Time Machine Detected That Your Backups

[Sabel Kantah]

Duringa normal check, Time Machine detected that your backup file has become corrupted and is no longer useable. Backup files that include backups going back over a year or more are particularly susceptible to corruption. Appears to be a nature of beast situation with Time Machine and a Time Capsule.

I'm getting a message that "Time Machine detected that my backups can not be reliably restored". It wants me to erase the backup history and start over. Can I trust that this is a legitimate problem and not a precursor to a ransomware attack? I have over 200 GB remaining on Time Machine. Have never needed to restore but it makes me nervous. Any thoughts?

First we need to deal with the permissions on the sparsebundle. A sparsebundle is a type of file for the package where TM backups go. You do not realy need to know the details of this other than what is provided in these instructions. Sometimes the sparsebundle is marked bad when the error above has occurred, and this would prevent you from proceeding. We need to reset the permissions.

This should complete with a repair successful message. This is one point at which things differred for me though. When I initially ran this still failed at the Rebuild. I had to disconnect from the NAS and power it down. I then had to restart it, and repeat all the steps above up and including the command to attach the volume again. I then had to run the rebuild again. Note: the value of x below might be different now so take note of that as well.

Edit plist file. You can do this in finder by right clicking on the specific sparsebundle, selecting Open Package Contents, and opening in TextEdit, however I did this in Terminal using vi. Use which ever is your preference.

It seems that Mojave has made this issue more difficult. Note the link he refers to as well: -no-write-operation-not-permitted-when-repairing-time-machine-sparsebundle/ which states you need to add /sbin/fsck_hfs to System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Full Disk Access, to run the fsck command.

I want to restore a backup from synology router time machine (they have option to enable it.). I actually have apfs instead of hfs, however I followed the guide here, just changes the fsck_hfs to fsck_apfs -y. Everything went smoothly.

The issue I am facing is, that the last backup is shown if I want to restore is from august, despite I am pretty sure my last backup was created at 10th of december. I can confirm it by looking at files in /bands folder, where I do have a lot of files with the creation date of 10th of december.

This guide is awesome! Unfortunately I had to overcome the issue that the sparsebundle image was only mounted as read-only even though I had issued the -readwrite parameter to hdiutil. Turns out: Mojave has a new security feature that blocks full disk access by default unless it is being added to the list of programs that are allowed to access the disk in full access mode.

It appears that something may have changed with a recent OS update. The number of hits on this page in the past month or so has started to go up dramatically. My recommendation: Make sure you have a backup before any OS updates. I have not experienced any new issues (knock on wood), but will post here if I do.

I realise this is an old thread, but very much still relevant. I have just used it successfully to repair my TimeMachine backup, so thank you very much, the instructions are excellent!

I think I should also weigh in on the network interruption corruption as well. I am using Apple Server to manage my backups, so I basically have an Apple Server with attached storage through Thunderbolt. I use DNS to connect to the server which has the backup on it. I was playing around attempting to get a mail server to work on the Server, and turned off DNS briefly. This lost the connection to the server and the TM backup was interrupted (this is all on LAN). Next thing, the backup is corrupted. I thought this was odd, as most connections to TM are through WiFi, mostly it is reliable, but more prone to interruption perhaps than LAN? Maybe Apple should have an easy way for newbies to fix their corrupt backups as it seems to be quite prevalent given the number of comments.

Thanks for adding the info about the network interruption info. It is odd that TM is not able to self correct with a LAN interruption. I agree, Apple should put out info on this to make it easier. Feels too flaky as is.

A lot of TM issues could be avoided by simply turning off automatic backups and manually backing up as your use case requires. If your computer is trying to access your Time Machine or NAS every hour that exponentially increases the risk of both NAS failures and a computer crash occurring during a backup which seems to account for the majority of TM recovery problems.

This is a new one. Did you try editing the empty plist file and adding the fields it is looking for? I am not sure if that will work but might worth a try. Definitely make a copy of the TM backup first! I have not used Migration Assistant enough to know the nuances of it.

Take a look at the comment below which talks about XML vs binary plist files as well.

Please post progress!

I am posting a link here to a comment I wrote on the WD support forums that addressed my issue, it might represent a common one with NAS-based Time Machine back ups tho so could be relevant to this discussion.

The only thing that differed from your walk through was that fixing the .plist file. It was a non-starter through Terminal, I followed the instruction but just got angry beeps and a series of weird symbols so I went through the Finder open package contents route.

Hi, good evening, i had a similar issue (back up need to be remade) and fix it in a similar way, however 2 or 3 weeks later i got again the problem. I read in a forum that unfortunately yes, these fixes were solving only temporarily, but deeper errors where there and would show up again. So the second time i had the problem i just allow the system to restart from scratch, i had not really critical data on the backup but this is not right for a backup system! My backup disk is connected wireless using the apple airport. So any long term experience of these fixes? is that reliable? is time machine reliable over wireless?

As Dropbox is a sync service and not a backup service it's important for me to know how to go about the backing up of all folders and files I currently have in Dropbox. At the moment I have the entire Dropbox folder excluded from Time Machine backups since I'm unsure about how/if it would work to include it.

First of all, Time Machine creates multiple backups, and restoring your Dropbox folder from one of these backups might not have the same permissions as the original folder, and could create conflicted copies, thus duplicating your data.

Lastly, this would cause a massive resyncing of files when restored, and even when making backups to Time Machine, it could be detected as a change to a file, affecting the version history of the real file.

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Now I know I should not include my Dropbox folder in Time Machine backup. If it had been a possible solution I would have turned off Smart Sync of course, but I gather from your answer that it would not be a recommended solution even with Smart Sync turned off.

I understand that you recommend manual backup for files in Dropbox folder. However, this is not a viable solution (for most I think). Do you know how other people solve this? What is the recommended solution from Dropbox, please (except for manual backup)?

Since the Dropbox folder is just like any other folder on your computer, you can use the same steps as you usually would to create a copy of a folder on your computer. You can do a quick web search for how to do this based on your device's OS if you're not sure.

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Wow, I almost made two weeks without having to re-create. WD are you listening? I bought the My Book Live for Time Machine backups. I now wish I had bought the Apple Time Capsule. This My Book Live may be going up on ebay soon.

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