Time Machine Kernel Panic Backing Up to Time Capsule

Earlier this week, my MacBook Pro kernel panicked three times in six hours. It had never kernel panicked even once before. All three log files (which are written to /Library/Logs/PanicReporter/) implicated “backupd”, which is Time Machine, and which I was using to back up to Time Capsule. Turning off Time Machine made the panics stop.

Ends up my friend Nat had the exact same problem last month. The same thing that worked for him worked for me: using Disk Utility to repair the sparse disk image on the Time Capsule containing the backups for my machine. This is a nasty, nasty bug, though — most users would be screwed, because they’d never even figure out that the culprit is Time Machine, so they’d keep getting panics when, after restarting, Time Machine next starts a backup.

★ Thursday, 5 June 2008