iMac M1 Monterey running slowly.

[Jonzjob]

Well, to celebrate you could have a Hogmanay in Welsh here in the lesser constraints of England Ian and I'll take on all comers to protect my mates and saviours

And yet another HUGE thank you for all who have helped me in this 'adventure' and all who sail in her!

Whooooops, getting a bit carried away there

 

[pm-r]

Okay, John. I hope the Admins won't ban me; but just to make you happy - this is 200.

Jon is going to be heartbroken as I am surec he was so looking forward to making and possibly breaking that #200 post mark.

But I have a feeling it's going to be a long way before this thread is finished... Sure some strange happenings with Apple's latest and greatest Macs and MacOS software... I think I will stay with Mac OS X Mavericks 10.9.5 for a while longer thanks... At least everything I need is working... And my sympathy to those having the problems with their new Macs and new Mac OS...


- Patrick
=======

 

[MacInWin]

OK, an update. Spent two hours playing "Stump the Apple Tech Rep," and I won! Totally stumped 5 of them in one call!

At the end I offered to do a Nuke'n'pave reinstall and they agreed that might be the only way to sort it out.

So, EACAS, here we go.

You find Erase All Content And Settings in System Preferences by opening the SysPrefs pane, then on the top bar, click on the System Prefences and the second menu item is "Erase All Content And Settings." Click on that and you get started down the trail to nuke-land. You get warnings of impending doom, pleas to back up with Time Machine, warnings that this will also erase other accounts, etc. Just keep plowing on and eventually it asks for your AppleID to log out of there and finally, it kicks off the EACAS process.

Surprisingly, that doesn't take long at all. After all, it's not really erasing anything, just resetting a lot of flags and setting back to factory standards. In a lot less time than I thought, the system boots to the "hello" screen and the setup begins.

Ok, now cue the sinister music...

At Eclectic Light website, Howard had suggested that it was no longer necessary to execute the Migration Assistant before creating a user on the new system. In fact, for a new system that may need immediate updates, he suggests creating an account with exactly the same name and password as on the old Mac from which you are migrating. So, that is what I did this time.

Part of that setup was to activate Apple Pay, and enter a credit card into the Wallet. Given that it knew about what I already had because it had asked for my AppleID and password to log into that account, I let it enter all of the cards it knew about. All I had to provide were the CVC numbers on the cards and agree to the terms. No problem, we're all good.

So, account is created, system boots into the login screen, I log in and launch Migration Assistant. First problem is that it wanted either the old Mac (gone) or a Time Machine backup (no recent one available because TM has not worked in three weeks, remember). The only option was to restore from a December 15 TM that was the last backup that worked.

First thing that popped up was that it saw two accounts on the TM backup (Logical, I had two accounts on the system) and it wanted to know if I wanted to merge the old data into my new account or keep them separate (ominous music gets louder). I picked the merge option for no particular reason. Restoration starts, all goes well. At the end of migration, the system reboots to the login screen, I log into my account. Everything seems to be there, but I do have to log into iCloud to get my Messages up to date, and I needed to import my Mail to get to my messages there. While Mail is importing, I look at the Wallet in System Preferences. Uh, oh, no cards. (Music gets really ominous here.) I clicked on Add card and in a couple of seconds, the same error message pops up! Dang!

I have a couple of minutes, so I ponder it while I am recovering Mail. It dawns on me that the reason to create an account first on a new machine is to be able to get the latest update in system software before you recover from the old machine or time machine. Maybe I don't need to do that. More thinking and I realize that maybe the "Security issue" that Wallet is finding is not really any security issue, but is the fact that the account that entered cards to Wallet has been change/merged/overwritten by the Migration and it no longer trusts that user. Seems to me that Apple could have considered this possibility, but whatever...

Ok, back to EACAS again, lather, rinse, repeat. But this time I don't create a new account, I just restored from back in December. Once the migration is complete, I still have to log into AppleID, iCloud and get that going, Mail still imports my mail, but now everything is catching up. And I can enter my cards to Wallet and they are still there!

