So being that it was a holiday and we had the chance to shut down servers to run updates and look into problems, we did just that. Nearly all our updates ran without a hitch so that was nice. We had one problem to look into though.  We have a Snow Leopard server running as a Time Machine backup server for our network. It has worked great since Leopard when Time Machine first came out. With the release of Lion we now have 3 machines (my boss’ and mine) that are running Lion. The rest we have held off on upgrading until Apple fixes the data loss issues related to non-local storage volumes.

These three Lion machines have not been able to run a Time Machine backup to the TM server, but they would backup everywhere else. The only difference was that the backup server’s storage was connected via SCSI so we decided to pull all 16 drives out of the array and drop a temp drive in to make sure it wasn’t a SCSI issue. Worked like a charm, so it isn’t SCSI. We also noticed the old array was partitioned with APM (Apple Partition Map) so we figured that had to be the issue and decided to wipe out all the backed up data and re-partition as GUID since that should have fixed it.  No dice. Formatted our 28TB backup array and still couldn’t backup.  Kept getting a random error about DiskImageHelper crashing while trying to create the sparsebundle.

An hour and a half later of trying everything to think of I finally tracked it down.  Lion’s Time Machine cannot handle a target volume which is over 17TB. If I format the array under 17TB it’s fine. If it is 17TB or more it fails, every single time. For now we are working around this problem by creating a 25.5TB volume for all the working computers and a 2.5TB volume for the 3 Lion computers. I don’t have an easy way to test if this is a network volume related issue or just a 17TB issue period. I don’t have a way to plug any of our Lion machines into the array and I’m not going to upgrade any computers until the data-loss bug is fixed as that is a pretty glaring issue that Apple has so far ignored (10.7.1 and counting).