I used to have this issue using a QNAP device. I forget what the issue was but it was something like the system not recovering gracefully from an error condition, which doesn't appear to occur on the TimeCapsule.
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Time Machine volume on NAS corrupt once a month
- Thread starter oreggero
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"Never happens with Time Capsule"? I get this all the time and if you Google the error messages you'll find plenty of others with the same experience. This isn't some "blame the 3rd party" issue.
Time Machine backup of my rMBP 2014 to a 5th gen TC keeps getting corrupted every 3-4 weeks or so even with Sierra + the latest TC firmware 7.7.7. It starts with a message about a failed backup, which is the first warning. At this point I disable automatic backups, reboot and then re-enable Time Machine. About 50% of the time, the next backup succeeds, and I can keep going for a couple more weeks... but sooner or later I get the dreaded "completed a verification... ...must create a new backup".
I have three Macs backing up to the same TC, an iMac, a Mini and a MBP. The iMac and the Mini never failed. Nor did the MBP for the first year or so (had it since Nov. 2014). Verification of the internal MBP drive that gets backed up gives no errors. Same with the TC hard drive. They pass all tests with flying colors. Doesn't help. The grim reaper will come and he will collect that backup in a month's time tops, over and over.
Time Machine backup of my rMBP 2014 to a 5th gen TC keeps getting corrupted every 3-4 weeks or so even with Sierra + the latest TC firmware 7.7.7. It starts with a message about a failed backup, which is the first warning. At this point I disable automatic backups, reboot and then re-enable Time Machine. About 50% of the time, the next backup succeeds, and I can keep going for a couple more weeks... but sooner or later I get the dreaded "completed a verification... ...must create a new backup".
I have three Macs backing up to the same TC, an iMac, a Mini and a MBP. The iMac and the Mini never failed. Nor did the MBP for the first year or so (had it since Nov. 2014). Verification of the internal MBP drive that gets backed up gives no errors. Same with the TC hard drive. They pass all tests with flying colors. Doesn't help. The grim reaper will come and he will collect that backup in a month's time tops, over and over.
I have been using a Synology NAS for 4 years for Time Machine and I don't remember having that problem.
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... what? Does ZFS need scrubbing??
And, what good *at all* is a snapshot if the client was backing up at the moment??
I used to get corrupt Time Machine repositories all the time until I disabled sleep on the machine being backed up. The computer would go to sleep in the middle of a Time Machine backup, and this seemed to trigger the corruption. Has anyone else observed this?
That can't be it, not in my case anyway.
I have a Mac Mini that acts as a media server. It's configured to wake on network access and go to sleep after one hour of inactivity. Meaning it goes to sleep a lot. A lot. It's basically like a cat, it sleeps 16-18 hours a day. This hasn't stopped Time Machine backups from working flawlessly. I bought my 5th gen Time Capsule in November of 2014 and if I enter Time Machine on the Mini, I can go all the way back to day 1, since I never had to start with a new backup. That 48 consecutive months of flawless operation.
In contrast I have an rMBP 15" from 2014 that more or less follows my sleeping pattern - I work on it all day, it only gets to go to sleep at night plus maybe a quick nap while I'm out to lunch. Yet I have to start fresh with the Time Machine backup once every few weeks. And it doesn't occur while the Mac is asleep. It usually happens somewhere in the middle of a workday when the MBP has been awake for hours. All of a sudden during some Photoshop or Safari session I get a "couldn't complete backup" alert shoved in my face.
It's usually preceded by backups taking longer and longer for no apparent reason. I mean the SSD is lightning quick with everything I do, the 802.11ac maintains a steady 800 Mb/s rate and when I do speed tests over the internet I'm usually able to get 150-180 Mbit/s (200 Mbit max), and the initial ≈300 GB Time Machine backup is screaming fast, but after a few weeks, Time Machine progress will be like watching paint dry. It'll say something like 'I need to back up 30 MB' and then it goes "1 MB..... 1.2... 1.8..... hold on.... wait.... OK 3 MB!" (that took a minute) "3 MB.... still 3 MB..... aaaaaand still 3 MB... (2 minutes) "...3.2 MB.... 28 MB *BOOM* didn't see that coming did ya!.... 28..... 28.4..... aaaaaaaaand 28.5......" It'll finish eventually, but one or two backups later it grinds to a complete halt.
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It's good practice. See for example Aaron Toponce : ZFS Administration, Part VI- Scrub and Resilver (2012-12-11)
The ideal is ZFS rollback to a snapshot to a point in time when a backup was not in progress. More specifically, a point in time when the sparse bundle disk image was not attached on the Mac OS X side.
If that ideal is not possible, then allow rollback to point in time that coincided with a backup in progress. There's a reasonable chance that the Mac will figure out how to proceed from an interruption.
