Time Machine failures

The symptoms you describe are highly consistent with backup disk failure. That suspicion is also supported by the fact even the newest Time Capsule models are now five years old.

You can erase the TC hard disk drive and start a new set and it may continue to work for many years. Or, it may fail again in a week or two. They can be replaced (with difficulty), and you may also consider connecting an inexpensive USB hard disk drive to the TC's USB port.

Many (arguably most) Mac problems are caused by unreliable / poorly implemented / abandoned software, or just simply worthless garbage people insist upon using anyway. EtreCheck might provide some actionable information, or it might not. It's not uncommon for EtreCheck to reveal the presence of something the user long since forgot about installing, or denied knowledge of ever installing to begin with. Consider using it, and your option, posting its report in a reply to this Discussion. How to use the Add Text Feature When Posting Large Amounts of Text, i.e. an Etrecheck Report - Apple Community contains a brief description and instructions.

For Time Machine, I do not advocate using any tools or utilities other than what Apple provides. For the morbidly curious I use a bash shell script to extract its logs. On very rare occasions I determined TM was "hanging" on backing up one particular file. By "very rare" I mean only once: Time Machine Backup Hang - Locating Corrupted File - Apple Community.

I no longer recall the particular problem I alluded to in that Discussion, but the solution was to delete the file. The hard part was finding it.

TLDR - not much help. I have some problems with TimeMachine after Ventura but not like yours. Do other backups as well and keep them with friends.

I got a new MBP in July with Ventura. I use a 3TB Time Capsule and a NAS for Time Machine backups. The first backups to both appeared to go fine - the size of the backed up data looks about right, but there's no other way to tell cos there's no log file.**, For subsequent backups i have the opposite problem to you - backups with Time Machine don't seem to transfer enough data. For example I added some metadata to my photo catalogue which, effectively, updated every photo on my Mac - which total over 50GB of data, but the next backup only uploaded a couple of GB of data. I also use an app to do Rsynch simple backups (just copy new and changed files) and that took ages because it copied every photo in my library and I confirmed this with the log. I understand that this is probably because Time Machine does incrementals but it's not good to remain in doubt that that my precious data is properly backed up

I certainly don't rely on Time Machine as my only backup strategy and I'd say it's second line now. It's good in the sense that it just happens and the recovery of files can be simple and elegant (see below ) but the inability to easily see what's going on under the hood is a problem for me**. Note that it's also OS-specific. I've been caught out trying to configure a new Mac from the Time Machine backup and couldn't because the old Mac's OS was different from the new one and it couldn't be updated cos it was too old. I still had the old Mac and just connected them together via Thunderbolt, but if the old Mac had been stolen or U/S then I'd have been f****d. It was at that point I started keeping other backups. The other advantage of non-Time Machine backups is that they can be used for non-Mac PCs should the need arise.

I can't answer the question about moving the sparsebundle to your NAS other than to copy it and try it. The downside is that if it is corrupted and causing the problems you're seeing on the time capsule then you'll transfer them across and personally, I'd live with the new backup; those 2-year old files aren't as interesting as you think! If I were you I'd buy a USB disk, do an Rsynch backup of my most important files stick it the shed or a friends house across town, but still keep Time Machine going.

Finally, the problem you're seeing with restore and it sitting there for ages until you get bored and restart the Mac? Time Machine has always been like that for me ever since my first Mac in about 2008. You either get just the last few days or nothing at all, then a restart and it all works fine.

**Yeah - I know about Backup Loupe - I've tried it and stand by my comment.

Seems more likely there is bad or malicious code in Ventura which created the TimeCapsule problem.

All I can tell you is that I haven't had any problems with Ventura on any of my very old Apple AirPort Time Capsules. I have never experienced even a single failure to back up or to restore, not since I began using them perhaps fifteen years ago.

But if I did, the very last thing I would suspect is "malicious code". They're old. If and when they fail I intend to replace their built-in hard disks, and perhaps their power supplies. I also use USB-connected hard disk drives with them, which may be even older than that.

On the other hand I completely gave up on attempting to use Time Machine with Synology NAS devices. That was a long time ago though. Perhaps Synology fixed things since then, but after repeated failures I am not willing to give Synology any more attention. So, I really can't help with them. You'll have to experiment on your own, and in your position it would be a very long time (years, perhaps) before I would trust them as much as my TCs.