The CNID DB is part of the AFP network protocol and is a small database file on your Linkstation share that tracks metadata about the AFP share to your Macs.

CNID DB corruption is not necessarily fatal, but I’m not sure how many tools you have available to fix it on the Linkstation.

If your Linkstation is still under warranty, I would try contacting their support area and see if they can help.

You might also check for a firmware update for your Linkstation.

If you get to the point where you think you just need to re-format your Linkstation drive, the last ditch step to regenerate the CNID DB is to delete all the .AppleDouble and .AppleDB directories.

My TM is connected to a Buffalo Linkstation 2 terabyte NAS which is connected to an Airport Extreme (for 6 months now w/o problems). I realise now that’s probably not a good connection through wireless, but had no problems before now.

The sparsebundle is located on the backup folder of the NAS.

I have no clue how to repair the sparsebundle and am not very good at ‘programming’. Should I follow exactly what you have written or should I just delete the offedning sparsebundle in question? I would really appreciate your input

Tks

Patrick

I just had to do this again, this time for my iMac, on a .sparsebundle containing over 940 MB on my Time Capsule.

Two notes:

1. you only have to remove the “uchg” flag from the .sparsebundle directory itself, and the file “token” within it. That saves a good deal of time!

2. the fsck_hfs process ran even though I gave hdiutil the “-noautofsck” option — but that was OK for me this time because (a) I noticed it running before I tried to run it manually (though the manual run will fail gracefully and tell you that the volume is busy); and (b) it actually did the repair!

The fsck_hfs process ran for almost 24 hours. That’s with the target being a Time Capsule, connected by gigabit ethernet.

When I started Time Machine again the verify (another fsck_hfs run by TM) took almost 9 hours. I wonder if there’s a simple way to set the .plist file to indicate that all is well and no new verify is needed.

Thanks for the write up. Certainly a mega time and headache saver!

-Jason

Your article allowed me to save my Snow Leopard back-up, which I thought utterly beyond recovery!

Thanks a lot!

Alain

There are a couple things to try. The first is in your Terminal preferences, go to the bottom of the Advanced tab in Settings and make sure your character encoding is set to UTF-8 (you’ll need to restart Terminal to see changes) – if it is set to UTF-8, try some other character sets.

The other option is to rename both your machine (in System Preferences->Sharing) and also rename the sparsebundle (via Finder) to the same thing.

Both of these come back with ‘No such file or directory’ as an error message. Does anyone know how to properly type those file names in the command line? I am using quotes around the full path.