Jim's Blog

Time machine failures

I've been having time machine troubles lately. From the console log it was giving a "failure to mount" the sparse image.

I didn't notice exactly when the failures started to happen, but I blamed it on an OS update. Now I suspect that it started to happen when we where having renovations done and the contractors turned off the power - probably mid-backup. I tried disk utility to fix the backup file, but something was corrupted with it. I found a way to repair a corrupted sparse file, but it requires DiskWarrior at 100 $. Since I don't really care about the history of the backups, I just want them to work now, I ended up just creating a new file and letting it run for a while (117 G ended up taking a while to backup).

So, what I learned is that time machine doesn't like it too much when the drive it's backing up to suddenly looses power. If I had more critical stuff on that drive, I'd put an UPS on it, but I'm still not sure if that would be good enough for the little 100 $ drive I've got plugged into it.

The other day the guys at work made fun of me for backing up my stuff twice - once manually and once with time machine, but it comes down (at this point) I don't trust time machine or myself manually backing files up. Hopefully both processes won't fail at the same time. Now I just have to set up a couple of more sites to backup files to - when copies and space are essentially free, why not store stuff every where I can. ;-)