Recently my Time Machine backup got corrupted. I could mount the Time Machine volume but the backup would never complete. After some digging around I found a great article that explains how the fix the corrupted sparsebundle file. If you are having problems with Time Machine be sure and check it out.
How to fix a Corrupted Time Machine Backup.
I have a server running FreeNAS that I am using it as my Time Capsule for Time Machine backups. Every once and a while the Apple File Protocol share gets corrupted and Time Machine can’t mount the volume after I select it.
To fix this problem we will need to mount the volume as an SMB share and delete some files. NOTE: To do this you will have to enable SMB on your FreeNAS and this is beyond the scope of this post but I have posted some links below that should help.
Alright, let’s get started.
Just to be safe we moved the hidden files and directories to a directory we created called applestuff. Once you are able to successfully mount the volume again with Time Machine you can delete the applestuff directory. These hidden files and directories will automatically get recreated again upon successful mount.
That is it. You should now be able to mount the volume again using Time Machine. Below are a couple of links on how setup FreeNAS for Time Machine backups and how to enable the SMB protocol.
How to setup FreeNAS as a Time Capsule.
How to enable SMB file sharing on FreeNAS.
