Fix Time Machine Sparsebundle NAS Based Backup Errors

Time Machine

This is a modification of an original post for use when you have a corrupt sparsebundle backup on a NAS (as opposed to an external drive attached to a router) and it needs to be repaired. The NAS is likely a hardware product from the likes of Netgear, Synology, Buffalo or QNap – or for those of us with a home-grown backup server running FreeNAS.

The error you may see is “Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you.” This can be fixed by following the below.

From your Mac, connect to the network share that houses the sparsebundle.

At the top level of the drive are the various sparsebundles that make up your individual computer backups.

Do not double click on these sparsebundles or try to repair with Disk Utility.

Open Terminal and then switch to root by typing

sudo su -

and then enter your password.

The verication that has already run has marked your sparsebundle as bad, so first we need to make it look normal.

From the command line

chflags -R nouchg /Volumes/{name of your network share}/{name of}.sparsebundle

This may take a little while.

Now type

hdiutil attach -nomount -noverify -noautofsck /Volumes/{name of your network share/{name of}.sparsebundle

You will then see something like

/dev/diskx Apple_partition_scheme
/dev/diskxs1 Apple_partition_map
/dev/diskxs2 Apple_HFSX

Where x is the disk id for the external disk. You are interested in the one labeled Apple_HFSX or Apple_HFS. It might be 2, 3, 4 or higher.

At this point, I have found that the filesystem check is already happening. You can check for activity by tail’ing the fsck_hfs.log

tail -f /var/log/fsck_hfs.log

If fsck is going then in my experience it will be able to repair the sparsebundle. Go away for a few hours and let it chug away.

When it is done, you will either see

‘The Volume was repaired successfully’

or

‘The Volume could not be repaired’

If the latter you can run disk repair again:

fsck_hfs -drfy /dev/diskxs2

(Optionally if you have the available RAM, you can set a RAM cache in the command above to help speed up this command like so:

fsck_hfs -drfy -c 750 /dev/diskxs2

This will use 750MB of RAM – feel free to change this amount to best fit your system (amount of RAM vs size of your Time Machine Sparsebundle). If you are unsure about this, use the first command.

Make sure to replace x with whatever number your disk is from the output above.

The letters “drfy” tell the filecheck utility different things. d for ‘Show Debug’ – r for ‘Rebuild Catalog Tree’ – f for ‘Force’ and y for assume ‘yes’ to any prompts.

Now go do something for an hour or two. Come back and

tail -f /var/log/fsck_hfs.log

If all went well, the last output you will see is

‘The Volume was repaired successfully’

Now you need to type
hdiutil detach /dev/diskxs2

You can redo the above for any other Time Machine sparse bundles you have permission to modify while you have the network share attached to your computer.

Final step.

When complete, you need to edit an plist file within the sparsebundle that records the state of the backup. On the top level of the sparsebundle find a file called com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist. Edit it and remove these two nodes

<key>RecoveryBackupDeclinedDate</key>
<date>{whatever-the-date}</date>

Finally you want to change

<key>VerificationState</key>
<integer>2</integer>

to
<key>VerificationState</key>
<integer>0</integer>

Now you can eject the network share and have Time Machine give it another go. After the (long) verification step, backups should proceed once again.

Notes:

Ideally this should be done over a gigabit wired network connection. Do not attempt using Wi-Fi. You also want to make sure your machine does not go to sleep during the above operation.

[Update: 1.1.2013]

I appreciate all the warm feedback from people all over the world who have been helped by this post. This site helps to fund my hobbies, so if this post has helped you please consider a USD $1.99 donation to my hobby fund.

[paypal-donation]

[Update: 12.23.2012]

If after running the initial

fsck_hfs -drfy /dev/diskxs2

command you get a message in the fsck_hfs.log along the lines of

RebuildBTree – record x in node y is not recoverable.

then try

fsck_hfs -p /dev/diskxs2

followed by

fsck_hfs -drfy /dev/diskxs2

And see if that works.  It did for me today.

330 thoughts on “Fix Time Machine Sparsebundle NAS Based Backup Errors

  1. Hey Garth

    I mean this is an incredible description! I was looking for weeks for something like that.. it just works really nice! Thanks a lot!

    I’m still trying to understand why it keeps happening after a couple of weeks.. I have 5 Macs, all TM’ing on the same NAS (Synology 509+) and only my big iMac does it… could it be because I put it to sleep by hand without checking before if TM is running ?

    thanks again!
    G

  2. I used the Furrybeard technique posted, using Disk Utility to repair the disk. Worked perfectly.

    1. Jim – the repair may be possible via Disk Utility – it is just a front-end to fsck_hfs – but I have had timeout issues in the past with the GUI and have better results running the repair from the command line.

