Time Machine keeps stopping backup!

[James Steele]

UPDATE: I cancelled the TM backup to the "lightly used" Seagate 8TB drive that had about 7 hours to go after backing up 800GB of 2.41TB. The new WD drive arrived, I got it hooked up to USB3. Started it going and with only 24GB of 2.41TB backed up, it will be done in 6 hours. Seems like the Seagates are slowing down. Like Mike said, it's probably comes down to spending more money for heavier duty drives if one is going to use Time Machine.

[James Steele]

Well this is just severely screwed. I don't know if it's because I was doing stuff while the backup was running but the backup to the brand new Western Digital drive failed. I restarted it and it failed almost immediately. Seems to point to something is jacked up with my system perhaps. Not sure what to do? Reinstall Mojave and try again? Run disk first aid on all the disks that it might be trying to backup?

[James Steele]

Well first off, thanks Mike Halloran for the chat last night. You helped confirm some of the strategies for solving this I had thought of and gave me some new ideas as well!

Looks like I may be okay. I reinstalled Mojave and Time Machine no longer bails out of a backup before it's finished. So, HC Markus, it may not have been the Seagate drives at all, but some sort of corruption of the OS.

I completed the backup to one of my Seagate drives that already had previous backups on it and that went fine. I discovered this particular drive was formatted Mac OS Extended and case-sensitive. It doesn't seem to be any problem, however. Googling this turns up that it's no big deal. My other external spinners are similarly formatted but not case-sensitive.

I started a complete backup to a reformatted Seagate drive when I went to sleep last night. When I woke up I saw that it was still cranking with no time estimate at all. Not even the verbage about it still figuring out the time, just a blank. And the target amount of data to back up, kept going up as the backup progressed. So I stopped it and restarted it and got what you see in the attached movie. You can see the second number 1.20GB change to 1.25GB and keep increasing as the backup progresses.



So I'm going to just format that drive again and use it for something else and I started a new backup to the new Western Digital Element external I got on Amazon yesterday. I use two drives that rotate between each other for Time Machine backup in my studio. I figured maybe it will be good to have each one from a different manufacturer for "insurance."

So I'm hopeful. Again it looks like some sort of OS corruption happened and it was fixed the the reinstall of the OS. Anxious to see if my crashes in DP when I tried to search from within DP's File>Open dialog will be solved too. I know Mojave has some issues on these cheesegraters, but I really want to just hang in there with it until I finally get to move to a Mac Studio perhaps in September or so.

[daniel.sneed]

Shooting in the dark, James, but I have from time to time a TM fail. Stoping backup for no reason.
Scratching head did not help at all.
I went with console app to look for some information, and there was some.
TM fail was related to a weird corrupt file. A duplicated file. One of the two files should not exist, thus confusing TM process.
Rename one of them, then delete it, empty trash and... all was right again with TM.

[James Steele]

So mine Time Machine backups seem to be working, but I come up against some strange behavior when I "Enter Time Machine." For example, if I open the Applications folder and start going backward in time, the application icons appear for a split second and then disappear. In the lower right corner of the window a little progress spinner appears and eventually the applications appear, but they all have generic icons or incompatibility icons. If I leave it open a while, the incompatibility icons change to generic icons, and the Apple apps seem to restore to proper icons, but third party apps stay generic. I thought perhaps if I just leave it like that long enough, Time Machine is rebuilding something, but they don't seem to come back. Attached is a pic.

IMG_8526.jpg (1.18 MiB) Viewed 536 times

[James Steele]

Well not much has been going on with this topic, but I think what is happening is I have a corruption on my boot SSD drive that cannot be repaired without backing up the drive, reformatting it and doing a fresh install and then using Migration Assistant to move apps, etc. back over. I had to delete the local snapshot files before I could run Disk First Aid (after booting from a backup of my boot disk) and I get this error. (The screenshot is from running Disk First Aid off the actual drive, though.)

Screen Shot 2022-05-10 at 9.53.23 PM.png (45.32 KiB) Viewed 439 times

I've tried some other solutions including this:

Screen Shot 2022-05-10 at 9.33.11 PM.png (58.49 KiB) Viewed 439 times

But basically a no-go. This particular drive is a long-in-tooth 250GB Samsung 840 EVO, so it's probably due for replacement, and thought about buying a new larger internal SSD, but I'm hesitant to be dumping more money into a Cheesegrater whose days are numbered. Really hoping to go to a Mac Studio by October. So maybe I'll just bear it. It's just that my Time Machine backups continue to fail.

ONE solution might be for me to just exclude the boot drive from Time Machine from now on, and continue to manually back it up using Carbon Copy Cloner to the internal spinner I've been using exclusively for this purpose.

Alternatively, I could just make a CCC backup and then immediately wipe the SSD and fresh install Mojave and then use Migration Assistant and migrate from the CCC backup drive. It just sounds scary and risky to me.