Time Machine .sparebundle has become .purgeable

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Level 1

78 points

Time Machine .sparebundle has become .purgeable

Yesterday, whilst backing up, I had to go somewhere and closed the lid on my MacBook to move it with me. When I reopened it, Time Machine popped up with a "Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. A new backup image must be created for you". I clicked Back Up later and went about my day.

Fast forward 24 hours, I had to Repair the Macintosh HD after some general slowness at which point Disk Utility informed me that it had repaired some 'orphan blocks' and that the 'Macintosh HD has been successfully repaired.' For reasons beyond my knowing, I decided not to mount my .sparsebundle and run a fsck over it. Now it has come back to bite me and the .sparsebundle has been renamed to .purgeable with the NAS' free disk space increasing meaning that TM is deleting all my previous backups as per the warning message from yesterday.

So I decided to venture into the .purgeable 'file' and found that TM has moved everything into 'bands' (all 8.4MB each, every 33,957 of them :O) which - to me - signifies all the Backups have been lost.

tl;dr Time Machine has begun removing backups and renamed the .sparsebundle to .purgeable and moved everything into a 'bands' folder.

-AllSeeingMac

MacBook 2009, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Nov 13, 2011 1:55 PM

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Answer 1

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Nov 13, 2011 4:58 PM in response to AllSeeingMac

AllSeeingMac wrote:

. . .

Time Machine popped up with a "Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. A new backup image must be created for you".

Not one of Apple's clearest messages. 😟 See #C13 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

Now it has come back to bite me and the .sparsebundle has been renamed to .purgeable with the NAS' free disk space increasing meaning that TM is deleting all my previous backups as per the warning message from yesterday.

I've not heard of it doing that without the Start New Backup button being pressed. But it's easy do do when there are lots of windows on a screen.

So I decided to venture into the .purgeable 'file' and found that TM has moved everything into 'bands' (all 8.4MB each, every 33,957 of them :O)

That's how a sparse bundle works; all the data is in those 8 MB bands . . . thousands and thousands of them.

which - to me - signifies all the Backups have been lost.

Most likely. 😟

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Answer 2

Snowyboy

Level 1

0 points

Feb 28, 2012 4:51 AM in response to AllSeeingMac

Hi There,

i had the same problem. from one to the otehr back up - TM told me that a back up is not pussible due to an error.

I checked the back up on the TC. and it was ****.pureable.

I can not access this file anymore and it looks like TM started a new back up. ;-(

Do someone has any idea whats going on there?

Regards!

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Answer 3

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Feb 28, 2012 8:59 AM in response to Snowyboy

Your backups are corrupted beyond OSX's abiliity to repair them.

See #C13 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

You'll need to deleted the old sparse bundle, per #Q5 in Using Time Machine with a Time Capsule.

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