Time Machine Annoyance

[bayswater]

This has been happening for a few years on a MBP running HS.

I’m hoping for some hints about where to look to fix this. While TM should be a simple background operation, I have to check and run it manually most of the time.

Time Machine often reports that no backups have been done. It sometimes issues a warning but usually i happen to notice the last reported backup was a couple of weeks ago.

Here are some of the things TM reports:

- it might warn no backups have been done for 100 to 200 days. Even so, looking at the menu bar, it reports backup of a few days ago, and I can enter TM and restore a file from a day or two ago.

- It often says the backup disk cannot be found. I can mount the backup disk, do “get info”, examine the contents and see all is what you’d expect.

- TM Prefs correctly reports the volume being used and only reports only one of them. (While reporting the volume cannot be found)

- looking at the menu bar it might say the last backup was 14days ago. Entering TM, I might find backups from the day before and modification dates from as little as an hour ago.

There are two other Mac that use the same volume for backup and these never report or show any of these problems, so I assume it is something to do with the MBP and it’s ability to understand what network connections are in effect. In fact this MBP often tells me other network devices cannot be found, when I am actually looking at them and working with files on them with this same Mac. E.g. I open a spreadsheet on a network volume, and go to open another file on the same volume to copy over some info, and I’m told the volume I want cannot be found despite that fact I am editing and saving files on it.

If I restart the MBP, sometimes a couple of times, or sometime just keep repeating an operation, it will work. But something is clearly wrong. This all reminds me why I stopped using Windows.

About a year ago, I tried creating a new account. That fixed things for a couple of weeks, but the nonsense started up again. What else can I try?

[mikehalloran]

How is your drive connected? USB? TB? Ethernet? WiFi? Other?

[bayswater]

The drive is in a Time Capsule connected via Ethernet to a router. As mentioned, I have three Macs, all in the same room, all on HS. Two maintain a connection with no interruptions, and use it for TM. There are two other Macs in other rooms that also have no problem connecting, but only use it to access documents. The MBP only establishes a connection when first started and then loses it after a short time. Ot at least says it loses it.

[mikehalloran]

The drive is in a Time Capsule connected via Ethernet to a router. As mentioned, I have three Macs, all in the same room, all on HS. Two maintain a connection with no interruptions, and use it for TM. There are two other Macs in other rooms that also have no problem connecting, but only use it to access documents. The MBP only establishes a connection when first started and then loses it after a short time. Ot at least says it loses it.

I had this happen in 2019 over Mojave. I updated the firmware on my MyCloud then deleted the old backups to reclaim the space — one at a time, of course and haven’t seen that issue since. Deleting those old backups is a royal PIA unless you reinitialize and create a new partition map by writing zeros so I don’t recommend unless unavoidable.

Later, I replaced the 6TB Reds with new 14TB reds.

I still don’t know what happened but my symptoms were the same.

[bayswater]

Thanks Mike. Looks like there isn't going to be a simple way to fix this short of wiping drives and starting all over.

[daniel.sneed]

Just my two cents.
Sometimes TM refuses to make its job.
A little search with console points to a corrupted folder. A duplicate one. Can't figure why nor how this happened.
Copy and save one appart, rename both duplicates and trash them, import saved one, and voila.

[bayswater]

Thanks dAn

[bayswater]

Here's another odd thing about Time Machine. I have pictures on an external drive included in the Time Machine backups. I did the because I assumed Time Machine would only backup changes. You can look inside both the Aperture and Apple Photos libraries and see the folder structure, so I figured if I can look inside and see what's changed, surely Time Machine can. But after wondering why my backup volume is so large, I looked at it with GrandPerspective, and saw that Time Machine contains multiple copies of both libraries, all full size.

So I'll back up pictures manually, exclude them from Time Machine and save a few terrabytes.