"The backup disk image 'Volumes...sparsebundle' is already in use" error message

Here's proof:

http://www.macworld.com/article/132613/2008/03/airporttime.html

Apple might have never said anything about this, but they sure enabled the possability for Time Machine backups to Airport disks.

That 3-1/2 year article merely proves that there's a bug in the AE firmware that causes it to falsely advertise an AirDisk as a Bonjour Time Machine server. The configuration has never been supported by Apple, and it has never worked reliably, as you've discovered for yourself.

But if you don't believe me, which you obviously don't, I suggest you direct your complaints to Apple. There's nothing I or anyone else here can do about it.

A 3-1/2 year old continuous "bug" in every firmware revision on AE? Okay... I guess it's a matter of point of view. I recognize that Apple never officially supported Time Machine backups on Airport disks. But the fact is that what you call "a bug" seemingly was enabled after complaints from customers who bought Airport Extreme. Now, this has been working reliably the last two-three years for many people, including me and many of my customers. And when there's a case of what I would call a bug, and the OP and among others, I myself, wish to report that as each of us see it, the only solution you come here and suggest is... what... buy a Time Capsule? Look, silverback, I'm not trying to challenge you or anything. All I wish for is that Lion on my MacBook Pro behaves like Leopard and Snow Leopard did before, and not make it necessary to restart the Airport Extreme or disconnect / reconnect the Airport disk after every of the very few times a backup in progress is interrupted.

I agree that they really shouldn't be calling it a bug, It starts to sound like the old "it's not a bug, it's a feature" software joke. I will say that mine completes a backup every day or so. I was actually annoyed that it took a hack to stop if from backing up every hour. I use a laptop and I don't want it backed up that frequently. I should be able to set the schedule easily in Time Machine. So as long as it completes one or so every day, I just click on the error message to make it go away. I know some people have had a problem where their backup becomes corrupted eventually, but I've never had that problem.

Kraftplugg, I agree with you. I'd been enjoying the flexibility of an Airport Extreme with an external 2TB drive (that has USB/FW/eSATA connections.) Worked absolutely perfectly for years, no problems whatsoever. (Not sure why Linc's saying it "has never worked reliably," because it absolutely did. Even tested with a handful of file recoveries and at least one full-disk restoration.)

Lion basically broke this setup for me, on my always-on-the-go MacBook Pro... with the constart unmount/remount error messages mentioned in the first post of this thread. I finally gave in and switched over to a 2TB Time Capsule last month... and I wasn't too happy about it. But yes, the backups seem to be starting and stopping elegantly now. Alas, I no longer have the flexibility of the USB/FW/eSATA connections nor do I have the easy upgrade path of swapping in a larger destination drive. <sigh> This was certainly a step backwards, IMO.

Beartech, what "hack" did you use to stop it from backing up every hour? I tried Time Machine Editor and Time Machine Scheduler, and neither did the trick for me. Pretty sure both of those put the backups on a regular schedule, whether or not I was on my home LAN, which means it would try to back up (and fail) when I was on the road.

And so I just recently used Lingon to edit the System Daemon:

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20080211194627629

I haven't had time to see yet if it's working properly. Curious to know what's worked for you. An automatic wireless backup every 6 (or even 12) hours would make more sense for me...

I don't remember which I used to edit the daemon but when I moved to Lion it blew it away anyway. I haven't bothered to do anything about it since it only completes a backup a couple times a day which is fine by me. I would like to get rid of the error messages though.

I had this problem with Airport Extreme + external hard disk in Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Lion. It is not new to Lion.

I just cope with it by restarting the Airport Extreme once a day… There's unfortunately no better way around it, except for buying a Time Capsule.

The backups work fine though, it's only an issue when I put a Mac to sleep while it's backing up. We have three MacBook Pros in the household, so at least one of them is always in a bad state… I got in the habit of restarting the AE before I go to sleep, so all machines can back up at least once a day (first time next morning). Maybe I'd need to have an AppleScript for it…

Yeah, annyoing. I'm sure it could be fixed in the firmware, but Apple can't seem to be bothered. I don't mind, but since I have a perfectly good, working Airport Extreme, I don't want to shell out money for a Time Capsule, so I'm just coping with the issue.

Well, just as a data point, I've had an Airport Extreme with an external hard drive backing up wirelessly via Time Machine for as long as that configuration was known to work. My computer is a MacBook Pro and I am always on-the-go, interrupting backups as I leave the house... all the time. I never had a problem with this in Leopard or Snow Leopard. No errors or issues... the OS would just deal with it, stay quiet and out of my way. The next time I was home and a backup kicked in again, it would do whatever necessary comparisons and calculations it needed to do, to resume backing up properly.

