Beware Monterey Time machine problems

[MacInWin]

How long was it stuck on "waiting to complete?" I seem to recall the first backup took quite a while and then when it reported 100%, spent some time verifying the backup, reporting "waiting."

 

[Lifeisabeach]

How long was it stuck on "waiting to complete?" I seem to recall the first backup took quite a while and then when it reported 100%, spent some time verifying the backup, reporting "waiting."

The first one would have been a bit over 24 hours.

 

[MacInWin]

Ouch. OK, definitely not normal.

 

[MacInWin]

You might get T2M2 (The Time Machine Mechanic), from here: Downloads

Set it for a review period that covers your most recent backup attempt and let it get the console log entries for you to see what, if anything, that may show you for what is hanging up.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

You might get T2M2 (The Time Machine Mechanic), from here: Downloads

Set it for a review period that covers your most recent backup attempt and let it get the console log entries for you to see what, if anything, that may show you for what is hanging up.

Yeah, I have that from earlier. Well here's the last 12 hours. I manually deleted the sparsebundle this morning (about 10 hours ago), so this covers from before that.

Analysis from 2021-11-03 05:28:53 -0400 to 2021-11-03 17:28:53 -0400 for 12 hours:
Backing up 1 volumes to Backups of MacBook Air (/dev/disk5s1,1e): /Volumes/Backups of MacBook Air
Backing up 1 volumes to Backups of MacBook Air (/dev/disk5s1,16): /Volumes/Backups of MacBook Air
Backing up 1 volumes to MacBook SSD (/dev/disk5s1,16): /Volumes/Backups of MacBook Air
on which there were 4 TB, 4 TB, 4 TB, 4 TB, 4 TB, 4 TB, 4 TB, 4 TB, 4 TB, 4 TB, 4 TB, 4 TB, 4 TB available.
Current free space on backup volumes:
/Volumes/Backups of MacBook Air = 2.81 TB
/Volumes/Backups of MacBook Air = 2.81 TB
/Volumes/Backups of MacBook Air = 2.81 TB
Started 12 auto backup cycles, and 1 manual backups;
no backup has been completed successfully in the period,
currently still making an auto backup,
last manual backup started 593.7 minutes ago,
Created 0 new backups, and deleted 0 old backups,
Created 8 new snapshots, and deleted 10 old snapshots,
Of 1 volume backups:
1 were full first backups,
0 were deep scans,
0 used FSEvents,
0 used snapshot diffs,
0 used consistency scans,
0 used cached events.

No error messages found.

There's nothing helpful here. I think I'm going to have to rely on using CCC for now and backup to the Time Capsule.

 

[bernard smith]

Well folks.. it looks like good news here.. The initial Time Machine backup which was made after upgrading from Mojave to Monterey ( quite a big jump ) , updating Lightroom to v11, Photoshop to 2022 as well as also upgrading Carbon Copy Cloner to V6 ( so that it will work with Monterey ) has finally finished.

I had reformatted my dedicated external SSD for TM to APFS and started again.

It took just over 24 hours.

After it finished I ran another back up manually which took just 12 minutes ( I had been using the iMac for a good bit of photo editing whilst the initial back up was running )

Set up now for scheduled automatic back ups. I have not encrypted the drive which is a 1TB G technology SSD


Thanks for all the advice and help received .


Cheers and fingers crossed

Bernard

 

[MacInWin]

Yeah, I have that from earlier. Well here's the last 12 hours. I manually deleted the sparsebundle this morning (about 10 hours ago), so this covers from before that.



There's nothing helpful here. I think I'm going to have to rely on using CCC for now and backup to the Time Capsule.

What I do see in the data is two instances running at the same time, which may be the problem. The report says, in part:

Started 12 auto backup cycles, and 1 manual backups;
no backup has been completed successfully in the period,
currently still making an auto backup,
last manual backup started 593.7 minutes ago,
Created 0 new backups, and deleted 0 old backups,
Created 8 new snapshots, and deleted 10 old snapshots,
Of 1 volume backups:
1 were full first backups,

So, there would seem to be as many as 12 auto cycles running, plus the one manual. I take that from the idea that no backup completed successfully and one auto backup is still running. I'm wondering if the multiple backups running at the same time are colliding and locking up? It might be time to reboot the machine to kill all the running backups, after turning auto backups off on TM preferences. Then after the reboot, run one manual backup to get it going, and only if that completes, then turn on auto backups. Doing that should mean that only ONE backup will be running (the manual one) and no auto backup will launch over the top of it.

Of course, all of this could be just me bloviating, but it's what I would do.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

What I do see in the data is two instances running at the same time, which may be the problem. The report says, in part:

So, there would seem to be as many as 12 auto cycles running, plus the one manual. I take that from the idea that no backup completed successfully and one auto backup is still running. I'm wondering if the multiple backups running at the same time are colliding and locking up? It might be time to reboot the machine to kill all the running backups, after turning auto backups off on TM preferences. Then after the reboot, run one manual backup to get it going, and only if that completes, then turn on auto backups. Doing that should mean that only ONE backup will be running (the manual one) and no auto backup will launch over the top of it.

Of course, all of this could be just me bloviating, but it's what I would do.

The manual one is likely the initial one from restarting from scratch. The remaining are the automatic hourly ones.

 

[jg66ue]

Big thread on this over at MacRumors. Lot of people having issues with Time Machine in Monterey.