  3. Hmm…mine doesn’t repair, instead I get left with “The volume Time Machine Backups couple not be verified completely. Volume check failed with error 7”. Drive failing, perhaps?

  4. Forget my question… I was looking for in the Mounted SparseBundle, but if I go in the folder with command line I can see it…

  5. Hello! Great help! But I can’t find com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist… I checked in the sparse bundle and in the preference folder of lion…
    Any idea?

  6. Does it works with “Time Capsule”, too?
    I have the same problem!!!
    Thank you

  7. got it working…

    Thanks, your instruction to fix the DIRTY volume saved me lot of pain

  8. Method described in this post did work with my QNAP TS-119 NAS (firmware 3.5.2 Build 1126T). I had “NO WRITE” from fsck_hfs command so I added -readwrite option to ‘hdiutil attach’ command.
    Thanks!

  9. Solved the corruption on my FreeNAS-hosted time machine backup perfectly . . . thanks very much for the detailed instructions !

  10. Hi, Garth.
    Thank you for great informations.

    My sparse bundle disk is almost 900GB.
    How long does it take first command (chflags -R nouchg /Volumes/{name of your network share}/{name of}.sparsebundle) ?

    how can I know the percentage of progress?

    Nori.

    1. Nori – there is no percentage indicator – just wait until it finishes. you can open a new terminal window and use ‘top’ to make sure te chflags is still running

  11. Garth,

    Any ideas about how to access a time machine backup that was interrupted because of a disk failure on the source disk so it can be restored to a new disk?

    Wsna

    1. Wsna

      If you boot from the Leopard, Snow Leopard or Lion boot CD (or Lion Recovery Partition), it will ask you to restore from Time Machine.

  12. Thank you Garth to people like you that are saving us. It is very sad to see that something that “just works” is becoming more and more of a device that has to be fixed all the time…
    I am trying to follow your instructions, however I stuck at the very beginning. Can you please clarify what must happen in the terminal window between “A” and “B” as per below quotes:

    A) From the command line

    chflags -R nouchg /Volumes/{name of your network share}/{name of}.sparsebundle

    This may take a little while.

    B) Now type

    hdiutil attach -nomount -noverify -noautofsck /Volumes/{name of your network share/{name of}.sparsebundle

    You will then see something like

    /dev/diskx Apple_partition_scheme
    /dev/diskxs1 Apple_partition_map
    /dev/diskxs2 Apple_HFSX

    —–
    Nothing happens for me – the rectangular cursor simply jumps to the next line. I have been waiting for something further to happen for about 2 hours now which seems to be not normal. The backup file is extremely important for me and I would be very grateful if you could help.

  13. Nice!!

    Finally after spending I don’t know how many hours on this I finally did a successfull repair and after that a new backup without errors, mostly because of following the suggestions of this post. I had to run the fsck_hfs command several times though. In the end it worked out.

    Thanks so much!

    Others: If you still have no success, keep reading the progress again, and make sure you don’t miss a step because that will most likely prevent success! For me, getting write access was what was most difficult.

  14. Worked beautifully! You saved me from 500GB of data loss when Apple couldn’t. Thanks for the tech help.

    Click ALL the banner ads!

  15. Thanks. These instructions were just what I needed to rescue my backup.

    Rod

  16. Hi Gartz,
    thank you for your effort. This is a really great approach and the only one I’ve seen so far.
    The problem is: my Volume can somehow not be repaired.

    I get this message, can you somehow help?

    DoMinorRepair: Repair for type=603 failed (err=48).
    ** The volume Time Machine-Backups could not be repaired.
    volume type is pure HFS+
    primary MDB is at block 0 0x00
    alternate MDB is at block 0 0x00
    primary VHB is at block 2 0x02
    alternate VHB is at block 3839106342 0xe4d41d26
    sector size = 512 0x200
    VolumeObject flags = 0x07
    total sectors for volume = 3839106344 0xe4d41d28
    total sectors for embedded volume = 0 0x00

  17. Garth, you saved my day! I just finalized my first backup again in weeks!!
    Best,
    Marius

  18. Hi Garth,
    I wanted to thank you for you time and effort and for your willingness to help me!
    It appears that I was able to fix my problem by another way, which I want to share with you:

