timemachine not working with 3.5 firmware installed.

[michaelbierman]

I have installed the 3.5 firmware. Time Machine backups are completely unreliable. On my Leopard machine, I consistently get this message:

TimeMachine Lion.png

that the Time Machine volume cannot be found. Sometimes If I manually have TimeMachine re-run things work, but not usually. I have deleted the Time Machine backups for that machine 3 times and started over. Obviously this is a pain and means that for all practical purposes i cannot count on these backups.

For my Lion machine, the backups were working for a while after I installed the 3.5 firmware. But now I get the dialog above that says Time Machine completed a verification of backups.

TimeMachine Tiger.png

To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you". This is not a message any user wants to see with regard to backups. I have also the Time Machine backups for this machine at least once previously.

What is going on!? I bought the QNAP primarily for a backup drive and am very disappointed in the reliability. Is anyone else having similar problems with the 3.5 firmware?

[michaelbierman]

update so far

QNAP support says there are issues with Lion 10.7.1 that they are working on fixing. That doesn't explain the problems I'm seeing with Leopard but I'm glad they are on the Lion issue.

[Visual_Purple]

I have a brand-new TS-212 with 3.5 firmware. I managed to complete my first TimeMachine backup but now can't re-connect. I'm getting "Time Machine cannot access the backup disk. OSStatus error2" In Finder I can connect using SAMBA or AFP but not TimeMachine.

Incidentally, although I can see the backup in the pie chart under resources, why can't I see the TM share in the Web File Manager? In other words, where do the TM files get put on the NAS?

[xavierh]

I have a brand-new TS-212 with 3.5 firmware. I managed to complete my first TimeMachine backup but now can't re-connect. I'm getting "Time Machine cannot access the backup disk. OSStatus error2" In Finder I can connect using SAMBA or AFP but not TimeMachine.

Incidentally, although I can see the backup in the pie chart under resources, why can't I see the TM share in the Web File Manager? In other words, where do the TM files get put on the NAS?

The time machine share is on a hidden folder and that is the reaosn why you cannot see if form the web file manager.

[Visual_Purple]

I have solved the problem and Time Machine backups are now working fine. However, the pie graph is only showing the size of the first backup I did. In other words it hasn't updated for the more recent ones, and so my total used/unused figures on my usage pie graph are wrong, which is irritating.

I have always shut down my NAS at night, as it is a bit noisy. Now I know that during the day, the pie graph only shows up-to-date values after you have refreshed each of the share folders under Access Rights Management, but as the TM folder is hidden, I can't do that. Am I right in thinking that if I leave the NAS on overnight, a cron job does a refresh of *all* folders, including the TM one, and so next day the pie graph would be correct?

[forkless]

Yep, every night at 3am. Its the /sbin/vs_refresh in your crontab.

[Visual_Purple]

Thanks forkless

[niallmcgee]

update so far

QNAP support says there are issues with Lion 10.7.1 that they are working on fixing. That doesn't explain the problems I'm seeing with Leopard but I'm glad they are on the Lion issue.

Great - I've seeing the "verification" problem with Lion 10.7.1 twice in the last 48 hours, and can't quite face moving my NAS to beside my iMac *again* to avoid a four-day "first backup"!

[Rogier]

update so far

QNAP support says there are issues with Lion 10.7.1 that they are working on fixing. That doesn't explain the problems I'm seeing with Leopard but I'm glad they are on the Lion issue.

Any news about this issue? It's quite frustrating that the TimeMachine option causes so much trouble in the past year and seems to be in a continuous beta-status.

[Dreamwolf]

I have never had a time machine problem in the last 1,5 years on my TS-419P, it always worked like a charm. Even after updating to firmware 3.5 it worked for a month without any hiccups however then I started to get the same TM messages that are posted at the start of this message which caused me to accept a ditch of all the TM backups I had and building up a new one. This did not work either as the system thought it had only 38 Gb available when it needed 119 Gb for the backup, in fact the NAS had 150 Gb free space. Despite this I was always in the understanding that once the NAS created a sparsebundle with a certain given maximum size (by me under capacity) this would be reserved and not be seen as available space which has to be shared with other data on the NAS...
With the firmware updates now it seems everything is suddenly shared.

After updating firmware to 3.5.1. ,deleting the sparsebundle and basically starting from scratch an entire new backup was created however 2 days later I am now receiving the following message when TM tries to run a new (incremental) backup;

'Time Machine can't finish the backup. The diskcopyfile '/Volumes/TMBackup/iMac of xxx.sparsebundle' which is used for the backup, is already in use.'
Before updating to 3.5. I was running on 3.3 (I think), it was the first firmware update enabling Time Machine through QNAP software, this always worked solid without any hiccups.

QNAP, what has happened? Please correct this problem soon!

[cdab]

same problem as michaelbiermann... i keep getting the "start new backup" message...

how to solve the issue?

[schumaku]

Update to v3.5.1 firmware (or newer) to get rid of some AFP slowness issues.

[phibes4000]

I am backing up over wifi (ethernet is not an option) and am frequently encountering the 'verification' issue, and have been since first using time machine on the TS-459.

I know that it is possible to resolve this through a long-winded process via the command line, but that's not an acceptable solution for me. Is this an avahi/netatalk issue? Or is it something QNAP can fix?

Have Qnap acknowledge the issue? If not, I will raise a support ticket.

[jack22]

UP (3 years old) ! I have the same issue, with several Mac and Several QNAP... Any solution for now ?

[RichieB]

There is a work around posted at viewtopic.php?f=15&t=49849&p=246100#p225790 that worked for me. Hopefully Qnap will fix this though, because it seems the work around needs to be applied multiple times.