[Macworld]

Post your comments for Bugs & Fixes: Time Machine holdups here

[kisfiu]

Actually, the situation is worse. I bought the Time Capsule. After 3 or 4 uses, it got a corrupted directory. I reformatted it (no easy task since Disk Utility cannot see it), but the problem came back.

Then it advised me that I have two hard disks of the same name, I reformatted again. Apple could not help.

I returned the unit.

I am now using Time Machine with an external hard drive, no such problems.

I find it odd that nobody comments on the clunky programming. The machine freezes up for a few minutes, sometimes much longer. There is no progress bar. Cancel does not work and you cannot force quit.

This could be a great feature if it worked. Maybe in 10.6?

[Grapho]

I have had my Time Capsule for more then a month. It has worked flawlessly since I installed it. But I have it one all the time.

[John_Dewar]

Sometimes if it gets stuck on Preparing... I just plug the hard drive directly into the computer (you have to tell Time Machine you did that in System Preferences) that will unstick it every time. But then I hit the kernel panic bug. I'm pretty sure I caused this my putting my computer to sleep while it was backing up. I tried using disk utility to repair the sparse bundle, but it couldn't quite get all the way through. According to Disk Utility, the directory tree and hardlinks were misnumbered or missing. I guess we need a more robust diskwarrior-type solution to really fix a corrupted Time Machine backup. At least one advantage of the external drive is connecting directly to the computer to speed up the re-backup process.
It makes sense for Preparing to take longer the longer you wait between projects, because more things have changed.

[rlockhart]

I have the exact error described in the article with a new 1 tb Time Capsule. The only way to resolve it that I've found is to delete the existing backup and let Time Machine start over from scratch. Hardly a good solution, and with a large drive, very time consuming.

I think the best backup has to be one using Carboncopy or SuperDuper, which leaves the user with a fully bootable copy of their drive. You are more likely to have your drive go completely bad and suffer a total loss of your OS and data than you are to need to restore only a few files.

While handy, I wouldn't say that Time Machine is the be-all or end-all of backups. It is certainly better than nothing--don't get me wrong--but for seasoned user who understands what "backup" really means, a WD Portfolio drive along with a copy of Carboncopy or SuperDuper is more reliable and functional than Time Capsule and Time Machine. To prove my point, just look at all the problems that people are having trying to get TM to work.

[Grapho]

rlockhart said:

I have the exact error described in the article with a new 1 tb Time Capsule. The only way to resolve it that I've found is to delete the existing backup and let Time Machine start over from scratch. Hardly a good solution, and with a large drive, very time consuming.

I think the best backup has to be one using Carboncopy or SuperDuper, which leaves the user with a fully bootable copy of their drive. You are more likely to have your drive go completely bad and suffer a total loss of your OS and data than you are to need to restore only a few files.

While handy, I wouldn't say that Time Machine is the be-all or end-all of backups. It is certainly better than nothing--don't get me wrong--but for seasoned user who understands what "backup" really means, a WD Portfolio drive along with a copy of Carboncopy or SuperDuper is more reliable and functional than Time Capsule and Time Machine. To prove my point, just look at all the problems that people are having trying to get TM to work.

I agree with you except on the point about the more likely even is a hard drive crash then having to restore the occasional file. I upgraded software that was patch with insufficiently tested code only to be left with the option of reinstalling the application from scratch. What is worse is that some developers no longer offer the "working" version of that Application. Time Machine saved the day.

Also saving over a file and overriding it with a new bad version that happened to have the same name. Or copying files from a transport disk, only to later find out you just overwrote all your latest work with old files. This is what Time Machine was written for.

But you do have a point in stating that it's not the ultimate backup solution.

[dfs]

Excuse me, but doesn't Apple recommend that with Time Capsule you do your initial backup with a direct ethernet connection to your Mac? This may partially be simply in the interest of speeding up the process, but Apple may have other good reasons for suggesting this too.