    1. I used the “show package content” command to get to the file named “token” within the sparsebundle and unlocked it via the “Info” window. That unlocked the whole sparsebundle, allowing me to correct the sparsebundle’s name back to what it previously was.
    2. Mounted the sparsebundle and deleted the “Latest” folder plus the 3 most recent folders (under the assumption that the corruption must have occurred recently). This took several hours.
    3. Had the mounted sparsebundle as well as the NAS drive (with sparsebundle unmounted) checked and fixed by Disk Utility
    4. In reference to your suggestion, I modified the “com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist” file (“show package content”) with text edit so that it matched the text from the corresponding file of a working backup. In my case, I adjusted the date/time (2011-11-20T18:30:10Z) to the date of the now latest backup and changed “0” to “1”.
    5. Had the backup verified by TimeMachine – it’s been working since…

    Thanks again and best regards, Christof

  19. Thank you! Your article helped me to repair my TimeMachine backup. One minor point: the fsck that automatically started, ended with the message:
    ** The volume Time Machine Backups appears to be OK.
    (so apparently there was nothing wrong, and TimeMachine only rejected it because of the unclean unmount, possibly caused by suspending in the middle of a backup).

    I was stubborn and did the procedure over wireless network anyway (802.1n 5GHz, transfer rates can be 20-30MByte/s). OSX Lion 10.7.2 backing up to Synology DS 711+ on DSM 3.2-1944.

  20. Dear Garth,
    I thank you for your time and effort!
    Did as you said, but I am not getting the expected response from the terminal.
    The shell is a bash and I found out, that “> ” is simply the prompt.
    I tried it being logged into the share once as “admin” (for the Synology DS210j) and once with the same user account that Time Machine uses – no difference:
    The “sudo su -” command always gets executed immediately, but when entering the subsequent commands, I simply keep getting these “>” prompts.
    Waited for 15 – 20 minutes with no change in status.
    Would you have any further hints or ideas?

    1. Christof – in Terminal->Preferences – see if ‘Shell opens with’ is ‘default login shell’

  21. Great job! It appears to have worked for me. Only thing was that my sparse bundle name had spaces in it, so chflags didn’t like the filename. Substituting “*” for each space solved that problems. (Works as long as there are no similar sparsebundle names, of course.) And I wasn’t familiar with tail -f, so while it looked like it had finished, there was no command prompt so I waited a lot longer than necessary to finish the process. Oddly, fsck reported that there were no problems to begin with, so Time Machine appears to have gotten a little paranoid. After following the process the backup ran just fine, and I was able to see backed up files. When this happens again – and I believe it will – I’ve got a quick solution. Thanks!

  22. Thanks as well for this. Oddly, after fsck_hfs ran for me, it reported that my Time Machine Backups partition was okay. Still, the overall procedure got TM back up and running for me without losing any of my backup history, so thanks once again!

  23. Dear Garth,
    thanks for this great resource, which I hope will work for me, too!
    Since I am a novice to the terminal, may I ask you some questions that my seem silly to you:
    1. When entering my own path in terminal, do the parentheses ({) in “/Volumes/{name of your network share}/{name of}.sparsebundle” stay or do they too get replaced by the names of my specific path?
    Example: /Volumes/{TimeMachineNAS}/{Dr. B’s MacBook Pro}.sparsebundle vs. /Volumes/TimeMachineNAS/Dr. B’s MacBook Pro.sparsebundle
    2. Do I need to enter the name of the NAS storage device, too or just the share?
    3. TimeMachine changed the name of my backup from “Dr. B’s MacBook Pro” to “Dr. B’s MacBook Pro_2011-11-07-200244”. Do I use the original or the new name?
    4. What does it mean, when terminal returns a “>” sign and does nothing else?
    Thank you very much for your time and effort!
    Sincerely, Christof

    1. 1 – Curly brackets should also be replaced.
      2 – whatever the share name is that shows in the volumes directory is what you need to type
      3 – you can rename the backup to the shorter version
      4 – you might be using a different shell than bash-check your terminal preferences.

  24. worked great, just had to make sure that the drive was unmounted first

    Thanks

  25. Garth… just wanted to say thanks for this Blog post. There were a few similar things around on the Interwebs, but yours was the most concise and best to follow. Worked a treat for me in Lion (Mac OSX 10.7) with a Time Machine backup that had started life as a Snow Leopard backup a few months earlier. Also, the backup was on a QNAP 410 NAS, and so I was doing it all over a (wired) 100 Mbps network connection. The backups with Time Machine have been good since then, over a week ago.

