Time Machine Frequent "Start New Backup"

Yep I agree. I didn't post this as a solution to the problem just a setup that works for me! Everybody can try and see if it works and if they are satisfied with the solution or not.

There is a downside which is you can't control the size of the backups anymore as "admin" as full access to DS. I know that some people with a smaller DS will not like this.

For me I have about 1.6TB free on a 5TB formatted DS and I have not seen backups of 4 Macs grow significantly over the last 6 months. TM does a pretty good job with managing the backup size by itself.

aschmid wrote:

. . .

There is a downside which is you can't control the size of the backups anymore as "admin" as full access to DS. I know that some people with a smaller DS will not like this.

Can you reduce the maximum size of the sparsebundle, per #A8 inTime Machine - Troubleshooting? I've been told some NASs allow that, some don't.

Pondini wrote:

aschmid wrote:

. . .

There is a downside which is you can't control the size of the backups anymore as "admin" as full access to DS. I know that some people with a smaller DS will not like this.

Can you reduce the maximum size of the sparsebundle, per #A8 inTime Machine - Troubleshooting? I've been told some NASs allow that, some don't.

You probably can but on next backup Time Machine will just resize the sparsebundle to the maximum size because it can - "admin" user!

If you then think of restricting the size you need to setup a special user on DS with quota but then you are back to square one that you will run into the sparsebundle corruption issues discussed in this treat. That's what's Synology is trying to to do with the "tm user".

IMO this is reason why it fails in the first place.

aschmid wrote:

. . .

You probably can but on next backup Time Machine will just resize the sparsebundle to the maximum size because it can - "admin" user!

Are you sure? That usually only happens on 10.6.3 and 10.6.4.

I back up to a Time Capsule and, for testing, several partitions on a USB drive connected to it, and it hasn't happened since then.

Mountain Lion does seem to do it, sometimes -- but only once, on the first or second backup (I forget which now), but not thereafter.

Message was edited by: Pondini

Pondini wrote:

Are you sure? That usually only happens on 10.6.4 and 10.6.5.

I back up to a Time Capsule and, for testing, several partitions on a USB drive connected to it, and it hasn't happened since then.

Mountain Lion does seem to do it, sometimes -- but only once, on the first or second backup (I forget which now), but not thereafter.

I am running 10.8 and I thought it did but I might be wrong.

Anyway other might want to try but i don't want to mess with this as it works for me as is. As I said everything else I have tried caused failed backups only giving TM free reign on the DS via admin did it.

I just tested this again, to confirm my memory. 😉

Started a backup to an empty partition on the USB drive connected to my Time Capsule. Cancelled it as soon as the sparse bundle was created (so the automatic verification wouldn't take long), and reduced the maximum size of the partition.

Started the backup again. When it was done, ran another.

Neither one re-sized it (running Mountain Lion).

So, when/if you revise your procedure, you might want to add, if there's a desire to limit the size of the sparse bundle, it does work, and that's the easiest way to do it.

As mentioned before, I have been told that some NASs won't allow the procedure -- I suspect that has to do with how the user was signed-on to the NAS, but of course I have no way to test that. Since your procedure uses the "admin" signon, it may well work.

Hey Pondini and aschmid,

will the solution also help people like rrichard, who is ethernet connected, all Apple and APS equipped? (see https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3684176?answerId=19482595022#19482595022 (or in the middle of this thread, in my browser page 6 of 14))

No. He has 2 Time Capsules, not a Synology NAS.

so it still seems that there is a bug in the TM software. so maybe the solution for Synology users lasts weeks or months, worst case even years. the problem might then reappear and weeks, months or years of backup will be lost.

Apple go fix that bug.

MacPear wrote:

so it still seems that there is a bug in the TM software.

Maybe, maybe not. We don't know.

He hasn't posted in 3 months -- we don't know what that means, either -- did he find a fix? Did he start backing-up another way? That's one of the problems with these forums -- folks often don't post back with results, so it's hard to tell what helps a lot of folks vs. what helps a few.

So maybe the solution for Synology users lasts weeks or months, worst case even years. the problem might then reappear and weeks, months or years of backup will be lost.

Yes, that's always a possibility. Until a number of folks have used that procedure, for a period of time, nobody knows. And, it may work on some Synology models and/or software, and not on others.

Plus, there's always the possibility of any backup device failing (they all do, sooner or later). That's why it's usually prudent to keep (at least) two separate, independent sets of backups; on different hardware and made with different apps. That way, you won't lose everything.

And, if you really need "years of backups," you should be archiving data separately anyway.

I got advice from Apple support, but that advice didn't work because after a month I had a corrupt backup. That happened however after we had a power outage, so maybe it would have worked, but I'm not convinced. I'm using a Synology NAS by the way.

I'm now trying aschmid's 'admin' approach to see if that works.

I've tried using Carbon Copy Cloner and that also ran into similar problems as Time Machine, and CrashPlan, but that ran into problems of the backup disk not being available so it would only back up when the disk was connected.

One of the problems I faced is that in Mountain Lion, the computer was going to sleep as soon as the screen locked, which meant that CrashPlan never had a chance to run. This might have affected CCC as well, but it's hard to get to the root of all these things.

Anyway, I'm at a 'mostly hopeless' stage of ever getting my laptop properly backed up to my Synology NAS. However CrashPlan has worked very well for backing up things to their cloud based service.

No answers here, but hopefully this is a little bit helpful.

Hi all,

Checking in on my previous update where I'd tried creating a fresh backup set on diskstation using an admin logon.

I have just had a prompt from time machine asking me to start again from fresh, so it seems the admin trick won't work for everyone.

I started this backup last week and backed up every night via powernap, and manually initiated backups.

I'll give applecare a ring tomorrow as i'm also getting some image retention issues on my laptop...

Not a happy bunny 😟

Austin

FYI ... Looks like there might be more pain on the horizon unless it gets resolved before DSM 4.2 gets out of beta ...

http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=225&t=62516

I've been running DSM 4.0 and then 4.1 since I first set up my 412+ last summer and I've never once had the glitch on my iMac via wired connection. (Dedicated TM account with quota btw). That said, based on this forum and my brief experience with my wife's MBA over wifi, I decided to keep my DA FW800 hooked up and let Mountain Lion do its round robin thing. I have been really looking forward to DSM 4.2 but I really don't want to loose my stable TM backups. Sigh.

It might be me, but i think that link is broken...

I've arranged a call with apple for tuesday morning (UK time) so will let you all know what apple say when i get off the phone.

Sorry. The link is good as you *see* it, but when you click it, it actually has a superfluous "amp;" added in. So the bottom line is it is my inability to include an unmolested link into an Apple forum entry box.