Time Machine Frequent "Start New Backup"

Hi Pondini

I think the reason he is here is for answers. I know I am.

I only get this on one machine (as meany people do) so I dont think it’s a Time Machine issue, I think there is a bug somewhere

As Bart85 says above, he has 2 macs, one works one does not.

There must be a solution. I have raise the issue with Synology and am waiting to hear back.

You may look at Mountain Lion. If I am not mistaken it allows Time Machine to perform backups while laptop is sleeping, which may make failures less frequent. I don't think Synology per se has much to do with the situation - I got an error backing up my wife Macbook Air over wifi to the homebrew Linux server with exports one disk with netatalk. Time machine ran fine for 3 months and few days ago threw this error. The issue I think is in design - as a backup space Time Machine tries to manage its own filesystem within one sparse file, and doing this over remote connection is unreliable in the long run. And once filesystem is corrupted, the whole backup history is lost. So if it happened once, it will be happening periodically. I left TimeMachine to run on my wife's Air as a short term, user friendly interface to few recent copies, but switched to Linux server side Backuppc as a long term backup solution (it just initiates rsync transfers over ssh from MacBook Air according to the schedule of your choice).

dmpogo wrote:

You may look at Mountain Lion. If I am not mistaken it allows Time Machine to perform backups while laptop is sleeping,

Only for certain recent models, and it requires an SMC update. See Mountain Lion: About Power Nap

which may make failures less frequent.

Well, It looks like I am not the only one with this problem.

I have a new iMac 24" ssd machine with a Promise Pegasus 4TB thunderbolt drive attached to it. I have 2 Time Capsules, each 3TB. All equipment is hard wired with gigabit ethernet. It came with Lion installed, and I originally had the iMac running wirelessly. Every month or so I would get the verification message and a new backup was made, losing my backup history. I thought it was a wireless issue, that's when I hard-wired everything. The issue remained. Then, when Mountain Lion appeared, I upgraded. The issue is still happening.

So, this is not a third-party issue, it's not a wireless issue, and it's not a Lion issue.

When I upgraded to Mountain Lion, I opted to use both Time Capsules for "redundant" backup. This morning, after the iMac was asleep all night, I got the verification message again. It's now creating a new backup. The error this time was specific to my "router TC". It will be interesting to see if my backup history is preserved after the new backup since my "iMac TC" was not included in the message.

What is supposed to happen is on each successive backup, TM switches backup TCs, so my backup history should be intact. We shall see.

I have Apple Care, and at the end of this backup I will call and see what they have to say for themselves.

rrichard wrote:

...

So, this is not a third-party issue, it's not a wireless issue, and it's not a Lion issue.

exactly. too bad you didn't mention to have a UPS, so some special user here might still be convinced this would be a user problem.....

the funny thing is - the thing a garth.org works. so if Apple would care about that problem, they could a least implement a solution so we don't have to do it manually.

Yes, I have everything protected by APC UPS power. In fact, I have a dedicated UPS for the router TC and cable modem, and another one for the iMac.

With all this EXPENSIVE equipment, I can't seem to keep a backup set for more than a month. As I said above, I am curious to see how this plays out with my new Mountain Lion dual TC backup setup.

EDIT: Oh, and every piece of equipment here is fixed IP, That was one of the first things I tried to correct the problem.

Well Something very strange happened. The backup finished. So, I bring up TM to see what the damages were. TM displayed only today. So, the backup history was lost. But was it?

For ***** and giggles I told TM to do a backup now, and left the machine alone for several hours. Came back, woke it from sleep, and ran TM. I was shocked to find a timeline going back 4 months. That's about when I bought this machine, and there have been at least 4 "start new backup" wipes since then.

In all the previous failures, the timeline was and remained 1 day on backup day. The only difference this time, is Mountain Lion, and using both TCs for backups, and running a manual backup right after the re-bacup.

The next thing to ponder, is whether this timeline will be the same when TM switches to the other TC for it's hourely update.