  26. Thank you for the terrific instructions! One note I’d like to add: if you see a NO WRITE message in the log when you attach the image, and it mounts read-only, and if you try to use the -readwrite option it gives you a “permission denied” error … that probably means that you’re connected to your NAS with an account that doesn’t have write access to the backup image. This threw me for a loop, I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t allowed to have write access, until I realized that I didn’tt have write permissions on the server itself. I mounted the NAS drive with the proper account and all was well.

  27. I followed the instructions, although at first it took forever to get the correct way to name the sparse bundle in the end some on Readynas forums helped me, it has to be like this..
    chflags -R nouchg /Volumes/ReadyNAS/Fred\ Smith\ office\’s\ iMac.sparsebundle
    and it ran fine and fixed the errors but now 3 days later I got the same error that Time machine couldn’t verify the backup and I need to start a new one 🙁
    The error is
    ** Checking multi-linked files.
    Incorrect number of file hard links
    ** Checking catalog hierarchy.
    so the same problem has occurred to the spars bundle.. I am running the fix again but fear it will just be the same. Does anyone know why? is it just Lion and ReadyNas? I never had this problem before.

  28. Thanks for the tutorial. After running “fsck_hfs -drfy /dev/disk1s2” I get the following:

    journal_replay(/dev/disk1s2) returned 0
    ** /dev/rdisk1s2
    Using cacheBlockSize=32K cacheTotalBlock=32768 cacheSize=1048576K.
    Executing fsck_hfs (version diskdev_cmds-540.1~34).
    ** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
    ** Detected a case-sensitive volume.
    The volume name is Time Machine-Backups
    ** Checking extents overflow file.
    ** Checking catalog file.
    ** Rebuilding catalog B-tree.
    hfs_UNswap_BTNode: invalid node height (1)
    ** The volume Time Machine-Backups could not be repaired.
    volume type is pure HFS+
    primary MDB is at block 0 0x00
    alternate MDB is at block 0 0x00
    primary VHB is at block 2 0x02
    alternate VHB is at block 2147483582 0x7fffffbe
    sector size = 512 0x200
    VolumeObject flags = 0x07
    total sectors for volume = 2147483584 0x7fffffc0
    total sectors for embedded volume = 0 0x00

    What does that mean? Is my backup hosed?

    Thanks
    – Tom

  29. Hello and Help

    I try to follow your tut. but i get this Error.

    smi:~ staffanmagneli$ fsck_hfs -drfy /dev/disk2s2
    journal_replay(/dev/disk2s2) returned 0
    ** /dev/rdisk2s2
    Using cacheBlockSize=32K cacheTotalBlock=16384 cacheSize=524288K.
    Executing fsck_hfs (version diskdev_cmds-540.1~25).
    ** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
    SearchTree(247): height 0 != level 2
    BTIterateRecord(946): returning fsBTInvalidNodeErr
    Catalog file entry not found for extent
    (4, 0)
    ** The volume could not be verified completely.
    volume check failed with error 7
    volume type is pure HFS+
    primary MDB is at block 0 0x00
    alternate MDB is at block 0 0x00
    primary VHB is at block 2 0x02
    alternate VHB is at block 3902834718 0xe8a0881e
    sector size = 512 0x200
    VolumeObject flags = 0x07
    total sectors for volume = 3902834720 0xe8a08820
    total sectors for embedded volume = 0 0x0

    Do you think you can help me, or is all hope lost ;(

    1. This error gets you into the ‘probably not going to be salvageable’ area. What this means is that the filesystem thinks two files are occupying the same place on the filesystem. There are commands to identify the file and then delete it – but ultimately it could be a file that you need and will cause further problems down the line – especially with the amount of hard and soft links that Time Machine does.

      For this error you are probably better off starting over.

  30. Hi

    Just to say, another grateful reader here. Process went surprisingly quick, <30mins total, with a 2011 iMac, 10.7.2 and Synology DS 409+

    The .plist nodes were labelled slightly differently, but still obvious.

    Hopefully it holds up…

    May not be connected, but this problem first occurred a few days after I installed TimeMachine Editor (small freeware app for changing the backup interval from default 60 mins). I've used it for a long time with no issues under 10.6, but maybe it disagrees with 10.7? If the problem reoccurs, I'll uninstall it and see if that makes a difference.

    Thanks again Garth, excellent work!

  31. Hi,

    Thank you very much for sharing this !