Still happening approx. once a month. MBP Internal drive is error free, so is the TC HD (and two more Macs are backing up to it with no problems). How can such a critical app offer absolutely zero help and diagnostics? "Completed a verification... must create a new backup". Uh, OK... and your findings were? What is it? Data corruption? Too many files for the file system to handle? What? Be ******* specific.
Do you connect/disconnect this Mac from the network at all? Does this Mac go to sleep at all? I'm slowly narrowing down the issue... I've remained connected via Ethernet... When my Mac wakes up, it displays the backup error... However, if I restart the Mac, the backup suddenly works again... Now, if I switch from Ethernet to WiFi, I'm screwed, no fixing that. So, I run a manual backup when I'm connected via Ethernet only. Sucks.
I don't use Ethernet at all. All three Macs connect wirelessly. All three have been backing up to the TC since I bought it. Two of them still do without any issues and I could restore them to November 2014 state if I wanted to. The third (the MBP) kept backing up just fine for a year or so before this monthly corruption thing started. The only theory I have so far is that the number of files started to pile up to a point where it hit some limitation in the file system, although it seems unlikely that 350 GB on a 500 GB drive would be a task too monumental considering you can buy an iMac w/ 3 TB storage...
As for the backup error appearing when you wake the Mac up, it's happened to me as well, but I've also had it happen while I've been sitting at the screen for hours. So I doubt that it happens because the machine is asleep. I think it's simply that when you're away from the machine for several hours (overnight, for example), there's a large window for the error to occur, and you don't know whether it happened 2 minutes after you left the machine or 2 minutes before you woke it back up.
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Hmmm, I'm using a WD MyCloud Mirror that is having these issues... Not the Apple TC. Might be macOS then? It wasn't until Sierra that I started noticing this issue.
I have had multiple failures on multiple drives and bays, including TC. I usually have 6 drives connected a (1 a 6 drive Promise RAID) but at full complement can also have a drobo 5D, 2 blu-ray drives, and an external firewire or USB 3 drive.
My path to stability is to make sure anytime anything goes wrong with the finder or network to fix it immediately. If the finder was having a problem with a mounted drive somewhere then corruptions tended to occur even on drives which were fine. Same thing if a network transfer was happening. Instability with finder could come from having read errors which hung the blu-rays, or programs which crashed my network or blocked the finder from working. Copying files to a disk archive on a TC via Carbon Copy Cloner aborted at one point causing the archive directory to be come inaccessible (folder name greyed out). I could go into the directory, but could not make any changes to it. However the files inside the directory were readable if I used the full path. The case went to Apple Development, who said I needed to delete the sparse image and start over from scratch.
Right now I'm working an issue with a backup vendor's developers because their program crashes my network (to the point where I have to reboot, if I can) when Intego Premium Bundle X9 is running. When I run tests I make sure that backups are turned off so that if I crash there isn't a problem. I suspect that a similar interaction problem may cause Plex Media server to intermittently freeze my internet connection. Once I exit Plex my internet recovers, which is not the case when the backup software crashes. These problems seem to be related to the 12 cpus on my nMp.
My path to stability is to make sure anytime anything goes wrong with the finder or network to fix it immediately. If the finder was having a problem with a mounted drive somewhere then corruptions tended to occur even on drives which were fine. Same thing if a network transfer was happening. Instability with finder could come from having read errors which hung the blu-rays, or programs which crashed my network or blocked the finder from working. Copying files to a disk archive on a TC via Carbon Copy Cloner aborted at one point causing the archive directory to be come inaccessible (folder name greyed out). I could go into the directory, but could not make any changes to it. However the files inside the directory were readable if I used the full path. The case went to Apple Development, who said I needed to delete the sparse image and start over from scratch.
Right now I'm working an issue with a backup vendor's developers because their program crashes my network (to the point where I have to reboot, if I can) when Intego Premium Bundle X9 is running. When I run tests I make sure that backups are turned off so that if I crash there isn't a problem. I suspect that a similar interaction problem may cause Plex Media server to intermittently freeze my internet connection. Once I exit Plex my internet recovers, which is not the case when the backup software crashes. These problems seem to be related to the 12 cpus on my nMp.
I just had this issue with a backup on my Time Capsule and it was disconcerting. Thankfully I maintain two Time Machine backups, one to a Time Capsule and the other to an external hard drive I keep in a drawer at work. So even though I had to delete the backup on the Time Capsule, I still have a semi-recent backup and history on that hard drive.
This can be downright DANGEROUS for people who only have one backup. What if the Mac's disk fails during the new backup attempt? All data not backed up will be lost.
Keep multiple backups, people. It could save your ass someday.
This can be downright DANGEROUS for people who only have one backup. What if the Mac's disk fails during the new backup attempt? All data not backed up will be lost.
Keep multiple backups, people. It could save your ass someday.
Issue isn't the Time Capsule failing . . . it's that the Time Machine backup gets corrupted and needs to be restarted. The warning for me has been none - other than the "you need to start a new backup" message.
