Time Machine Frequent "Start New Backup"

I may (or may not) have found a reason for the repeated backup failures.

I hve a 2012 MacBook Air with 10.8.2 installed and my backups get trashed repeatedly (roughly every 2 weeks).

Initially I thought this might be an issue with Popwer Nap and so switched to Time Machine Editor to stop the backups happening overnight. This went fine for a few weeks but then failed.

On checking the MBA disk for errors I found that there we a number of orphaned blocks. Cleared this and then reverted to the TimeMachine Editor cycle again.

Then last night the whole thing failed again.

On rerunning the Disk Utility it turns out that again there are a number of orphaned blocks.

I am wondering if the backups are true but it is the source data that has the problem and so when the backup is verified it turns out to be corrupt, not because of the backup but because the original data was corrupt in the first place?...

I support this. Checked my SSD (2012 MacBook Air with 10.8.2) same as yours) and found a lot of errors, rebooted to safe mode and got 80gig back!!

Time will tell if TM will work more stable after this but it do sound very plausble.

Hi Bartz,

Can you elaborate on what you did?

I can only find your second most recent post about setting time to fix files on your airport base station, which i cannot find in airport utility...

Thanks,

Austin

Hi all,

Chiming in to tell you I have the same issue, running a mid-2010 MacBook Air, the latest OS X and TM backups over wifi on a (Sitecom) NAS. I get the full backup notification almost daily. Now I'm new to the Mac (and not terribly knowledgeable about computers in general), but if this is a TM (on Mountain Lion) bug, shouldn't everyone be experiencing this?

Kind regards,

Bram

Bram, Try to reboot and hold down alt. Here you should have a menu about disk repair, follow this information :

https://kb.wisc.edu/helpdesk/page.php?id=3810

After this you should hopefully not have any more TM issues, at least mine seems to get solved.

/C

dialstatic wrote:

. . .

running a mid-2010 MacBook Air, the latest OS X and TM backups over wifi on a (Sitecom) NAS. I get the full backup notification almost daily.

See #C13 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

Thanks! Both links were really informative (and hopefully helpful...guess I know in a few days).

Netatalk 2.2.3 didn't solve the issue. I'm using WD Live, and it has that version but still getting the Time Machine "start new backup" regularly (at least once a week).

I've ran a "full diagnostic" on the drive and there were no errors.

This makes backing up to Time Machine moot as every week I need to wait for two full days to backup my Air completely, even on Gigabit ethernet (I had to buy a thunderbolt adapter just for this).

----

afpd 2.2.3 - Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) daemon of Netatalk

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under

the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software

Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later

version. Please see the file COPYING for further information and details.

afpd has been compiled with support for these features:

AFP versions: 1.1 2.0 2.1 2.2 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3

DDP(AppleTalk) Support: Yes

CNID backends: dbd last tdb

afpd.conf: /etc/netatalk/afpd.conf

AppleVolumes.system: /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.system

AppleVolumes.default: /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default

afp_signature.conf: /etc/netatalk/afp_signature.conf

afp_voluuid.conf: /etc/netatalk/afp_voluuid.conf

afp_ldap.conf: not supported

UAM search path: /usr/lib/netatalk/

Server messages path: /etc/netatalk/msg/

lockfile: /var/run/afpd.pid

Yes agreed. Time Machine should be tolerant and not wipe out the entire backup just because a few files got corrupted by the Wi-Fi connection. Restarting a backup session is acceptable, but not deleting backups that it promises to keep in the first place.

I am running backups from 2 x iMacs and one Macbook Pro to a Synology NAS DS412+.

As reported back in August i had the same data corruption issues. My own investigation has pointed to a permission issue when TM is trying to delete backups but doesn't have sufficient rights on the NAS to do so as backup was run as a "tmuser". The "tmuser" was part of the admin group, but still problems.

Since then I have changed my Time Machine user to be the "admin" of the Synology NAS box and everything is running fine since then. It's been nearly 3 months now and not a single "start new backup". Not from my iMacs of whihc one is wirless nor my Macbook which is wireless too.

Aschmid,

I have a synology drive as well. I created a new TM user such that I can set a quota limit so TM doesn't eat up all the space on the synology drive. I was getting repeated "start new backup" issues and have stopped using TM since then. If you use the admin login for TM, can you still setup a quota limit?

Thanks!

You hit the gotcha which is using the admin user you can't set quota limits!

Having said that I have been running this for 3 months now and I don't see my TM backups growing out of proportion. TM has build in functionality that it consolidates backups by weekly, monthly, etc.

BTW I believe this is actually the root cause that people are having problems. By creating a user that has from a TM point of view artificial limites it's was is messing up the backups and creating the issues.

So I'll leave it at that. This works for me, others can decide for themselves which way they want to go.

I just notice that sounds like a bit short but last time i posted a user called "Pondini" draged all my comments through the wringer and it turns out he didn't even have a NAS device. So that's why excuse my comment, it that's want to try, do it, if not do what ever you think is right. Thanks!

He's probably makes another reply to this referring to his TM backup guide ....

Aschmid,

No worries. The feedback is helpful since we have similar setups. I remember my first time using the synology drive and TM that I was logged in as Admin and the next thing I knew half my space was gone (only have 500 GB Raid). I might give it another try as Admin to see what happens. If you don't mind me asking, how big is your TM file for one computer on your synology drive?

Thanks!

aschmid wrote:

You hit the gotcha which is using the admin user you can't set quota limits!

If you need to limit the size of the backups, see the yellow box in #A8 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting. As noted, that may not work on some NASs, but is worth a try.