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About once a month, I get the following message for my time machine backup:

Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you.

I'm guessing that this is because my backup was corrupted and needs to be redone. This is annoying for 2 reasons:

  1. I loose all of my old backups.
  2. It takes several hours to recreate the backup.

I have 2 questions:

  1. Is this common behavior for everyone using time machine?
  2. How can I avoid this?

Could it be the case that closing your laptop during a backup will cause corruption?

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  • No, that's not common. Closing the laptop should ideally just pause the backup and your MacBook will continue where it left off when you open it again – but I haven't tried that. I would probably start verifying the volume through Disk Utility and checking for errors. Also, try switching to another drive if possible (I know, might not be that easy).
    – slhck
    Commented Jun 22, 2012 at 20:23
  • I used diskutility on the backup disk. All looks fine. This is actually the second drive I am using. It works fine for my wife. The first drive also had problems (but I don't think they were related).
    – Andrew Eisenberg
    Commented Jun 24, 2012 at 6:03
  • I'm also just wondering if I should give up on time machine. See superuser.com/questions/440816/alternatives-to-time-machine
    – Andrew Eisenberg
    Commented Jun 24, 2012 at 6:04

1 Answer 1

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Look at this blog post, it seems that it can solve this problem: http://sansumbrella.com/writing/2012/the-reluctant-sysadmin-nas-time-machine/

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    Hey Robert, thanks for contributing. The convention on Superuser is that you summarize instructions in your answer. Just providing a link without any explanation is frowned upon.
    – Isaac Rabinovitch
    Commented Dec 3, 2012 at 22:06
  • Better than nothing. :-) I'll try this out. Thanks for the link.
    – Andrew Eisenberg
    Commented Dec 4, 2012 at 4:08
  • And now the link is dead.
    – Florian F
    Commented Mar 18, 2022 at 11:14

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