So, I cannot backup or restore from my TimeMachine volume as it "cannot be reliably restored." The disk and volume are healthy according to disk Utility, so TimeMachine itself managed to corrupt the backups it was creating until they became unusable. This is an insane failure mode. Nothing at all is recoverable due to the useless way TimeMachine stores backups since BigSur. So dumb and unacceptable. Time for a third party backup solution. Yet another once working MacOS feature Apple killed for no reason. I'm trying to go down with the ship and use Macs until the inevitable merge with iOS, but it's getting almost impossible!
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How is this an acceptable failure mode? (Time Machine backups)
- Thread starter Stevenyo
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Copy-paste never failed me.
APFS is unreliable and recent changes (all sorts of snapshots) made matters worse.
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...is-not-the-currently-booted-snapshot.2378429/
I use HFS+ for storing data.
Been using Carbon Copy Cloner for years on multiple Macs. see MacOS 12/13 - Carbon Copy Cloner - Users Thread
You can download the latest version and try it for 30 days. https://bombich.com/download
Yes you can make limited time bootable snapshots of the latest MacOS. They are not incremental due to a limitation of Apple APFS utility. You of course can do non-bootable backups in incremental or archive fashion.
The Time Machine limitations never appealed to me, and CCC makes ASR volumes for using with Migration Assistant for DFU restorations as a example.
You can download the latest version and try it for 30 days. https://bombich.com/download
Yes you can make limited time bootable snapshots of the latest MacOS. They are not incremental due to a limitation of Apple APFS utility. You of course can do non-bootable backups in incremental or archive fashion.
The Time Machine limitations never appealed to me, and CCC makes ASR volumes for using with Migration Assistant for DFU restorations as a example.
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Only downside to copy-paste is you have to remember to do it regularly.Copy-paste never failed me.
APFS is unreliable and recent changes (all sorts of snapshots) made matters worse.
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...is-not-the-currently-booted-snapshot.2378429/
I use HFS+ for storing data.
Absolutely with you on HFS+ for storage. APFS seems to have some benefits for a day to day SSD but seems to be nothing but trouble when storing things on disk.
Time Machine was easy and “good enough” for a long time, but this latest failure that left absolutely nothing recoverable despite a healthy drive means I can’t ever trust it again.Been using Carbon Copy Cloner for years on multiple Macs. see MacOS 12/13 - Carbon Copy Cloner - Users Thread
You can download the latest version and try it for 30 days. https://bombich.com/download
Yes you can make limited time bootable snapshots of the latest MacOS. They are not incremental due to a limitation of Apple APFS utility. You of course can do non-bootable backups in incremental or archive fashion.
The Time Machine limitations never appealed to me, and CCC makes ASR volumes for using with Migration Assistant for DFU restorations as an example.
I’ve heard of CCC for years, guess it’s time to take the plunge, at least for the trial basis.
Another vote for Carbon Copy Cloner.
As an aside the error message doesn't necessarily mean that you can't recover any files from the backup - just that it has some errors which Time Machine can't fix so wants to start with a fresh copy.
I've had it before and been able to browse the time machine and extract files ( never found what was broken)
As an aside the error message doesn't necessarily mean that you can't recover any files from the backup - just that it has some errors which Time Machine can't fix so wants to start with a fresh copy.
I've had it before and been able to browse the time machine and extract files ( never found what was broken)
I keep a regular CCC backup and recently went from Monterey to Ventura along with a complete reformat and backup restore. I used Migration Assistant in Ventura to restore my CCC backup, which it happily accepted, so I went to bed and left it to it. When I woke up the iMac was shut down so I started it again and found that the restore hadn't actually happened. It had copied about 16GB of over 500GB to a temporary folder then stopped the process, couldn't see anything in the logs to explain why. Not the first time Apple's data migration has failed me either over the years, perhaps the 3rd attempt and the 3rd failure. So I restored using CCC itself, no problem, although, perhaps for copyright reasons, they verbally recommend you use Apple's tech to do the job (not that it works - which I had just proven).
Unfortunately since it’s a network backup, TimeMachine saves it as a sparsebundle, all that seems to be accessible when I examine the package are the sparsebundle “bands” not any actual files.
Copy-paste never failed me.
APFS is unreliable and recent changes (all sorts of snapshots) made matters worse.
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...is-not-the-currently-booted-snapshot.2378429/
I use HFS+ for storing data.
? If you had some problems with snapshots, it doesn't mean APFS is less secure or less resistant to data loss than HFS+. It's actually more secure and safe, at least that's what I keep reading elsewhere.
Unfortunately the bundle seems massively corrupted. Fortunately I don’t need anything in these backups and probably won’t miss them, but this total data loss backup failure mode means I can’t trust timemachine for anything anymore.
In theory. But it’s really designed for SSDs, and all the extra snapshotting and copying on move and all that seem to bog down HDDs for no benefit (and, anecdotally, a much higher likelihood of data corruption)
OP, sorry to hear this has happened to you. Personally, I have never trusted Time Machine and so in all the years it has been available, I've just not bothered using it. Instead, all of my backups are on external drives, over which I have control since I do them manually, and I have multiple sets as well, so nothing gets lost and if there is an error or glitch while actually doing the backup I am aware of that immediately. Then again, I have the time to put into this and it is important enough to me to handle my significant data and image files carefully.
apfs_fs_alloc_count is not valid https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/disc-utility-warning.2376773/
"physical object not prepared before dirtying" kernel panic?! https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...repared-before-dirtying-kernel-panic.2340560/
"warning: file has compression bsdflags, but doesn't have the compression xattr"
In my experience TM using APFS on my external HDD works well, is quicker than it used to be, and the file system is much more robust that using HFS+ for TM. File system corruption is pretty well a thing of the past for directly attached disks.
