Time Machine Hiccup

Time Capsule may be selling well and I'm mostly happy with mine, I did run into an issue yesterday. I think it's more Time Machine than Time Capsule related.

I'm not quite sure how or why, but it seems the sparse bundle disk image that Time Machine creates on the backup drive became corrupt. It no longer mounts. The problem is, this is unrepairable. My backups are lost. I have to start over.

This also happened to the only other person I know who has a Time Capsule. It happened to both of us after about 5-6 weeks. I called AppleCare and they have no suggestions. Sounding knowledgeable and realizing my data was gone but wanting to help them debug this I worked my way up some support escalation, but it only resulted in me sending in my system logs. I'll hear back in 3-5 days when a real engineer looks at it but by then I'll have a new backup started. I asked if others reported such problems and was told in a quiet voice, yes.

I regularly notice when the Time Machine icon in the menubar spins and check how much it copies (open the menu to see). I noticed it was spinning for a long time and checked the logs in Console.app. I saw a lot of these:

May 14 16:11:12 Machine kernel[0]: HFS: err 5 reading VH blk (Backup of Machine)
May 14 16:11:12 Machine kernel[0]: disk1s2: 0x23 (UNDEFINED).

Then after a reboot I saw a lot of these...
May 15 08:32:05 Machine /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[256]: Waiting for index to be ready (905 > 0)

which turned into a lot of these...
May 15 12:10:51 Machine /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[256]: Waiting for Spotlight to finish indexing /Volumes/Backup of Machine/Backups.backupdb

This is not how you want your backups to behave. Since only Apple software writes to this sparse bundle, there's a bug somewhere in Apple's code. My friend thinks his corruption occurred when he closed the lid on his MacBook Air, putting it to sleep while in the middle of a backup. I don't think I did that but it's hard to know for sure. Still I hope they fix this soon. Now I have to go erase my corrupt backup and start a new one.

Update: My new backup seems to be working. It also seems I'm not the only one with problems.