HFS Runtime Corruption on Time Machine volumes

[steffi]

I use an external drive to backup my UMBP with Time Machine.

This has been happening for quite sometime but I'm surprised that people can rely on Time Machine given how brittle it is.

Nearly always if you have to turn off your machine by holding down the power button instead of unmounting the Time Machine volume even when it's not actively backing up you will end up with a corrupted HFS Volume. That typically can only be fixed by running fsck_hfs -f or Disk Warrior

I personally feel that it's unacceptable to end up with HFS Corruption just because I didn't umount the volume when it wasn't in use. Secondly, this HFS Corruption leads to the volume not be mountable upon boot.

I'm really having a hard time putting my trust in Time Machine.

 

[AppleNewton]

I'm not really sure if it is exactly a time machine related issue more so a hardware related issue...you gotta factor in its still an external harddrive after all and if you dont unmount them properly harddrives will become corrupt regardless of their use or format.

ive seen it with ipods before that used hdds; not being unmounted properly made the ipod drive more prone to early failure or some other issues.

 

[steffi]

As I'm the type of person who generally is uneasy with a backup solution that I don't have complete 100% faith in I'm becoming more and more inclined to return to Retrospect, especially since they've reworked it completely in 8.0 from what I can tell.

I'm not really sure if it is exactly a time machine related issue more so a hardware related issue...you gotta factor in its still an external harddrive after all and if you dont unmount them properly harddrives will become corrupt regardless of their use or format.

ive seen it with ipods before that used hdds; not being unmounted properly made the ipod drive more prone to early failure or some other issues.