Apple Time Capsule Disk Naming Breaks Backups

Apple Time Capsule Ad
Originally uploaded by Feras Hares.

Took me awhile to figure this one out so I'll blog it here to help raise awareness.

I bought an Apple Time Capsule to add to my home network. I loved the idea of wireless backups using the cool Time Machine software. Anyway, I kept having issues where I could see the Time Capsule's disk in the finder but the back ups would fail with a warning about not being able to mount the disk.

There is a lot of long posts out on the webs but here are two things I tried:

1: Some people were having problems when the Time Capsule disk name was long/contained odd characters
It appears that the shared disk name (not wireless network name) needs to be fairly short ~25 chars. This is unfortunate because Apple software tends to default to a long name when you first set up a TC. (e.g. Joe Owner's Time Capsule).

Link to original thread on issue #1

-- note: this alone did not fix the issue for me but still seemed like a good idea

2: Delete the last entries in the sparse bundle
This one seemed to do the trick, got my Time Machine process past the 'processing' stage and into the actual backup (now at 1.2 GB out of 2.2 GB for the current job). The good thing is all my old backups (except the one day I deleted) still exist.

Here is a quote and a link to the thread that helped:

I just had the same problem. That error can be caused when Time Machine is attempting to hard link to a previously corrupted backup.

Try this:
1) Connect to the shared drive from your Mac
2) Mount the .sparsebundle on your Mac
3) Inside the .sparsebundle, expand the folder "Backups.backupsdb"/
4) Sort the contents by date
5) Delete the link "Latest" and also the most recent incremental backup folder (ie. "2008-06-18-075750")
6) Unmount the .sparsebundle
7) Go into Time Machine Preferences, choose "Change Disk..."
8) Select the shared drive (not the sparsebundle)
9) Click Start Backup. After "Preparing" for a little while, it start backing up again.
10) Click Enter Time Machine when it's done backing up. All of your old backups should be visible (whew!)

Link to original thread on issue #2

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Of course the very first thing you should do is make sure you have the latest OS updates on the machines you are trying to back up. You should also make sure the hardware flash drivers are up to date on your Time Capsule

One final detail is that I also have an Airport Express attached to the network to extend the range of wireless reception and to share our printer. Not sure if this contributed to the issue (probably not)