Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you.

Agreed!

However, posting here won't help -- these forums are for user-to-user help only; they're rarely, if ever, monitored by Apple for technical content.

But do add your voice here: http://www.apple.com/feedback/timemachine.html

Please, just use the great instructions garth.org offers above .. and don't forget the tipjar!

Yes it's sad that Apple has a problem. Yes it's sad they are Draconian. Yes it's good we have a community that has given us a fine solution.

-- Owen

I experienced this problem the first time yesterday. And my TM history has now been deleted.

As I don't use TM as my primary backup this did not concern me too much until I recieved the message again today and started searching for why TM to want to keep deleting itself.

MBP retina 10.8.5

TM on (LAN) Synology DS410

I have used the NAS for TM for a number of years without a problem for a number of laptops and mini's.

Have fallen back on TM many, many times in the past when upgrading hardware, reinstalling after a motherboard failure and after the occasional accidental deletion of work in progress - have been impressed and very happy at how well it has worked. (from a TC in the past before I got the DS410)

So . . . rather disappointed to read that this error could herald a future of unreliable TM backups likely caused by the NAS.

The error appeared after I had (coincidentlly) been working on the DS - updating packages, setting up surveillance station and yes I installed the 'Antivirus Essential" for the first time. . . so I am guessing that this is most likely the cause given some earlier comments . . .

I have uninstalled the AE package, am wondering if I need to go through the steps to fix the sparsebundle or will a new TM backup be OK from now on ?

I have a synology DS1812 and as I mentioned earilier. This TM behaviour was due to data scrubbing while TM backup was running. So if anything on synology is accessing and/or modifying sparsebundle file ie data scrubbing(optimizing volume) on synology while backup is running boom you will have this problem.

This can happen if:

Your have just added a new drive to synology. -- confirmed

You started manual data scrubbing on your volume.-- confirmed

You're running smart test? (not sure if this does it)

Above scenarios cause those problems for me.

Solutions:

Disable TM backup while adding a new drive and/or doing scrubbing. You can use http://www.klieme.com/TimeMachineScheduler.html or just stop it.

I have both an Air (laptop, often open/closed) and a Mini (always on). Both use Synology NAS. The Air fails periodically, I'd say every two months. The Mini has never had that problem. Both run OSX 10.7.5.

I believe Apple cannot fix it, they are poor at remote file systems in general, even tho they are based on a Mach kernel. Hard to believe, but you gotta remember their market is more the designer, and UI world, and often are draconian in terms of listening to user's technical difficulties.

Happened again this morning on my MBP running 10.8.5.

Time Machine will appear to work fine for a month or so and then I get this crap. It has happened on multiple

mahines, all running 10.8.5. Makes backing up with Time Machine useless.

Unbelievable!

machines.

Just to be clear: Is this mainly a laptop problem, .. i.e. are the predominant failures wireless NAS to laptops, not allways-on desktops/minis, either via NAS or directly connected?

This is the case for me. Directly connected, no problem. Wireless NAS, only a problem with my Air not my Mini.

-- Owen

No, I do not think it is only a laptop issue - I have an iMac and have the same problem. I do back up wirelessly, however.

I disabled Carbonite and have not received the error message in a few months. I disabled Carbonite because Apple support (some type of upper level support), told me to uninstall Carbonite, Parallels, and another program. I said it was not possible for me to uninstall Parallels. So, they closed my support case.

I decided to disable Carbonite to see if that solved it. It seems to have solved it, but I liked having several different backups. Not at all happy with having to disable a program I have used for 10 years. Carbonite was working just fine - with TM - on the iMac for at least 2 years. Before that - there were no issues with MBP, Mini. All running wirelessly

That's sad, IMHO. Carbonite (and the other backup services) are quite nice. I use dropbox which as well as sync is a nice backup. I also use Arq, which does a great job of backing up to Amazon, either S3 or the archival, dirt cheap storage. I also use Google Drive and Amazon Cloud, they're quite useful too. I've also considered one of the others like Carbonite, all of which get rave reviews amongst the tech community here in Santa Fe.

So in our thrilling attempt at diagnosing the problem, it seems like Apple suspects windcows emulators? I can kinda understand that. Do you have TM backup the windows partition/file? Possibly that's where the cat-fight occurs.

My backup strategy is to have several replications of my data, simply because Apple is technically challanged in the kernel and systems level. I speak from experience, I built the first Mac (printing software, laser writer).

As painful as this problem is, its is rather fascinating to see if we can come up with at least a few suspicious common scenarios.

No Carbonite, and no Parallels, just using the DS410 NAS for TM, which has worked great for years until the day (literally) that I activated the Virus package from Synology - uninstalling the package and recreating the TM backup 'seems' to have worked as TM is backing up again without error.

Time will tell.

One additional, maybe related (maybe not) error that also popped up very recently is that my MBP keeps changing its name (adding sequential numbers) after giving an error message that a computer of the same name is already present on the network (which of course there isn't). I haven't had the time to try and fathom out what is going on here, but I did notice that my TM backup has also aquired this automatically updated name MacBook Pro (10) - Am wondering if the MBP name change could be a reason why TM requests to reverify as there is no longer a match in naming ?

I will see what happens if and when the MBP name changes (it is a random occurence) - curious if anyone else experiencing this TM verify issue also has the automatic name changing ghost ?

I am still inclined to think that it is more likely the Synology Virus Essentials package . . .

It really seems to me it's linked to whatever is accessing bundle file.

Do a test: exclude the share that contains TM bundle file from antivirus and or any indexing software packages on synology.

If there is nothing touching that file there is nothing to break.

Just to be clear. This issue has occurred on my iMac and MBP. It is not isolated to laptops. Although it occurs more often on the MBP.

I am not using Parallels or VMWare.

Hi all!

Thanks for all your information. I got the same message now for the second time, on a MacBook Pro 6,2, Intel Core i7, with SNOW LEOPARD 10.6.8 (there are reasons why I havent updated yet) - so updating to a newer system does not necessarily create this misbehaviour. The message never appeared as long as I used Time Machine with a connected USB drive, but appeared right after I had installed my first backup on the new WD WLAN 8TB external drive. Right after it arrived I realized that it ONLY connects via WLAN to the laptop - I thought it would be physically connected to at least one machine. I didn't like that idea of relying totally on WLAN and now I know why.

I have tried the solution provided by http://www.garth.org/archives/2011,08,27,169,fix-time-machine-sparsebundle-nas-b ased-backup-errors.html but must admit that I am even unsure what exactly NAS is and whether it applies to my hard drive. The first line runs promptly, instead of taking a while as indicated so I am not sure whether this is correct.

With the second line of code provided I get the error message

"chflags: {...} No such file or directory"

four times for the bits of the file name of the sparsebundle that contains spaces, so Terminal does not recognize the file name because of the spaces, at least it doesn't in the second line. Putting the file name in " " gets rid of the error message, but the expected three lines do not appear - nothing happens.

additional information: to save on electricity (or hoping to do so ..) I plug out the WD drive every other day, and both times I got the message, it was after plugging it back in in the morning .. but others had this message even with WD drives that were permanently running, right?

ok, sorry, I just learned that I have to replace spaces by \ - did that. Next question: I seemed to gather from another post that the path does not need to include the name of the external drive? So instead of Volumes/MyBookLiveDuo/TimeMachine/ I can do /Volumes/TimeMachine/?