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Time Machine .sparsebundle Gone on Synology 212j NAS

ebd.i.am

ebd.i.am

macrumors 6502
Original poster
I encountered something interesting today with Time Machine. I'm using a Synology 212j NAS that Time Machine backups to for 3 Macs; a iMac, MBP, and a MBA.

Today the MBP began to backup like usual but instead of backing up a few hundred MBs it began to backup the ENTIRE hard drive of about 52GB of data.

I checked the backup folder on the NAS and the .sparsebundle for the MBP was gone! I ran DaisyDisk on the folder location and it only found the two .sparsebundles for the iMac and MBA.

What's the deal? This kinda defeats the purpose of backing up, I never know when the .sparsebundles will disappear.

Update: the iMac and MBA both performed backups just fine, about 300MBs each. I checked the NAS capacity and theres 85% of free space so space isn't a issue.
 
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You're a better man than I am if you can get TM to wirelessly back up multiple machines to a NAS without the crapshoot that the .sparsebundles will corrupt or disappear. I finally gave up and just bought WD MyBooks for each computer, as a backup that occasionally trashes itself and it's history IMHO is more frustrating than not backing up at all.
 
sinoue said:
Garth Gillespie posted a fix for addressing Sparse bundle errors, but this assumes you caught the message that Time Machine couldn't complete the backup and wanted to do a new backup.

http://www.garth.org/archives/2011,...ine-sparsebundle-nas-based-backup-errors.html

Also make sure you have the 10.7.3 supplemental update for Time Machine. Good luck on tracking down the culprit.
Click to expand...

I'll give that a try but I did not receive a error when Time Machine began to backup. TM just started a new backup without any message at all.

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Ccrew said:
You're a better man than I am if you can get TM to wirelessly back up multiple machines to a NAS without the crapshoot that the .sparsebundles will corrupt or disappear. I finally gave up and just bought WD MyBooks for each computer, as a backup that occasionally trashes itself and it's history IMHO is more frustrating than not backing up at all.
Click to expand...

The iMac backups over Cat6 and the laptops (MBA, MBP) backup over WiFi. Everything has been working fine for many months up until then.

The only thing I did different with the MBP was install a SSD and then I used a Time Machine backup to restore the computer. The MBP performed backups fine for a few weeks but now every time the MBP tries to backup it will backup the entire drive.

Maybe that has something to do with it?
 
I back up to a 500 GB Time Capsule with an external USB drive so if the TC dies (again), I don't have to send my data to Apple and get a blank drive back (again).

I have had problems with TM backup to TC over wifi, especially anything slower than 802.11n. I don't recommend doing TM backups over a slow link. They just don't work well. Also if you have a Finder window open on the "root" of the volume where you are doing TM backups, close it. Also put the TM volume on your spotlight excludes list. All of these will increase the speed and reliability of your TM backups. BTW, I have found that while TM can't tolerate a slow link, Crashplan does just fine so if you have any machines backing up via wifi, make sure you add Crashplan to your backup strategy.

Lastly, I recommend using something alongside TM for backup. I use CCC and Crashplan but the bottom line is use more than one backup method. You don't want to find out you have a corrupted sparsebundle AFTER your primary HDD crashes!
 
ebd.i.am said:
The only thing I did different with the MBP was install a SSD and then I used a Time Machine backup to restore the computer. The MBP performed backups fine for a few weeks but now every time the MBP tries to backup it will backup the entire drive.

Maybe that has something to do with it?
Click to expand...

Definitely. Upon restore to even the same disk, the disk UUID, the partition UUID, and the volume UUID are all different. As far as backupd is concerned, it's a new volume and gets a new fresh full backup from the start.
 
murphychris said:
Definitely. Upon restore to even the same disk, the disk UUID, the partition UUID, and the volume UUID are all different. As far as backupd is concerned, it's a new volume and gets a new fresh full backup from the start.
Click to expand...

I see. Well the first time it performed a full backup (after the SSD install) I let it do its thing and re-backup the entire drive.

But now every time TM runs it performs the same backup of the entire drive.
 
ebd.i.am said:
I see. Well the first time it performed a full backup (after the SSD install) I let it do its thing and re-backup the entire drive.

But now every time TM runs it performs the same backup of the entire drive.
Click to expand...

Go to Preferences > TM and set the drive to None. Find TM preferences and trash them (a bit of voodoo, but easy to do).
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist

On the NAS, delete the sparsebundle.

On the Mac, renamed Time Machine, and choose the NAS. Let it backup fully again and then see if you're getting a different result.

In the meantime you could also post your system.log section for the latest full backup that should have been incremental and see if that's revealing.
 
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