It wasn't until I installed Lion that the problem mentioned in this thread showed up for me. It seems fairly obvious to me that there have been some changes to Time Machine in Lion, and some of them have resulted in a less-than-ideal end-user experience. (These backups seem to slow down my Mac under Lion far more than they ever did with Snow Leopard.) Yes, rebooting the AE (or restarting it via Airport Utility) would "fix" this "sparsebundle is already in use" error... but that felt largely inelegant and defeated the purpose of a "set it and forget it" automatic wireless strategy. Not being encouraged by the "unsupported" nature of the Airport Extreme with USB hard drive for Time Machine backups, or Lion's other flaws, I simply bit the bullet and side-graded to a 2TB Time Capsule instead. My wireless range is better now, the backups kick off and continue (even with interruption) without a hitch, and I was able to sell off my Airport Extreme to someone else who needed one. It would have been nice to avoid this out of principle, but life's too short and I didn't like the anxiety. I just wanted my backups to be as seamless, automatic and invisible as they were before. That's the whole point of Time Machine. I hope Apple fixes this with 10.7.2 or later OS versions, if only to help others who find themselves struggling with the same issue.

I haven't upgraded to Lion largely due to this issue. I experienced the problem while still running Leopard, but it seems to have resolved itself. The backups are being performed seamlessly on my iMac desktop and my Mac Book Pro laptop. I did buy a new Mac Book Pro running Lion, but use an external hard drive for backing-up that one. Needless to say, that one doesn't get backed-up on a regular basis... Like Fofer says, it kind of defeats the purpose.

Well Fofer and brain trust ... I've been reading and rereading a variety of sites and forums here there and everywhere to try and flipping get my crap to work...maybe y'all can help me in "stupid" language...as in, I don't understand a lot of the tech stuff, per se, I just want it to work.

So, I've got a relatively new MacBook Pro, bought late summer and it was Snow Leopard. I waited to upgrade to Lion until I got my iPhone 4S and wanted to take advantage of iCloud. Since my Lacie HD crapped out (dammit) a while ago (when it was realitvely new too...i don't have the touch) and my Airport Express was getting wonky, I decided I'd go for big memory and got the 2TB Time Capsule, figuring I could plug it in and voila.

Plugged it all in and did a big backup overnight of the MBP (purposefully hadn't migrated much critical yet to be "safe") before I went for the Lion upgrade...worked fine on Snow Leopard and I can see where it made some of the automatic saves before I put Lion on the next day.

Then the magic went away.

I haven't been able to get all these ****** things talking to each other and get any saves done via Time Machine since then. I created separate folder to do some drag & drop back ups from my old MBP and that seems to work just fine. I've turned things on and off, reconfigured the best I can, have run disk utility to verify - seems to be fine - and just about any other semi-unscary thing I can do. I consistently get that my "MacBook Pro.sparsebundle” could not be accessed (error -1)". Once or twice I've got the error message that it's already in use, but I have no idea why it was...probably me just pushing buttons! Early on, I also noticed it was "Preparing", and I now realize I should have just let it go on that for a long time so that everything could reindex from the upgrade, but unfortunately I was stupider then and stopped it...never to be able to even get back to that.

So...I'm reading here and ascertaining that I am likely out of luck with all my fancy new (and expensive) hardware doing what it's really supposed to do and I should do a manual dump of my computer like I did the old one? Like y'all said...defeating the purpose of it all?

Any additional learning would be most grateful...since I've pretty much spent and entire day plus trying to find a solution!!

I just had the same problem and have found a fix for this:

• Open Airport Utility and go into Manual Setup for your Airport Extreme
• Select the Disks tab
• Disconnect all users
• Unplug your disk and plug it back in so the Airport Extreme recognises it
• Start a Time Machine backup.

My guess would be is that some sort of file locking on the Airport Extreme implementation of AFS isn't working right and the Airport Extreme is reporting that the sparse image is in use. Disconnecting all users and reconnecting the disk flushes that out. Probably a bug with the AE firmware, not Lion.

It's much less hassle to just open Airport Utility, and tell it to restart your Airport Extreme. No unplugging/replugging necessary - if you can live without Wi-Fi for a minute while it restarts.

After the latest Lion update mine has gone back to working flawlessly.

Seagate 1T USB drive connected to Airport Extreme Dual N