I suppose I should look at the 2 TC's file systems to see if the TM data files are the same size.

So, after the hourly backup I brought up TM, and there was only today for a timeline. Went back and told TM to do a manual backup, after which my 4 month timeline re-appeared. The size difference between the 2 sparsebundles is 300GB. It seems TM queries the last TC to which it did a backup. You would think that a smart backup system would realize it actually had all that data, and fix itself synching both sparsebundles data-wise.

Well, I am going to see if this behavior persiste for a few hours before I write this up and call Apple. Now at least I have some actual evidence. Of course, TM may declare the good sparsebundle defective in an hour and wipe it too! Who knows. This backup system is seriously wanting.

I fixed this issue easily. I dumped Time Machine and purchased Carbon Copy Cloner. Now I do not worry about backups at all. They just work seamlessly. So much of Apple's stuff just doesn't work as it is supposed to. Very dissapointing. But one gets what one pays for.

You didn't "fix" the issue, you simply worked around it.

I Just spent 2 hours on the phone with Apple Care. He logged into my iMac and observed the inconstant behavior of TM. He also had me run a program which sent a profile and logs back to Apple. He has referred the issue to engineering and I should be hearing from them next week.

Apple's tech support folks are unaware (or so they say) of both the "start new backup" issue happening regularly, and Mountain Lions inability to properly deal with the consequences. This guy was totally unaware of Mountain Lion's ability to make redundant backups.

Rrichard...that is interesting to hear. I have been following this topic for a long time. I have the same issue as everyone else. I also called Applecare and because I used a Synology network drive they would not support my claim. It went to level 2, who said the same thing..."Synology is a third party device that Apple does not support." That was it...left in the dust...I hope you have better results.

Everything here is Apple. Everything here is ethernet connected. Everything here is on UPS power, all firmware and software is up to date. So, I guess they had no one to blame but themselves. I was handed off to level 2 today after level 1 was totally flummoxed, and the level 2 guy found a problem he could not explain, hence the referral to engineering.

I am now convinced this is a bug in TM. We dismounted the TCs then remounted the one with the new one-day old backup. TM showed a history back to july, meaning it ignored the mounted device (the one with the one day old backup), and went straight to the TC to which it made the last backup, even though it was dismounted. Ran a manual backup, and TM showed only one day of history. This may very well point to the core issue of corrupted sparsebundles. We may even get some information from this excersize, or dare I hope for a fix.

It will be interesting to see how they clear this open ticket, and the fact that engineering wants till next week to figure it out says reams as well. We shall see!

Sounds promising...keep my fingers crossed.

I am experiencing frequent "Start New Backup" notifications on both a 2010 Mac Mini and 2011 MBP 13"

I am also using a Synology NAS - DS411J

Mac Mini is connected via Ethernet 100% of the time, MBP is connected via WiFi 99.9% of the time.

The idea that the corruption occurs depending on connection medium seems absurd, but then again, this whole thing IS absurd.

Hopefully rrichard gets some meaningful assistance and a fix is provided to the public.

It's worth noting, this issue occurred on Lion and now on ML. I wasn't using Time Machine with SL (that I can recall)..

I've been experiencing the 'Time Machine needs to start a new backup' issue very often. It has got worse over the last few months and I'm pretty much unable to complete a backup now without this happening. I'm backing up to a Synology DS212j NAS over Wi-Fi (with a strong signal - I'm very close to the router) from a MBP Retina running Mountain Lion (10.8.1). I contacted Synology support and their solution was only to backup over Ethernet not WiFi, and amusingly they included a link to this thread in their response. It seems from the above posts that this is not a solution either. Plus, it's impractical - I have a laptop for a reason.

Oddly, my wife's MacBook doesn't seem to have any issues. It's backing up to the same NAS. It's still on Snow Leopard (10.6.8).

I'll keep monitoring this thread too and keep my fingers crossed than Apple can sort it out as I like Time Machine - when it works!