I cannot agree more with you on this. I was having this problem and now all my macs have at least two time machine targets. In one case, I rotate 5 time machine disks.
Something has been broken with time machine backups for a long time. It is a rare occurrence but for backups we need not rare but six sigma or better. Moreover, it is disconcerting that something this important hasn't been fixed. At the very least, there should be some sort of recovery tools available to salvage what you can from a corrupted time machine backup. A single failed bit could mess up your entire multi terabyte backup.
This is a well known problem that effects both a NAS and time capsule. I had a time capsule and gave up after a year of having to start fresh backups about every two weeks.
I now use two Glyph Atom SSD DRIVES and rotate the time capsule backups. I also have a third Glyph Atom that is dedicated to Carbon Copy. I also Copy select "must have" files to iCloud.
Once I ditched time capsule for backups, I was still using it as a router in bridge mode, in conjunction with my older Fios router. When I updated my Fios router to the latest edition, I then gave up my TC.
Apple worked with me for about a week to diagnose the cause of the problem. The acknowledged familiarity with the issue, but ultimately had no fix. I moved on.
I now use two Glyph Atom SSD DRIVES and rotate the time capsule backups. I also have a third Glyph Atom that is dedicated to Carbon Copy. I also Copy select "must have" files to iCloud.
Once I ditched time capsule for backups, I was still using it as a router in bridge mode, in conjunction with my older Fios router. When I updated my Fios router to the latest edition, I then gave up my TC.
Apple worked with me for about a week to diagnose the cause of the problem. The acknowledged familiarity with the issue, but ultimately had no fix. I moved on.
I actually think my Time Capsule might be flakey. The backup attempt after the system deleted the "bad" backup failed. I told the TC to wipe the disk completely, and am attempting another backup. If this backup fails I'm going to swap out the hard drive in the TC.
Meanwhile, my other backup disk sits happily in that drawer at work. Luckily I updated that backup last week and haven't done anything too critical since.
All of what you describe happened to me. The drive could be flaky or it could be something in the operating system. If you want to stick with TC, I would recommend a refurbished Apple one instead.
[doublepost=1501202389][/doublepost]All of what you describe happened to me. The drive could be flaky or it could be something in the operating system. If you want to stick with TC, I would recommend a refurbished Apple one instead.
[doublepost=1501202389][/doublepost]All of what you describe happened to me. The drive could be flaky or it could be something in the operating system. If you want to stick with TC, I would recommend a refurbished Apple one instead.
Yay! I managed to make the TM/TC backup stop corrupting itself... Someone mentioned the possibility that the number of files may become too great for the file system to handle. Sounded unlikely, but it was worth a shot. So I uninstalled a couple of VST plugins that I knew had like a zillion files (audio samples) installed. One of them was SampleTank 3 (comes with 33 GB worth of samples). I had a vague recollection of having installed it just before the corruption problems started. Sure enough, I've now been going for 5 months straight with no backup corruption (I used to have to start over once every 4 weeks or so).
I also removed a crapload of GarageBand libraries from Apple, so I can't single out ST3 as the only possibly suspect. Either way, from now on I'll install VST plugin sound libraries to a folder that's excluded from backups. No point backing them up anyway.
I also removed a crapload of GarageBand libraries from Apple, so I can't single out ST3 as the only possibly suspect. Either way, from now on I'll install VST plugin sound libraries to a folder that's excluded from backups. No point backing them up anyway.
Me neither, but... so far so good. I wonder if APFS might be the magic solution to this issue? Perhaps with APFS on the horizon they saw no point in patching Ye Olde HFS+ Time Machine.
Those with corrupt TC backups... Do you often switch from WiFi to Ethernet at all? I've noticed that if I maintain an Ethernet connection, my TC backup never gets corrupt... But the second I try to backup via WiFi, the file gets corrupted.
So now I do manual backups when I'm connected via Ethernet... You do have to plug in the Ethernet cable and restart the computer... Then you can run the backup. It has been working for well over six months for me.
I use WiFi exclusively. I've got a 2014 rMBP (a/n/ac) and a 2011 Mac Mini (a/n) backing up to the TC. The Mini TM backup has never failed or become corrupted. The rMBP backup ran like clockwork for 2 years, then I got the dreaded monthly corruption for a year or so and now it's been fine again for 5 months straight.
In order for WiFi be the culprit, the problem would likely be intermittent, and both Macs would be affected. As it stands, one is entirely unaffected and the other was so for 2 years, then failed with regularity for a year (the intervals were so even I learned to predict them). So I'm sticking with the too-many-files theory.
Nope, still solid, no signs of the dreaded "Completed a verification... must create a new backup" message. Oldest backup is from March 12 last year, so I should've bought a tiny birthday cake for my Time Machine backup yesterday. Yay!