I have been utilizing sparsebundles for >10 years, and notably I’ve a big encrypted sparsebundle (in HFS+ format) in my predominant storage. I again it up recurrently to exterior drives utilizing rsync.
Downside 1:
For a couple of years (and so a couple of OS variations in the past), I’ve seen that not manually unmounting the sparsebundle earlier than shutting down my Mac results in bizarre issues:
- When my Mac subsequent begins, the Finder hangs for a very long time.
- After I subsequent shut down my Mac, it additionally hangs for a very long time with a clean display screen earlier than powering off.
- The issues are likely to linger till I mount and unmount the sparsebundle once more.
- If I again up the sparsebundle whereas my Mac is on this bizarre state, the backup is corrupt. Nevertheless, I’ve all the time been in a position to mount the unique sparsebundle once more.
I discover this bizarre, as in my understanding, a Unix machine is supposed to correctly umount all mounted volumes when shutting down. I do not recall this was occurring >5 years in the past.
Downside 2:
I not too long ago tried opening a backup of this sparsebundle from 10 years in the past. It mounts positive, and I can learn the contents. However after some time, the contents of some directories begins to vanish. No error message seems within the Finder, however utilizing ls within the terminal returns I/O errors. At that time, correctly unmounting the sparsebundle fails and I’ve to power unmount it. Then it’s corrupt and I can’t mount it once more.
I’ve tried to restore it to no avail, utilizing:
hdiutil connect -nomount -noverify -noautofsck my_back_up.sparsebundle
fsck_hfs -drfy /dev/disk...
Be aware: the I/O errors are usually not brought on by my exterior backup drive failing, as I’ve copied the sparsebundle from the exterior drive to my predominant storage earlier than making an attempt to mount it.
I am not even positive these two issues are associated…