    However, I have a problem. I ran ‘fsck_hfs -drfy /dev/disk2s2’ three times but got the same result each time :
    journal_replay(/dev/disk2s2) returned 0
    ** /dev/rdisk2s2
    Using cacheBlockSize=32K cacheTotalBlock=16384 cacheSize=524288K.
    Executing fsck_hfs (version diskdev_cmds-540.1~34).
    ** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
    ** Detected a case-sensitive volume.
    The volume name is Copies de sauvegarde Time machine
    ** Checking extents overflow file.
    ** Checking catalog file.
    ** Rebuilding catalog B-tree.
    hfs_UNswap_BTNode: invalid node height (1)
    hfs_swap_HFSPlusBTInternalNode: catalog record #34 keyLength=105 expected=206
    Invalid key length
    (4, 15270)
    ** The volume Copies de sauvegarde Time machine could not be repaired.
    volume type is pure HFS+
    primary MDB is at block 0 0x00
    alternate MDB is at block 0 0x00
    primary VHB is at block 2 0x02
    alternate VHB is at block 3902834718 0xe8a0881e
    sector size = 512 0x200
    VolumeObject flags = 0x07
    total sectors for volume = 3902834720 0xe8a08820
    total sectors for embedded volume = 0 0x00

    Any idea why, and more important, how I could repair my Time Machine backup ? =/

  32. Thanks, Helped a lot.
    I’m using filevault, so backup was made only then I was restarting MacBookPro.

  33. Looks like someone else posted your article as their own:

    http://www.netafp.com/fix-time-machine-sparsebundle-617/

    Thanks for this, BTW! I knew there should be some way to try to fix things up in most cases, but I was stumbling on finding all the right steps. I was missing out entirely on the fsck step — I didn’t even guess it might be a necessary step given there were no errors mentioned in any logs when I manually mounted the sparsebundle.

    Note for fsck to work on the backup volume on my Time Capsule, I found it was necessary to use the -readwrite option when attaching the volume with hdiutil attach.

    Unfortunately in my case even after running fsck twice, the volume remains corrupted.

    Anyway why the heck couldn’t Apple have backupd automatically do one extra fsck like this just in hopes it might work? It obviously works for some folks!

    There may be something else missing from your instructions as well. I noted in the system.log that backupd had renamed the sparsebundle directory from machine.sparsebundle to something like machine_date-verification-failed.sparsebundle right after the backup verification first failed. I renamed it back to what it was. I don’t know if this was necessary, but it didn’t seem to cause any problem either. I also renamed it again to a unique name after having no luck with the fsck, and re-locked the files that were locked with the uchg flag so as to preserve what I could of my older backups.

    BTW, I found this other post which suggests one can use the GUI to do the filesystem repair:

    http://furrybeard.com/blog/tech/error-time-machine-completed-a-verification-of-your-backups-to-improve-reliability-time-machine-must-create-a-new-backup-for-you/

  34. What if I’ve already copied my sparse bundle to my desktop? They did that at the Apple Store when they were trying to get the data to migrate. The sparse bundle won’t mount though. Thanks in advance.

  35. Hi there!

    I followed all your instructions, but it won’t get through this following part:

    /dev/rdisk1s3: fsck_hfs run at Tue Oct 11 20:00:25 2011
    /dev/rdisk1s3: ** /dev/rdisk1s3 (NO WRITE)
    /dev/rdisk1s3: Executing fsck_hfs (version diskdev_cmds-540.1~34).
    QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN

    It keeps repeating over and over, with 4 hours in between . I have 300GB of Backup, but it’s been nearly 24 hours and nothing happens.
    If I skip this step, and go directly to editing the plist file, do you think it may work, or it HAS to be in order??
    Thanks!

    1. If it says the filesystem is clean – then i would proceed to the next step. But it could be another problem with the backup that isn’t related to disk corruption.

  36. My bad! I forgot the line with the chflags. With that included it works just fine.
    Thanks again.

  37. Thanks for the very useful tip. Unfortunately, I get the following result:

    hfs_UNswap_BTNode: invalid node height (1)
    hfs_swap_HFSPlusBTInternalNode: catalog key #27 invalid length (0)
    Invalid key length

    What are my options now? I would be grateful for further advice.
    Niklaus

  38. Garth based on the responses you seem to be the only person that can fix my issue. I am getting a sparsebundle error code (-1). However I don’t even see a sparsebundle on the local external disk. At one time I was trying to do network backups but have since reverted back to locally attached. The backups are there because time machine can restore files from the backup files.