[dfoltz]

I recently had my hard drive replaced on my 17" Intel iMac. Thankfully I had Applecare. I reinstalled everything from Time Machine. However after running the software updates, my old time machine backups became blacked out. The files were still on the hard drive but you couldn't access them through Time Machine. I was told by Apple support that this was a "known bug". My choices to access the old updates were to manually go through each folder on the hard drive or erase and install. That's a big "known bug". Those old backups are essentially useless.

[georgep]

My Time Machine started interrupting itself in the middle of a backup, first on one notebook, then on another. It started not seeing its assigned backup disk attached to Airport Extreme.

All this seems very buggy, and unreliable. But Steve promised us this with OS X.5 and they should deliver fixes as soon as possible. I know it can work because it was working for my MacBook and MacBook Pro when I first set them up after 10.5.2 came out.

[pdmarsh]

Time Machine is quite dependent on maintaining a robust WiFi connection during the backup. If something happens to temporarily interrupt that connection, the sparse bundle in the Time Capsule HD may be damaged. Directly connected hard drives (wired) don't have this issue, since that method doesn't use sparse bundles.

[dfs]

To build on this observation about the corruption of sparsebundles, this sort of problem can occur on hard-wired networks too. This happened to me once when for some reason a single file in a sparsebundle got corrupted, and again with a LaCie ethernet Big Disk when a power outage damaged the disk directory. In both cases, I couldn't fix the problem. In the first case, the difficulty was permissions: if I could have deleted that single file the sparsebundle could probably have been saved, but I don't understand Time Machine permissions or how to change them (I even logged in as root, this didn't help). In the second case, if it had been a normal hard disk I could probably have repaired the directory using some special repair utility, but the management tools LaCie supplies haven't the ability to make any repairs and I haven't found any third party software that can do the job. (I don't mean to single out LaCie, this problem of inadequate maintenance and repair tools may be true of ethernet h. d.'s in general). Result: that LaCie disk is now useful only as a paperweight, and I've sworn off networked disks for storing valuable data, I'm not convinced they provide an adequately safe environment. This other issue of Time Machine permissions still bothers me, and in all I've read about Time Machine I've never seen it discussed.

[abhishekaiyar]

great!!!! this comes exactly a week after i took Michael Potter's advice and tried to move the files from the old drive to a new one and ended up either corrupting the files OR the drive was already a piece of junk.

those backups didn't make it. they got completely corrupt. i fixed it via disk utility.... some file structure repair, but somedays back when i tried to retrieve a GB worth of files, they were all corrupt. then i had to reformat the drive but it still corrupted anything and everything placed within. so i drove a nail right through it :) ... nice way to destroy drives. huh?
I AGREE!!! I HADN'T BACKED UP FOR A SOLID 10 DAYS! but had i known this earlier, i'd have done it everyday. i am on a macbook and i move around a lot so it is virtually impossible to have the drive connected all the time.


i am just happy that i am back with my backups [a fresh one] and yes, after reading this article, i'll backup atleast once a day.
thanks.

[John_Dewar]

Don't forget you can drag the sparsebundle from the finder into the sidebar in disk utility and run the utility directly on the sparsebundle.

If you start a Time Machine backup wirelessly and then plug directly into the computer via USB, it will continue to backup to the sparsebundle over USB, so you can go back and forth no problem.

[NoSpamMan]

This problem is far greater than Apple seems willing to admit. TimeCapsule is TOTALLY UNRELIABLE and is still failing to keep its sparse disk images from getting corrupted. Read some of the long threads on Apple's Boards for more information. Here's one to whet your curiosity:

http://discussions.a...hreadID=1476501

I can see why wireless backups were yanked from Leopard just before it's release. Even Apple techs are admitting that it's not very reliable yet. I think even TimeCapsule probably should have been held back another 6 months until they figured this out. We're Apple Certified Techs in the field and we've had to delete sparse images and start over with 8-10 hour initial backups at least 5 times since our 1TB arrived for shop use during the first week of shipping. That's just unacceptable.

Oh, and in case I failed to mention, they seem to be causing widespread incidences of kernel panics once they become corrupt.

Fun city.

Mick