Is this related to the update today?

Philip A. S. Miller wrote:
This is a crazy error, I took the 10.6.4 update this morning and for the first time ever needed to restore some items from my mailbox deleted in haste earlier.

Now this verification runs and tells me that I need to start again. What is the point, timemachine can clearly do the restore properly, why not a option to archive the 'corrupt' but clearly still working back up. (I am doing this myself at the expense of a lot of diskspace).

Is this related to the update today?

In a way. The update seems to include the verification process that was first introduced with the earlier +Time Capsule Backup Update 1.0,+ as detailed in #C13.

It didn't cause a problem, it found something very serious that was already there (we don't know just what, but it appears to be something Disk Utility can't fix).

You may be able to restore some items, but if there's damage anywhere, the whole set is suspect, since they're all inter-linked -- you don't know, for example, if you can do a full system restore.

i am having the same issue, except weekly. it's getting really ridiculous that i have to lose my backup history every single week now, not to mention the extremely long time it takes to start over again (even when hooked directly to the time capsule via ethernet cable). only thing i can think of is that i'm backing up to a 1TB drive that's hooked into the time capsule by USB, rather than onto the 500TB time capsule itself. could that be causing this behavior?

sunbears wrote:
i am having the same issue, except weekly. it's getting really ridiculous that i have to lose my backup history every single week now,

That is quite unusual; reports of it happening even twice are rare here.

only thing i can think of is that i'm backing up to a 1TB drive that's hooked into the time capsule by USB, rather than onto the 500TB time capsule itself. could that be causing this behavior?

Possibly. Are you using a powered hub? There are some reports that some external HDs, even some with their own power supplies, don't work reliably with a TC unless there's a powered hub between them.

Or, the TC or USB drive may be beginning to fail.

Or, you may have a bad WIFI connection.

Or, something on your internal HD is corrupted. Verify it, per #A5 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum), just to rule that out.

Other than a failing HD, none of those should cause your backups to be corrupted, since there's all sorts of checks, including journalling, to prevent damage or recover from it. But stranger things have happened.

FYI: you're not alone. I'm also having the same problem weekly for the past several weeks. In my case, the backup is on a external drive connected via AirDisk. I have a second computer backing up to the same drive but it's Time Machine backup hasn't had to be recreated even once. Hopefully Apple will examine this problem soon!

Doug Hirzel wrote:
FYI: you're not alone. I'm also having the same problem weekly for the past several weeks. In my case, the backup is on a external drive connected via AirDisk.

If you mean via an Airport Extreme, you need to know that's "iffy" and +*not supported by Apple.+* See: Using Time Machine with an Airport Extreme Air Disk (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

Holy **, I've recently started using TM because I was seduced by way in which is able to do an incremental backup v. quickly without slowing down other tasks in the slightest (it must take bottom priority in the thread manager or whatever its called).

Anyway, I've been using CCC for years on the 5 macs in my workgroup and never had a single issue. Got a record of every file that's ever been created on those machines. Browsing this forum has made me very uneasy. Kind of puts me off introducing file sync. software into the group also.

Sorry this is slightly off topic, but my advice is to abandon TM if your backups are mission critical. And there is no reason to think that your family photographs will not be very valuable to you 30 years from now.

oxcart wrote:
Holy **, I've recently started using TM because I was seduced by way in which is able to do an incremental backup v. quickly without slowing down other tasks in the slightest (it must take bottom priority in the thread manager or whatever its called).

Not entirely true. They're usually quick and unobtrusive, but if you're backing-up wirelessly, and also trying to do a lot of other things over the same network, you will see a slowdown. And, of course, if your Mac is already overloaded, or having other problems, that may happen, too.

Anyway, I've been using CCC for years on the 5 macs in my workgroup and never had a single issue. Got a record of every file that's ever been created on those machines. Browsing this forum has made me very uneasy.

Do not overreact. First, what you see here are the relative few folks having problems, not the millions who don't. If you walk in to your local hospital, do you assume that everyone in town is sick or injured?

