Time Machine Anomolies

[Speed38]

(I posted this on another Apple forum to which I belong, but no one there was able to provide any useful suggestions for how to deal with this. Hoping someone here can suggest what I need to do to get this gal's TM backups working again.)

I help seniors in an aging-in-place community having problems with any of their Mac devices. Today one of them told me she was getting alerts that there was a problem with TimeMachine

First thing I did was open Disk Utility, select her TM backup, and run First Aid and got a clean bill of health.

Then I double-clicked on the TM icon on her desktop and instead of a list of dated backups I saw this:

https://imgur.com/a/9ab0GJd

• I have no idea what the .sparsbundle image is doing there.

• The backups under [Barbara's iMac] go back to 2016

• The backups under Barbara's iMac (2)] begin in the summer of 2013 with the last backup being 28 Nov 2023

Is this going to require erasing her TM HDD and starting afresh???

 

[Brian33]

I have no idea what the .sparsbundle image is doing there.

Time Machine creates and uses a .sparsebundle when the backup destination is a network-attached remote disk. For example, an internal disk in a Time Capsule, an external drive connected to a Time Capsule or Airport Extreme, a drive in or attached to another Mac on the network, or a drive in a NAS device.

Presumably this drive was used in one of those ways, at some point in the past. (I'm assuming in the more recent past this drive has been directly-attached to the user's Mac.)

The two similarly-named folders in Backups.backupdb sure are confusing. Would changing the machine name (or machine UUID) cause this? I don't know...

Or, perhaps the drive was used (directly-attached) to an older "Barbara's iMac", then she got a new Mac and called it "Barbara's iMac (2)" (or, more likely, macOS appended the "(2)" when it detected two macs on the local network with the same machine name). And during the migration macOS left the original machine folder, and started a new one (with the new machine's name). That guess doesn't quite fit with the dates you've given, though.

Is this going to require erasing her TM HDD and starting afresh???

To me, that certainly seems the easiest and probably best thing to do. Try to determine if there's anything in the backup history on that drive that she values and is not already on the current machine's storage.

 

[Speed38]

Thanks so much for that detailed response. It's greatly appreciated.

The seniors I help vary in age from middle 70's to just shy of 90 and they really do need all the help they can get...and providing it can sometimes be frustrating.

I will ask her is she has ever had this TM HDD connected to more than one computer and/or if she has ever had used it in association with a Time Capsule or Airport Extreme.

One would think this would have to be the case as I have been running TM backups with TM HDDs connected directly to my Mac computers and do not recall ever seeing a .sparsebundle.

As to the two similarly-named folders in Backups.backupdb, I vaguely recall that not too long ago she did buy a new Mac and maybe that accounts for the two folders.

I was leaning strongly towards your conclusion that erasing these HDDs and starting TM all over again is going to be the best solution.

Before I do it, I will ask her to connect the TM HDD and do a [Backup Now] in order to double check on what alert the machine produces.

Again, thanks for responding.

 

[Brian33]

I think you have a good plan. Good luck!

 

[Speed38]

Whatever the outcome, I will come back to this thread to close it out and not leave it hanging.

 

[Speed38]

https://imgur.com/ZM7B70t

I zoomed with her today and here is a link to the two screenshots I took on her Mac.

It has been showing [Waiting to complete first backup] for over 24 hours.

I went to Sys Settings > Time Machine and clicked on the red info dot and that led to the [The backup disk could not be found] alert.

Still in Sys Settings > Time Machine I removed the HDD she was using, had her disconnect it from her Mac, reconnect it, and then went to Disk Utility, erased it, ran Disk First Aid (all ok), renamed it, then designated it as the HDD for TM backups...and as soon as this was done, the first backup began. When I left her 10' later and checked the TM icon, it was 9% done so she is fine.

Case closed.

 

[f54da]

Time machine backups to network disks have always been a gamble, for the sparsebundle reason mentioned (which have a notorious tendency to completely fail and require a fresh backup as opposed to incremental). In fact pre-APFS time machine was also notoriously fragile due to its mess of hard links everywhere. Post-APFS time machine might be ok since they should just be volume snapshots.