I use both TM and CCC - both use APFS for destination. For a simple backup scenario they really are very similar in what they achieve. With your multiple disks, you would find CCC gives you lots of additional flexibility. And CCC support always respond to requests.
TM to NAS (or equivalent) is always tricky and very prone to problems unless the NAS is known to have support for TM. If you want to see the content, try mounting the sparsebundle (if it isn't too corrupted).
My guess is that it is the sparsebundle which is in trouble, not the file system inside it.
Why is it a network backup? Isn't the Seagate just a directly attached disk which you can format as APFS?
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See the posts about APFS on USB drives getting corrupt. Better than HFS but not indestructible.
Even when supported, as with QNAP and Synology, for me has been problematic. Never was able to keep a TM backup
without corruption for more than a few weeks.
TM is valuable in that it maintains hourly backups for as long as it has disk space and doesn't get corrupted. As you found TM backups can get corrupt. That is why it should be only one of your 3-2-1 backups. CCC is always a good choice.
I think time machine is better being used on a physical disk anyways. Adding another layer of potential failure (network) just makes everything way worse. Even the developer of SuperDuper isn't keen on using sparsebundles for cloning startup disks and those are far simpler.
I even had a HFS partition just randomly corrupt itself one day. Didn't do anything special and safely ejected. Fortunately, i have a ton of redundant backups (different ones) so nothing was lost but goes to show how volatile macOS is. To make matters worse, if something happens there's often nothing much you can do as there are little to no tools for repairing things unlike Windows. (Diskwarrior can't repair APFS)
As far as I know TM hasn't had any major updates for maybe a decade. It has always been prone to failure so should never be your single backup.
Rubbish. HFS+ to APFS was a major upgrade. The rest is continuous improvement. You may not like the functionality, but it is just as reliable as the alternatives and easier to use for the non-techie. I do agree that it should never be your only backup because we all should have an off-site or cloud backup too - and that applies equally to other local backup products.
Seagate is directly attached to my Mac Mini. I just don't trust or like APFS for spinning drives, and barely trust it for SSDs. There are still so many uses that just plain don't work on APFS, including things as simple as accessing files from my older Macs I sometimes pull out for fun, so I avoid it except for boot disks on 10.13 and above.
It is very much the sparsebundle that is in trouble. It's just unacceptable for a backup utility to corrupt the entirety of its backup history. That years of backups are totally useless due to software issues is really wrong.
I do a network backup so that my MacBook actually gets backed up. In the years before I started using a network backup I was lucky to complete a backup even once a month, because I'd have to specifically connect and eject the backup drive, which rarely was convenient as I use my laptop for "on the go" tasks 90% of the time, and at home it rarely even makes it to the same room where my Backup drive lives. Backing up should be an automatic, background task and with a network backup it has been for years. Unfortunately now all of the history from this current laptop is lost forever. I have backup.backupdb folders that date back into the 2000s for machines I haven't owned for close to a decade that I could dig through in a pinch, and disk images from machines all but untouched since the 90s, but now nothing from my primary laptop for the last ~18 months. Thats pretty lame.
Honestly, it's just the sparsebundle container that makes network TM bad. The connivence of backing up a laptop while on the couch means I had much much more regular backups over the network than when I used a directly connected disk. If all the files from my completed backups were still accessible, I would have no issue with this failure. Every TM backup disk I've ever used has eventually gotten some sort of messed up, but I can always just go dig through the backup.backupdb folder for what I need. Not the case when the sparsebundle itself craps out.
And yeah, the lack of repair/recovery tools is a big reason I use APFS as rarely as possible.
the issue I have isn't that it's a single backup. I generally store things on multiple disks, on multiple mac and/or in multiple clouds. The issue is that the entire history of your backups can just fail and render every bit of your time machine history useless. Someone could easily set up a system where they backup to a network disk, then that network disk uploads to a cloud service or copies to a second disk and think they have 2 copies of everything, but if the sparsebundle corrputs itself and is copied to the second location while you sleep, you're still out all your data. Time machine has always been really slick, but just as unreliable. I have a shelf full of disks with "backup.backupdb" folders on them that are perfectly navigable but ceased to be useable by Time Machine and are nearly impossible to copy (days of transfer time for 1TB, destroying the destination drive's permissions, etc). I never had an issue with those failures though as the data on them is fundamentally accessible. If I can't find something from a project I was doing on my 2011 iMac in late 2013, I know which drive to go digging in. But now, anything I did on my MacBook pro from November 2021 to now will only ever be accessible if it's still in one of my other types of copies/backups. That's not an acceptable software failure. It's like having a car that self destructs when the windshield cracks.
This. time machine is way different than when it came out in 10.5. And still a super easy way to do the bare minimum of backing up. Many people use it for the security blanket feeling. Knowing that without paying for a ton of cloud storage, or learning how to set up a third party app, they can feel secure that things like family photos are safe from things like drive failure or device theft. When the software has a failure mode that can destroy all of those backups even on a healthy disk and volume, that security blanket feeling is gone. Time Machine (on a network especially) is now worse than not backing up because it can give you a false sense of security. I went on a trip in January knowng that even if my laptop was destroyed before I got home, I could recover all the files and settings it contained in a couple hours with one button clicked. When I returned, I learned that my entire backup history for this device was useless and I had been traveling with no safety net. (yes, all/most of my files also exist other places, but there was nowhere else where my Mac, as a whole was saved in a "one button recovery" state).
I've been using TM, CCC, and Super Duper for a long time. USB disks and a Synology NAS. Worked without issues until i got my MB Pro Max (M2). Then TM didn’t work at all until the latest MacOS update on Feb 13th. Now it is again working without issues.
What error messages did you see?
Did you contact Apple?