Time Machine Backup for large HDD fails

[seim]

One of the things I'm using unRaid for is to backup all my computers at home on a central device. That's no problem for the Mac Mini, Hackintosh Mini and my Mac Book which have all harddrives less than 500GB.

 

However with my Hackintosh 'Mac Pro' which has a 2TB drive with maybe 50% free space it constantly throw errors that the backup location was not found (see the screenshots). If I try to connect to the backup location in Finder, so just pick Hightower from the sidebar and double click on the Time Capsule share, it starts loading and I get a spinning wheel until it throws me an error that the location can not be opened or stuff like that.

You can temporary fix that with a little trick: If you acces this share with Samba it will open after a while (you get a spinning wheel but it finishes after ?1min and opens the share) obviously you can't back up to a Samba share but the strange thing is if you connect now over AFP to this share and disconnect/unmount the one from Samba then it will work, then you have access to the Time Machine files and the backup daemon will do it's work. However this trick lasts maybe just for one day then you have to do this all over again and that's not the purpose of a background backup service..

 

My theory was that the AFP in unRaid has some issues caching the folder structure while accessing the share. The data of my backup has an amount of maybe 1TB now and the .sparesbundle saves this 1TB in small files of maybe ?10MB and so many files are somehow too much. For some reason SMB achieves to open that and after it has done that, the AFP is able to load the directory, too.

[EdgarWallace]

Seim,

 

this is an interesting hypothesis. Can you pls. check post #23 in the thread here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=21549.15. Do you receive the same log messages?

 

These are the errors I'm getting on my iMac (late 2009, 1TB drive).

 

My wife's Time Machine Backup on a 128GB MacBook Air is working without any hassle. She had the same trouble-free TM Backup on her 2007 iMac with a 320GB HDD.

 

Important to know: the share settings are exactly the same!

 

Net is: size of the HDD might matter??

[dgaschk]

You could try the cache-dirs add-on. Search in User Customizations.

[EdgarWallace]

Thanks for the advise. Let me just ask you what's the rational behind? Is the large HDD support a known issue?

 

Thanks a lot.

[dgaschk]

I back up a 256G and a 750G drive with TimeMachine. It works well. I suggest creating a separate share and limiting the share to a single disk.

[EdgarWallace]

dgaschk, unbelievable but it's running now. Just finished the first backup since 3 weeks. Based on some former experience I created a separate share, limited to a single disk but it seems that the cache-dirs-add-on did the trick. I just enabled it via Simple-Features-Addon with the default settings. Thanks a million.

[Johnm]

I had the same issue with my macs.

I had to create a share that was forced to use only one disk. My guess is that timemachine does not like to span across multiple drives under unRAID.

 

right now it is working flawlessly. I have 4 macs backing up to a single 1TB AFP TM share. 

All of my macs have single 128GB or 256GB SSD's. so I am OK for now.

 

I do plan to add a second drive (2TB) to one of my Pro's. When I do that, I'll probably have to create a second TM share on another disk just for that one PRO. have you (or anyone else) tried 2 TM shares on a single unraid box? I'll assume it works fine. but, you never know....

 

[dgaschk]

I create a separate share for each client. This allows me to have a distinct TimeMachine volume size limit for each client.

[Johnm]

I create a separate share for each client. This allows me to have a distinct TimeMachine volume size limit for each client.

Thx...

[seim]

Well even if there's no mount bug for my smaller shares, but every few weeks the backups are getting fucked up for some reason.

It looks like that:

 

There you have only the option to abort or create a new backup.. however there are tutorials for solving this problem and continue using the corrupted/repaired sparsebundle.. http://www.synology-wiki.de/index.php/Defektes_TimeMachine-Backup_/_Sparsebundle_reparieren

 

Am I the only one who getts those messages? Currently I'm using the splitfunction for my backups, but I'm now trying to create a share that is limited to one disk for testing.

[Johnm]

I am not sure what the pop-up says in english. but I was getting the similar errors when I had two macs going to the same share. It think my mac pro and my hack pro were both overwriting each others backup.  I have not seen the error since i crated a share for each mac.

[seim]

Good point.. maybe that message is too rare to recognize it in a different language. Found one in english.

[speeding_ant]

The 'make fresh backup' error message usually happens when either the Client or the Server disconnect improperly. Eg, there is an issue with the sparsebundle due to improper dismounts.

[dgaschk]

Try rc11a. http://download.lime-technology.com/download/

[dgaschk]

Use rc12.