Reliability of Time Machine Sparse Bundles

[être]

Hello all, I'm new around here and also with using a Mac. I have some questions regarding backup reliability.

Here's my situation. On my new MBP I've been using Time Machine sending backups to an AirPort Express with a Mobius hardware RAID1 set of disks attached to it. Backups are encrypted. This was working good for a few weeks. Then I started having issues, where the backup would stall at the "preparing backup" stage. Also when I entered Time Machine it would not return the results for backups older than 3 days no matter how long I waited. I tried basic things like restarts. Eventually I just deleted the sparse bundle and started fresh.

So this leads me to wonder what other peoples experience with encrypted sparse bundle, Time Machine backups is. I'd appreciate any personal experiences or insight with respect to reliability. Also, is there any maintenance that should be performed on sparse bundles to ensure their integrity? Maybe I jumped the gun by deleting it and starting fresh, but I did not have much history yet. Going forward I must be able to rely on it.

 

[MacInWin]

Welcome to the forum.

My personal experience with a networked TM backup (sparcebundles) is mixed. On one machine, my personal MBP, I had two or three failures of the sparcebundle, which led to long "preparing" stages, followed by an error message that TM could no longer continue and was erasing the sparcebundles. That process of deleting then took forever, but eventually finished and TM rebuilt a new backup. After going through that twice, I gave up on TM for that machine and moved to a direct connect backup drive where the files are copied, not merged into a sparcebundle. I don't use encryption of the backups, so I don't know if it's part of the problem or not. I also don't have a TimeCapsule. My networked drive is a WD MyCloud. I use that same drive for TM backups of two other Macs, an iMac and a mini, and they both have worked perfectly so far (about a year in place).

So, as I said, I have mixed results. Two failures on one system, two systems with no failures. All are on macOS Sierra, updated to the latest version. My WiFi router is an Apple AirPort Extreme, and it works well.

 

[être]

Thanks for sharing your results on three machines MacInWin. That made me start thinking about how many factors can be at play and without any solid logging or evidence to my failure, its just all speculation as to the exact issue. I do like TM and will continue trying it to evaluate for myself to see if I get better results going forward. I do think I'll hedge my bets by running Carbon Copy Cloner backups to another drive until one method wins out over the other.

As much as I need good backups, this is all a bit of experimentation for me at this point. On my previous Windows laptop I was using Mozy cloud backups which I really liked. Being in a rural area now with less internet bandwidth makes local backups much more appealing, but more time consuming to plan for reliability, redundancy, etc.

I'd love to hear more stories or thoughts on TM and sparse bundles.

 

[harryb2448]

Well no guesses but I would suggest abandoning TM and relying on an external dive cloned with either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper, and weekly 'Smart Update' procedures. This checks the information on the clone with the internal drive/s, and then proceeds to copy the changes.

CCC has one advantage in that the Recovery Partition is cloned, and not in SD. Being one who always makes a bootable thumb drive of all operating systems for a clean install, the lack of the partition on SD does not concern me at all.

 

[MacInWin]

I run CCC as well, to a directly connected drive. I haven't experimented with CCC to a networked drive, mostly because the purpose of the CCC clone is to have an immediately bootable drive if my internal drive dies. The fewer moving parts in that scenario the better, IMHO, so not having the clone on a network removes trying to boot from a non-attached drive, if that is even possible.

The reason for two backups is that I have actually had dual failures of the boot drive and the backup drive at the same time, leaving me with no options to recover. Now I have a TM backup on one drive (or the network for the two that work that way), plus CCC clones to other direct connect drives. I also duplicate data across my data files so that if I lose one of them I have all m pictures and financial files in two places. Yes, I'm paranoid!

 

[MacInWin]

être, Harry does not like TM (That's really an understatement, even he would agree), and recommends to everyone to abandon it, or avoid it. For me, TM has a place in the backup hierarchy. CCC is my "disaster" backup, for when my internal drive dies. It's bootable, instantly there. TM is my "oops" backup, for those times when I need ONE file restored from a historical archive. Yes, CCC can do that, if you set it up, and if you know which CCC archive the file you want is stored in, but it's not as intuitive as TM's interface, IMHO. TM does it by default and finding file is easier, to me. But it's really up to you on how much coverage you want/need and how much money you want to invest in software and hardware to support that risk reduction. There's no magic answer that fits everyone.

 

[être]

Great info, lots to think about.

harryb2448, I was searching around for Smart Update and came across some posts regarding SMART drive failure prediction which now has me looking at some utilities. I'm not sure if this is what you were referencing or not. I have lots of digging around to do in forum archives for sure, but now I see that I one more tool that I can use that was not on my mind.

MacInWin, I'm in the paranoid camp myself when it comes to protecting data. Losing a decade and a half of financial, legal, and personal files makes the effort and expense a small price to pay in my opinion. I want redundancy on redundancy! As much as I like the time machine functionality from my limited testing, I must have faith in the reliability it can offer. I like the convenience and interface, I hate having a bad experience causing a start-over. If it fails again, I'll spend the effort to try to pin the exact cause down - if possible.

Now that I'm planning on running TM and CCC, perhaps its not a case of one winning out over the other, because as you guys mentioned they can be complementary to each other. I'm looking forward to playing around with them and various external drive scenarios to come up with an ultimate backup plan and media rotation. Cheers to paranoia.

 

[harryb2448]

No être. SmartReporter is a little app that checks the state of the hard drive on bootup, and regular times, and checks the heat inside your Mac. E.G. it tells me at 12.48pm today, summer Down Under, the inside heat is 30º C (86ºF) and Airflow 23ºC (73.4º) F.

SmartUpdate is available on registered version of SuperDuper, a cloning utility. I connect my external Thunderbolt drive, and choose SmartUpdate which means the software runs a check on my internald hard drive, and what is different on the external, then changes those things so the external is identical to the internal. On CarbonCopyCloner it is referred to as Smart Updates, same principle slightly different name.