Second, some of these posts are by folks backing-up over a network via an Airport Extreme, which is +*not supported by Apple.+* Sometimes it can be made to work, but if you do something Apple tells you not to, you really shouldn't complain when it doesn't work well!

And there are problems and failures posted on the CCC forums, and all other backup apps' forums, too.

Sorry this is slightly off topic, but my advice is to abandon TM if your backups are mission critical.

Baloney. TM work well for most folks.

But I've learned over the years (mostly the hard way, of course 😟 ), never to trust my backups to a single app or piece of hardware: no app is perfect, and all hardware fails, sooner or later.

Like many here, I keep full Time Machine backups, plus a "bootable clone" on a separate external HD. I use CarbonCopyCloner, many use the similar SuperDuper. That gives me the best of both types of backups, plus of course a completely separate, independent backup.

This is not limited to +Time Machine.+ While it's relatively rare, we do get posts here every few weeks where someone had an internal HD fail, or get corrupted, and while they were restoring from their backups, the backup drive failed.

Hello,

I've got the same issue since the "Time Capsule Backup Update" which was installed on my system at June 2nd.

I own my MacBook since 2006. I've upgraded from Mac OS X 10.4 to 10.5 and 10.6. Since 10.5 I've been using Time Machine on an external USB-drive connected to my AEBS. This worked very fine. After a HD-crash in 2008 I was able to recover my hole system perfectly. At the beginning I used a 1 TB HD, partioned in to 500 GB partions, one for data, one for the backup. Later I formatted the drive to 1 TB only for backups. Everything worked good.

Since 10.6 I got more and more problems with Time Machine. Time Machine began an backup, told me, that e.g. 10 MB have to be backed up, but hang on e.g. 64 kByte for hours and haours (the longest time I gave him was 48 h). Checking the external HD didn't find any errors. Formatting the HD (and losing all my Backups solved the problem for a while, but after a few weeks it happened again.

Accidentally I found out, that after using the software "Applejack", that I tryed because of another problem, the problem went away. I don't know which step, that applejack auto does did solve the problem, maybe cache clean-up? So I found my solution, every time my backup hung, I did a reboot to single mode, executed applejack, and than everything worked fine again for 2 - 4 weeks, until the problem occured again. That wasn't nice, but I could live with it.

My AEBS has an issue, that is mentioned in forums from time to time: it sometimes "forgets" its connected USB-drive. You can't connect to it until you do a restart of the AEBS. Because this happened about every week and was annoying, too, I decided in December 2009, to activate the backup function of my QNAP NAS SS-839 Pro. Henceforward everything worked fine with my NAS.

Then came June 2010 and the "Time Capsule Backup Update". Surprisingly Time Machine worked fine for 2 days without the creation of a new backup? But after these 2 days TM suddenly wanted to do a completly new backup and deleted all my old backups. Ok, for stability I accepted this.

But since than I get every (about) 2 weekd the same message and all my backups are lost. Backing up my complete HD over WLAN takes about 24 hours. 😟 First I thought, it could be a problem with the NAS, so I reconnected an HFS-formatted USB-Disk to the AEBS. But in this configuration I got the same error message again after a few days.

Meanwhile there were 2 updates to the NAS-Software, after the last update I had a period of about 3 weeks when everything seemed to work and I was very happy. But today I got again the error message mentioned above and TM is backing up everything since now 17 hours (60 % completed 😟 ).

This is very annoying and I don't know where the bug is. 😟 Maybe I should buy a Time Capsule? But I'm fearing that the problem is somehow with my MB?

Please help. I'm thankful for any hints or suggestions.

Thomas

P.S. Please excuse my bad english.

t.schaefer wrote:
. . .
My AEBS has an issue, that is mentioned in forums from time to time: it sometimes "forgets" its connected USB-drive.

