Time Machine keeps stopping backup!

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 3:06 am

Well this kind of sucks. I have two Seagate external 8TB drives that I use for Time Machine backup. They''re set up to alternate. Now NEITHER OF THEM can complete a backup. They go for a little while and then I get an error that they're "stopping." That's it. I tried reformatting one of them, that didn't help. Neither of them will finish the backup. Also tried deleting and trashing the .inProgress file and restarting and trying again. That didn't do anything.

They'e both connected to a USB3 card. I don't know if that card could be failing? I may try plugging in the one that's set to "resume" into USB2 directly in Mac and see if that does something, but this is not good. Hard to believe both drives are failing. Ugh...

HCMarkus · Post by **HCMarkus** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 4:10 am

Dual simultaneous failures seem unlikely. Definitely try a USB2 port on you Mac. Hope that works!

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 4:35 am

HCMarkus wrote:Dual simultaneous failures seem unlikely. Definitely try a USB2 port on you Mac. Hope that works!

I did that. No luck. Also used terminal to delete local snapshot which could cause problem. That got me going further than before. Had 12GB incremental backup and it got through 9GB before stopping. But then I realized I never emptied the trash from when I deleted the .inProgress file so Im guessing that messed me up.

I just deleted it and emptied trash again and did a safe boot. I had planned to just reboot normally after the safe boot, but it let me run time machine in safe mode so I started if again, but this find time it looks stuck … actually just started moving but super slow. I’m guessing maybe safe boot really slows down my USB3 card perhaps? Dunno. I may have to bail out if this and boot normally and try again.

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 5:08 am

Well I may have gotten a break. I rebooted normally and did a backup to the drive that already had backups on it. (I really wanted to keep that one since I reformatted my redundant Time Machine drive hoping that might solve the problem). Anyway, it was odd in that it said it had 12GB to backup and when it reached about 8GB of that with the progress bar 2/3 of the way to the right, it said "Finished backing up" and then said "Cleaning up" for a good 3-5 minutes, but then showed the backup status as completed! I went ahead and did "Back Up Now" again... this time it backed up abut 300MB and the progress bar made it all the way across and it also completed as it should.

Anyway, I just started a first time backup to the drive I erased and am at 39GB of 3.03TB. I'm going to just turn my monitors off and let it crank while I get some sleep. Yeesh. Hopefully this is fixed and I'll wake up to a completed backup in the morning!

At 54GB. Gotta love that the inline graphic attachment feature is working now. Behold:

: Screen Shot 2022-04-13 at 5.07.13 AM.png (86.85 KiB) Viewed 1004 times

P.S. If this does work, maybe I can go for a drive tomorrow. Found a Komplete Kontrol S61 Mk2 for a really good deal it appears. About half new price!

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 10:08 am

Well bad news this morning. Looks like backup was incomplete. I started it again, this time without deleting the .inProgress file. Have 2.59TB left so only about 500GB were backed up.

I know BOTH drives can’t be bad and I ran first aid on one of them, no problems. I can’t figure out what’s going on here. Maybe something is corrupt on one of the drives it’s attempting to copy FROM?? Ugh. This is not good. I may have to perhaps take out my USB3 card and put the RAID box with the spinners back in and see if that works.

I can’t figure out why it just went bad like that.

HCMarkus · Post by **HCMarkus** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 11:25 am

James Steele wrote: ↑Wed Apr 13, 2022 10:08 am Well bad news this morning. Looks like backup was incomplete. I started it again, this time without deleting the .inProgress file. Have 2.59TB left so only about 500GB were backed up.

I know BOTH drives can’t be bad and I ran first aid on one of them, no problems. I can’t figure out what’s going on here. Maybe something is corrupt on one of the drives it’s attempting to copy FROM?? Ugh. This is not good. I may have to perhaps take out my USB3 card and put the RAID box with the spinners back in and see if that works.

I can’t figure out why it just went bad like that.

Hoping MIke might be able to shed somme light James. Having induced you to purchase these drives when on sale, I feel somewhat responsible, but not capable of offering a solution.

That said, Im discerning that you formatted the drives APFS. Under Mojave, APFS may not be the best approach. It is, however, recommended by Apple now under Monterey.

Do you have a spare, known good drive you can try?

Is it possible to try re-formatting one of the Seagate External Drives at this point?

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 12:33 pm

HCMarkus wrote:
James Steele wrote: ↑Wed Apr 13, 2022 10:08 am Well bad news this morning. Looks like backup was incomplete. I started it again, this time without deleting the .inProgress file. Have 2.59TB left so only about 500GB were backed up.

I know BOTH drives can’t be bad and I ran first aid on one of them, no problems. I can’t figure out what’s going on here. Maybe something is corrupt on one of the drives it’s attempting to copy FROM?? Ugh. This is not good. I may have to perhaps take out my USB3 card and put the RAID box with the spinners back in and see if that works.

I can’t figure out why it just went bad like that.
Hoping MIke might be able to shed somme light James. Having induced you to purchase these drives when on sale, I feel somewhat responsible, but not capable of offering a solution.

That said, Im discerning that you formatted the drives APFS. Under Mojave, APFS may not be the best approach. It is, however, recommended by Apple now under Monterey.

Do you have a spare, known good drive you can try?

Is it possible to try re-formatting one of the Seagate External Drives at this point?

Thanks man. I will ping Mike soon to see if he has any ideas.

Both drives were formatted extended journaled like they’re supposed to be. I actually did reformat the drive I’m having a problem with now. I’m getting ready to move some stuff off of the third Seagate drive that I have and set it up as a Time Machine drive and see if that one works. If all three won’t back up, (that’s definitely not possible in my mind), it may point to something corruption on with my operating system. Perhaps?