  39. Hi, Garth:

    Thanks so much for providing this info– you’re awesome for posting it! But I can’t get it to work and need help desperately and obviously Apple is clueless w/NAS drives.

    When I open Terminal and then try to switch to root by typing sudo su –
    and then enter my password (not sure if the pw is typed right after the su -) but tried it both ways– but all I get is a response that I don’t need the admin PW or it just says root# again. My husband does software engineering and tried walking me through other options per your instructions in Terminal but we got nowhere and couldn’t get anything to run that should have happened.

    Would you have any suggestions at all? Your blog is amazing and I wish you could post for Apple proper!

    Thanks so much for any extra help!!

    PS: My computer has brought this up twice now– the first time I did the whole new backup and it worked fine for a few weeks (although I figured it should have just discarded the oldest backups if the disk were really full, which was what came up the first time– so I lost everything short of the last few weeks, but not a big deal… yet… as long as I don’t lose any more). I do have what appears to be a good backup when I go into the sparsebundle for this computer but have no idea how to even save that last backup (if there is a way or if this is really a backup at all) before possibly losing everything again. I do have a mirrored drive on my NAS but am guessing they’re both messed up somehow. Also, I’m running 10.6.8 if that makes any difference since most people seem to be getting this error w/Lion.

    1. If you see ‘root#’ you have succeeded with the sudo command and can proceed with the rest of the instructions.

  40. Hi there!

    I’m stuck at

    At this point, I have found that the filesystem check is already happening. You can check for activity by tail’ing the fsck_hfs.log

    tail -f /var/log/fsck_hfs.log

    If fsck is going then in my experience it will be able to repair the sparsebundle. Go away for a few hours and let it chug away.

    I’m waiting for more than 15 hours… the terminal has this little black spot in the big red one (at the top left). So I’m guessing it’s doing its thing.

    Terminal says

    Executing fsck_hfs (version diskdev_cmds-491.6~3).
    QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN

    It previously said

    ~ PierreAxel$ fsck_hfs -rf /dev/disk1s2
    ** /dev/rdisk1s2
    Executing fsck_hfs (version diskdev_cmds-491.6~3).
    ** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
    Invalid B-tree node size
    (3, 0)
    ** The volume could not be verified completely.

    Should I add that I am using my Time Capsule’s HDD to wirelessly backup?
    I hope someone will save my butt… thanks in advance.

    1. when you saw this

      QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN

      it means that the filesystem was mounting cleanly.

      the “invalid b-tree node size” may be one of those HFS errors that aren’t fixable.

  41. This article is now my saving grace. Followed the instructions and was able to salvage my backups. I have 6 months worth of backups, and I definitely did NOT want to lose them.

    The only thing worth clearing up is the bit about the com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist modifications. It took me a while to research it, but you actually have to right click on the .sparsebundle and view package contents to see that file.

    I let my backup run overnight and sure enough, all is well in Time Machine land. THANK YOU.

  42. I’d like to echo the thanks offered by the previous 4 posters! Your good sleuth work figuring out the correct Unix commands (Mac OS X is not Linux, Dwayne 🙂 , finding the necessary property list file in the sparse bundle wrapper, and figuring out which property list file entries to delete and modify seem to have saved my 2+ years of backups.

    However, my Lion system and Time Capsule backup behaved a little differently from your description. After running the hdiutil attach command, the file system check did not automatically start, so I had to run the fsck_hfs command manually (thanks for providing the correct command to use). Apparently, my backup volume detached automatically after the file system check completed, so running the hdiutil detach command produced a “device not found” error (not a problem). The tail commands did not produce any output that wasn’t written to standard output of the terminal, so running tail was not necessary in my case.

    I hope that others who are experiencing this potentially devastating Time Machine backup corruption problem will find this Web page and that they are as successful as all of us so far have been.

  43. Thanks for your tutorial! It saved me from rebuilding the whole thing and losing a whole year backup of my iMac!

    Cheers,
    Antony

  44. Brilliant. Thanks a ton for the helpful post. Backups are up and running again.

  45. Hey Garth-
    I just found your post on Time Machine backup recovery. I’m now sitting waiting on fsck**whatever to finish, but wanted to say that your blog has gotten me farther that any other. Some guy on the Apple Group just told me that my files are unrecoverable, and maybe they are, but I haven’t been able to run fsck_hfs until I got your sequence of magical Linux incantations. So lets wait and see and if it works, I owe you big time for 3 years of Time Capsule recovered data. If not, no foul, no blame. hahaha

    DJ in New Hampshire

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