I'm on a MacBook Pro running OSX 10.7.5. ReadyNAS Duo with RAIDiator 4.1.10.
I started work on a large (aren't they all!) Final Cut project on my MBP and so wanted to increase the Time Machine backup allocation.
I opened the Backup/Time Machine pane in Frontview and increased the Capacity from 500GB to 750GB - the amount of data backed up from my MBP was about 400GB/1TB but the folder containing the FCP project was. The FCP project is about 100GB so I figured 750GB was an adequate buffer.
After the first backup, I had a message saying that some backups had to be deleted because of lack of space. I checked the TM preferences which state that 287.67 GB of 805.31 GB is available but with the Time Machine volume mounted the TM volume window status says 23.39 GB available. I notice that the space available on the ReadyNAS Duo's other shares has decreased by about 100GB (the FCP project size) not 250GB (the amount I added).
I concede that I have always been a little confused regarding the ReadyNAS Duo's maths and/or expression of free space as I seemed to be getting about 2.5GB from a 2GB HD on it but acknowledge that allocation and capacity are possibly entirely different.
Could somebody either help me configure my ReadyNAS Duo correctly or reassure me that everything is OK, please?
[edit] Perhaps I should have added that prior to changing the allocation in Frontview, it said that the maximum was 960GB - now, after increasing it and backing up, it says the maximum is 870GB.
I can't say that I did these things for diagnostic purposes but since posting the question, my Mac has been rebooted several times and Time Machine has also been deactivated.
Sorry for disappearing from the conversation - I've been sick and unfortunately, I don't seem to get the subscription notifications.
I realise it is Christmas Eve and most sensible people are not messing around with their computers at the moment but I'm just killing time waiting for somebody and then I will be away for a couple of days.
However, I will send the output in the next minute or so.
This indicates that your sparsebundle image still has a 500(536870912000/1024/1024/1024)GB capacity. It hasn't expanded. So the sparsebundle image is full to capacity.
You could try: 1. Rebooting the NAS and Mac if you haven't already 2. Disabling then re-enabling Time Machine on NAS and the Mac. 3. Go to System > Shutdown in Frontview. Reboot with a quota check.
Due to Time Machine being 'unaware' of the extra space, today it began a lengthy 'Preparing backup...' which went on for a few of hours and it is now 'Indexing backup...'.According to what I have read, this is fairly normal when old backups have to be removed to make space. Essentially, though, what I was trying to avoid already happened shortly after I posted the original question, i.e. that the oldest backups had to be deleted to make space for my FCP work.
I'll give your suggestions a go when it has finished though, as you guessed, I already rebooted the Mac and NAS and disabled and re-enabled TM on both.
I tried everything suggested without success but according to this, the only way to increase the capacity is to remove the sparesebundle and redo the Time Machine setup:
I recently dusted off an old ReadyNAS NV+ to repurpose as a dedicated Time Machine backup server. I upgraded it to the latest firmware 4.1.13 being that it is a Sparc model. It has the maximum 4 x 2TB hard disks. With nothing else stored on it one might assume you could define a Time Machine capacity of roughly 6TB or at least 4TB.
As per the many discussions here FrontView still limits you to a maximum 2TB Time Machine size in the FrontView interface. Previous posts on this topic have claimed this was due to the EXT3 file system limit of a maximum 2TB file size. However this is I still feel erroneous as Time Machine uses a Sparse Image disk bundle and this is actually a folder full of smaller slices and each slice is way smaller than the 2TB per file limit.
It seems that as standard one can have multiple up to 2TB backups but as standard each backup i.e. Mac being backed up is limited to 2TB.
In theory and as per other posts one can either create a Time Machine Sparse Image disk bundle locally on a Mac configured to a larger limit and then copy it to the ReadyNAS. Because as mentioned above it is made of lots of smaller files this still does not exceed the file system file size limit and gets round FrontView's mistaken 2TB limit.
Also in theory one can use Disk Utility to issue a command to resize the existing Sparse Image disk bundle to allow a bigger size. I have done this many times in-conjunction with "SuperDuper" backup images to allow bigger backups as needs grow. Having done so I have encountered a persistent problem with Disk Utility in that it will initially fail to do this - apparently because the 'partition map' does not have enough room in it to handle the change.
I found an article (several actually) which fortunately describe how to get round this. Here is the link to the one I followed
Note: Despite the date above, this problem with Disk Utility still occurs even in Mavericks.
I would also add to the above article that before following the above steps one should first mount the Sparse Image disk bundle in the Finder and then use Disk Utility to do a volume repair. This is because if the image becomes completely full the directory (of the Sparse Image) can become slightly damaged. One needs a completely undamaged directory because during the successfully resizing process Disk Utility will do an automatic verify and will abort if there is damage detected.
So the above will hopefully help people trying to resize the Time Machine Sparse Image disk bundles to allow a bigger than 2TB capacity. What a shame NetGear still make us jump through all these hoops.
The quota set in Frontview could be an issue once you use the quota as the NAS won't let you write more as the TM user.
I will bear that in mind. I have another ReadyNAS 1100 also dedicated as a Time Machine server at work and have enabled each users home share to be used as per user Time Machine backups. With this one can specify either 0 (no limit) or bigger limits for their storage quota which does not have a direct relation to the Sparse Image bundle size limit.
The same tip for resizing images would still apply and be of help even when using user homes rather than the global Time Machine share.
I have not hit it yet but in theory if the per user storage quota is hit before the Sparse Image limit Time Machine might not handle automatic pruning of old backups gracefully. I therefore again refer to the below. :wink:
jelockwood wrote:
What a shame NetGear still make us jump through all these hoops.