I did “Enter Time Machine“ with the one drive I still have backups on and it was rather slow and my application icons were generic.

I’m going to perhaps take one of the (alleged)“bad“ drives and reformat it and attempt a backup from my office Mac via USB2.

I can’t remember… I think I tried backing up via USB to this Mac, but not sure if it failed or I just got tired of waiting because it got stuck in preparing to back up, and moved on. I don’t think it could be my USB3 card. It seems like other file operations like copying, etc. all seem to work fine. Drive DX does say that these drives are running hot and that the internal temperature is warm. I guess there is plenty I have in front of me to try and narrow it down.

The thing is I’m trying not to give into frustration. You get to the point where you want to say the hell with it and I’ll go in debt and just go ahead and get myself that Mac Studio, but I will still need to back it up to some thing. I don’t know if maybe the Time Machine app could be corrupted or my system could be corrupted? I guess if I can back up to the drive from a different Macintosh it might point to that. Oh well. Glad I had some time off this week! Lol

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 1:07 pm

Under the “throw money at the problem” category, in the hopes something sticks, I ordered one of these on Amazon and it should come today.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D5V2ZXD/re ... UTF8&psc=1

That will definitely tell me if the problem is my computer.

cuttime · Post by **cuttime** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 1:16 pm

I know this may not be a solution, but I have never been able to recover from a failed TM backup. No amount of re-formatting or drive repair has ever been able to get me back in business. The only thing that works is a new drive. I have seven old WD black drives sitting around that I don't dare trust to use with TM. I guess TM is just really sensitive to minor drive errors.

bayswater · Post by **bayswater** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 1:34 pm

Same here, once gone, the TM backup never came back, except in my case, it was a “corrupt” backup image, and in some cases, was actually reported as corrupt by TM. The last time it happened I looked around for alternatives, and noticed SuperDuper, which I used prior to TM’s intro, was still around, and appears to be a free app, and works with at least Mojave. TM is supposed to be automatic and free, but I figure if I have to muck around getting it to do backups, I might as well use SuperDuper and initiate the backups manually. Restoring a lost file is not as simple, but I’ve only had to do that maybe ten times in 25 years.

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 2:15 pm

Yeah. I regularly back up my boot drive with Carbon Copy Cloner and that works great. I know a lot of people swear by Time Machine, but I’m a little spooked and prior to these comments was seriously considering manual backup with that from now on. Just doing disc images to the externals.

It’s interesting that Finder copies and everything else seems to be working, but Time Machine just won’t finish the job on either of these drives. I’m suspecting maybe there’s a corrupted file one one of the drives it’s backing up and that’s messing things up. Dunno. The WD drive from Amazon is going to get here today and I may give that a shot. Can’t hurt to have the extra external anyway.

mikehalloran · Post by **mikehalloran** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 2:59 pm

It looks like you are up and running. You have my phone number if needed.

TM is very sensitive to drive errors — understatement of the year. I rarely keep my TM HDDs past the warranty period.

There is no way that I would use a high heat drive such as a WD Black. I like cool running, NAS rated drives over Ethernet because that never goes to sleep.

I have done many successful TM complete restores including one in February that took about 40 hours but that was because I was overwriting a nearly 4TB SSD System drive on my iMac Pro. TRIM and Garbage Collection need time to prepare cells for writing—a fresh drive would have taken less time.

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 3:29 pm

mikehalloran wrote:It looks like you are up and running. You have my phone number if needed.

TM is very sensitive to drive errors — understatement of the year. I rarely keep my TM HDDs past the warranty period.

There is no way that I would use a high heat drive such as a WD Black. I like cool running, NAS rated drives over Ethernet because that never goes to sleep.

I have done many successful TM complete restores including one in February that took about 40 hours but that was because I was overwriting a nearly 4TB SSD System drive on my iMac Pro. TRIM and Garbage Collection need time to prepare cells for writing—a fresh drive would have taken less time.

Thanks Mike. Good to know. I’m gonna keep the WD for now. I can use it for something I’m sure. It hasn’t arrived yet so I haven’t tried backing up to it yet. Perhaps the Seagates are no good anymore for Time Machine. I’ll have to find a better drive down the line.

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 5:13 pm

Well, I have three Seagate 8TB external drives I bought at the same time. Two were my regular Time Machine drives. One of them I put Final Cut Projects on but only had about 500GB on it, and it really has not had very heavy use. So I finder copied the contents to another drive, reformatted this "lightly used" drive and started a Time Machine backup to it. So far it's backed up about 450GB as I write this, but progress seems pretty slow. It says it will take 9 more hours and I think it's been going for at least an hour or hour and a half. Not sure why it's taking this long, but I might need to interrupt it when the Western Digital one I ordered gets here. Or I suppose I can let this plod along till 2AM. Sigh. Oh well... another opportunity to use inline attachments...

: Screen Shot 2022-04-13 at 5.09.12 PM.png (81.76 KiB) Viewed 914 times

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 5:27 pm

You know, in a way, I'll be almost relieved if it's just that those two drives have gone bad. Less of a headache than if there's something hosed with my system. They do indeed run very warm in those enclosures. I'm thinking they might still be good for backing up images using CCC. Be nice if I can use them for something rather than have to recycle them so soon.

My goal is to really just get along as best I can without throwing too much money at my cheesegrater here until I can get something M1-based (Mac Studio probably) before October. Sadly, it's almost like you won't be able to give away these Intel Macs anymore. Such a shame if I have to take 3 cheesegraters down to the recycle center. Not to mention my MOTU PCI audio interfaces and MIDI interfaces. I guess I did get plenty of use out of them over the years, so I need to bear that in mind. They had a good long run.

MOTUnation.com