Flakey USB3 TM backup for nMP

[Michael73]

In addition to the Drobo 5D attached via TB to my nMP, I have a simple USB3 enclosure with a 3TB NAS. The drive is partitioned: 2.25TB for TM and 750GB as a boot drive which is backed up nightly with CCC.

In the last two weeks I've started having issues with TM just hanging. It'll get anywhere from a couple hundred KB to around 100MB into a backup and it'll just hang. It seems the only way to restart the backups it is to go through the procedure below:

1. Turn off TM
2. Stop using said disk (in TM preferences)
3. Eject disk
4. Turn off and on the power to the chassis
5. Delete the *.inprogress backup
6. Re-select the drive as my TM backup disk
7. Turn TM back on and let it do it's thing

All that and it works about 50% of the time...sometimes it takes a little more fiddling like restarting my entire machine

Is this just a flakey USB3 chassis? Anyone else find USB3 external drives to be unreliable? Is this a nMP issue others are having?

I don't know how much this bears on my issue, but my TM backups are set to backup my entire boot drive along with a few directories on the Drobo such as iTunes, iMovies and Pictures.

 

[chrisn123]

I've been using a USB3 "Sled" with a bare drive as a second TM drive (alternates between USB3 and RAID array as the TM target every hour). No problems at all.

I actually have TM set up with three targets and I rotate the drive in the USB3 sled every couple of weeks and keep one offsite. Again, no issues.

You might just try to wipe the TM volume and start your backup set from scratch.