I hate to have to tell you this, but Time Machine backups via an Airport Extreme to a USB disk are "iffy" and +*not supported by Apple.+* See Using Time Machine with an Airport Extreme Air Disk (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

What you're seeing is one of the things that happen to some of us who do that. In my case, it worked fine for about 3 months; then every couple of days, the sparse bundle came up corrupted. Sometimes Disk Utility could repair it, sometimes I had to use Disk Warrior, but usually the only solution was to erase and start over. After a few weeks of that, it's now worked fine for several months (and that's all with exactly the same hardware in exactly the same location).

You may or may not have a problem with your Mac; the problem may be in the Airport, or a bad WIFI connection to it. But any network backups (even to a Time Capsule) are going to be much slower and less reliable than to a directly-connected drive, especially via WIFI.

And Time Machine doesn't back up well, or at all, to many NAS boxes. See the pink box in #2 of Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

I think I've seen several posts here about it working reasonably well with yours, but I can't be sure, and have no direct experience with them.

Some things that may help:

Try renaming some things, as odd as that sounds, per #P1 in Using Time Machine with an Airport Extreme Air Disk.

Try the things in #D2 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

-deleted, see next post-

Message was edited by: t.schaefer

Pondini wrote:

t.schaefer wrote:
. . .
My AEBS has an issue, that is mentioned in forums from time to time: it sometimes "forgets" its connected USB-drive.

I hate to have to tell you this, but Time Machine backups via an Airport Extreme to a USB disk are "iffy" and +*not supported by Apple.+* Thank you very much for your fast reply!

I know this. At the beginning, I used the external backup-drive connected directly to my MB via USB for many months. Then I just tryed out to connect it to the AEBS, and everything worked fine, too, for more than 2 years.

In addition: Not only TM-backup-HDs loose their connection to the AEBS, even data-HDs. I think this can not be the intention of apple, that files that should be transferred between two users via WLAN are suddenly not accessible, but again after unplugging the AEBS from mains and reconnecting (or starting AEBS-Configuration-Tool, choose "Restart AEBS" and waiting 3 Minutes).

What you're seeing is one of the things that happen to some of us who do that. In my case, it worked fine for about 3 months; then every couple of days, the sparse bundle came up corrupted. Sometimes Disk Utility could repair it,

I was only able to check the external HD via my Mac and there were shown no errors. I'm not able to check the HDs of the NAS directly, because they're EXT4-formatted and in a RAID-Configuration, but the internal check of the NAS software reports no errors.

And Time Machine doesn't back up well, or at all, to many NAS boxes. See the

Yes, I know, but it worked fine 5 months, so this is a little bit sad. I'm now dealing strongly with buying a TC, but if the problem is in my MB, I would spend money for nothing.

Can you maybe specify some log files where I can find out, what TM exactly is missing or disliking?

Thank you for the many hints! I will try them out.

Regards

Thomas

t.schaefer wrote:
. . .
I know this. At the beginning, I used the external backup-drive connected directly to my MB via USB for many months. Then I just tryed out to connect it to the AEBS, and everything worked fine, too, for more than 2 years.

Yup, that happens. 😟

In addition: Not only TM-backup-HDs loose their connection to the AEBS, even data-HDs. I think this can not be the intention of apple, that files that should be transferred between two users via WLAN are suddenly not accessible, but again after unplugging the AEBS from mains and reconnecting (or starting AEBS-Configuration-Tool, choose "Restart AEBS" and waiting 3 Minutes).

Have you checked out the quality of your connection and interference?

I was only able to check the external HD via my Mac and there were shown no errors. I'm not able to check the HDs of the NAS directly, because they're EXT4-formatted and in a RAID-Configuration, but the internal check of the NAS software reports no errors.

You can't check anything on a network drive with Disk Utility, except a mounted +sparse bundle.+

Can you maybe specify some log files where I can find out, what TM exactly is missing or disliking?

See #A1 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum). But as long as the backups complete normally, you won't see anything unusual in the logs. And if it's a WIFI/connection problem, the most you'll probably see is a failed backup.