Time machine experiencing multiple issues on Monterey (my personal issue resolved)

Hey guys, I have a really strange issue (at least for me) with Time Machine after upgrading to Monterey. Normally, a new complete backup takes between 3 to 5 hours for me using a 4TB USB 3, my Passport drive as the time machine drive. After upgrading to macOS Monterey, the system is very...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Finally some good news here. I booted into Safe Mode and initiated a manual backup. It finished up just fine. So now the million dollar question is... why? It may be something loading up on startup that's interfering. Actually you know what? I had that one big problem with Private Internet Access' app on my iMac that caused me to lose internet connectivity. Uninstalling it cured that problem and reinstalling it didn't cause me any issues. I have PIA on my MBA, but it didn't cause me any internet connectivity problems. I'm going to investigate that possibility.

EDIT: Definitely was NOT PIA. After rebooting, I tried a manual backup again and once complete, the last backup still showed the one done in Safe Mode. Uninstalling PIA; rebooting; and doing another manual backup resulted in no changes there. TinkerTool System does still show a backlog of local snapshots that haven't been copied to the Time Capsule yet. I'm going to go back to Safe Mode and stay that way for a few hours to give them a chance to get moved.

 

[xgman]

There is a bug in TM in Monterey. Cases are being investigated up the chain by Apple.

 

[jpdemers]

Just as an FYI, I have an external RAID 5 box, with a volume dedicated to Time Machine that's HFS formatted (Mac OS Extended (Journaled).) It's working fine with the Monterey (12.0.1) OS running on an M1 Mini, so APFS is clearly not required. (I believe it's only required for startup disks.)
This particular RAID is built with HDDs, for which HFS is preferable.

 

[rachalmers]

Had to restore the Ruby folder in /Library yesterday from Time Machine. No problems that I could see. Worked fine.
I normally just let TM get on with it. Works quietly in the background. It’s been a life saver on more than one occasion.
Once a week I run CCC just to be on the safe side for a full system clone.
I also have iCloud where a Lot of daily stuff is shuffled. Including photos and design work.
Monterey seems fine so far. Love it.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

So I've done some extensive troubleshooting with no resolution. In particular, I uninstalled a small handful of kernel extensions and their associated apps to eliminate that as a vector, but no dice. What I did think was interesting was an EtreCheck report run both in the regular mode and safe mode. In regular mode, EC shows there are 39 Apple launch daemons not loaded. In safe mode, only 17 are no loaded. It seems to me that if anything, safe mode would have more of them not loaded. At any rate, this is looking pretty obviously a bug in Monterey. Weird how seemingly random it is, but a good reminder to myself to avoid being an early adopter.

 

[DCM_UK]

I have downloaded the last version of Monterey and it has backup problems.
I have been running beta for a few months and no problem. If you backup then your backup cannot be seen on the backup disk and you cannot use it to restore although disk utility shows there is something on the disk. I have been in touch with Apple and they agree that this may be a sofware issue and are looking at it.

Are you using Time Machine?

 

[DCM_UK]

I have downloaded the last version of Monterey and it has backup problems.
I have been running beta for a few months and no problem. If you backup then your backup cannot be seen on the backup disk and you cannot use it to restore although disk utility shows there is something on the disk. I have been in touch with Apple and they agree that this may be a sofware issue and are looking at it.

Silly me, of course you are using Time Machine,I only asked as I will be changing to Monterey soon and I use TM.

 

[Bengaldad]

I received my 16 in. M1 Max MacBook Pro on October 26, 2021. From the first day I have observed the following issues with Time Machine: TM backs up the entire MacHD then reports in the TM menu bar “Waiting for TM to finish”. In the Finder TM shows no files whatsoever. clicking on Apple>About This Mac>Storage shows > 300 Gb on the TM drive.

i have tried the following, but NONE of these steps corrected the issue: I erased and reformatted as APFS my TM disk. I replaced the USB 3 WD 4TB TM disk with a new USB 3 Seagate 5TB HD formatted as APFS. i booted my M1 Max in Safe Mode and selected Backup Now from the TM menu. I created a new Test User. I reinstalled Monterey. The described TM issues persisted throughout all of these changes. I have now disabled automatic TM backups since TM is not working properly.

I have spent more than 6 hours with Apple Support attempting to solve the problem without success. My active case has now been escalated to Apple Engineers and I am waiting to hear back from them. These TM issues are not unique to my M1 Max. They have been reported on two other Mac forums, and users on those forums have reported that erasing their MacHD and reinstalling Monterrey did not solve the TM issues.

I have a Late 2019 Mac Pro with the same version of Monterey installed, and TM is working perfectly on it so the issue with TM is specific to my M1 Max.

i will report back on any further help that I get from Apple Engineers.

 

[chscag]

i will report back on any further help that I get from Apple Engineers.

Thanks for your input. Keep us posted if you can.

 

[Bengaldad]

I received a call yesterday from the Apple Senior Specialist working on my TM issues with my M1 Max MacBook Pro. She said that she had heard back from Apple Engineers. They acknowledged there was an issue and they are working on a fix. She stated that she would contact me as soon as the engineers had contacted her with a fix. In the meantime, I have turned off automatic backups on TM and I am using Carbon Copy Cloner to make regular backups.
Tom

 

[IWT]

Thank you for that feedback, Bengaldad. We all await the "final solution".

Ian