So, lesson learnt after all this is that while creating a new account and updating the system software for a brand new machine is a good idea, you need to be aware that if you use Apple Pay on the Mac, you don't want to enter anything into Wallet until all migrations are done. Another way to avoid the problem is to create an account, update the OS and firmware, then use EACAS to get back to "naked" and use Migration Assistant at first offer.

OK, Wallet sorted. Off to test Time Machine to see if it works now.

 

[Jonzjob]

Good luck with that Jake.

And Patrick, ye of little faith. Plan for the worst and you'll get it

This one is still sailing along and I just tried a TM update and it took about 1 minute, but I hadn't changed much.

I had a quick look to see if I could find your EACAS by clicking on the text 'System Preferences' Jake, nowt happened. Is that literarily where you meant?

 

[IWT]

That's a fabulous post, Jake. May I ask a basic question to which you have kind-of answered, but I want to be sure.

After the EACAS: supposing I didn't create an new/identical account, but instead just let MA work as it did in the past. Presumably, my account and details would transfer over as previously - or not?

Put another way, what disadvantage, if any, follows from letting MA migrate from BU to Mac directly - no input from me?

Ian

 

[MacInWin]

After the EACAS: supposing I didn't create an new/identical account, but instead just let MA work as it did in the past. Presumably, my account and details would transfer over as previously - or not?

Yes, that is what I eventually did. I used EACAS to get back to factory status, then at the first offer, took MA to migrate from my last TM backup and everything migrated just fine.

Put another way, what disadvantage, if any, follows from letting MA migrate from BU to Mac directly - no input from me?

Sorry, but I don't understand that question. You have to agree to the migration during the setup, and point to the source for the migration, so it isn't "no input."

The suggestion from Eclectic Light was to create an account, then apply any updates/upgrades that have been issued from Apple after the machine was manufactured but before you bought it, then do MA. I think I would revise that to 1) create an account, 2) update/upgrade, 3) run EACAS to get back to factory (but with the upgrades now in place) 4) use MA to recreate my account.

That seems to be the best of both approaches and avoids the hassles I ran into.

 

[IWT]

Sorry, Jake. The comment: "Put another way, what disadvantage, if any, follows from letting MA migrate from BU to Mac directly - no input from me?" - is nonsensical. I meant to express it differently.

You have courteously answered my question as stated in the earlier paragraph.

As I said previously, a great post Jake.

Ian

 

[pm-r]

And Patrick, ye of little faith. Plan for the worst and you'll get it

Sorry Jon, I don't find that things work that way.

By preparing for the worst, you can reach your goals much more smoothly and you can put more of your energy in having a positive attitude knowing that you’ve covered any eventualities and lessening the negative chatter in your head. By doing this you naturally create a smaller percentage of time thinking and fearing obstacles because you already have a plan in place.
...
Many also believe that preparing for the worst is some sort of excuse lurking in the back of the mind telling you that it can’t really happen. But actually it’s the opposite of that – it’s a very smart move.

To Reach Your Goals, Start With Planning For The Worst - LifeHack

To reach your goals you need determination, a positive attitude, and an absolute belief that you can achieve what you want. However, another important

www.lifehack.org

PS: Great article Jake and maybe it could be condensed into a highlight form and added to a MUST READ ME FIRST type of article for those heading into such an upgrade.


- Patrick
=======

 

[MacInWin]

OK, an update on TM. (MODs, if you want me to stop posting about the issue, let me know, I know this is really long now, but we've talked multiple subjects.) If you are new to the Time Machine problem start at post 148, then 149, 152, 153, 161, 167, 168, 173, 181, 183, 190, and 198.

Apple called me today, on schedule, to discuss the TM issue. Quickly got escalated to second level. Spent two hours on the phone with the support rep. He logged into my system to see what was going on. Last night I turned on TM automatic backups, pointed to an empty 1TB SSD and let it run. It failed, as usual, but I left it turned on so that I would have a complete set of logs for the call. By the time of the call, there were 16 snapshots created, all of them large because TM thought each was an attempt at the FIRST backup. In the meantime, the 1TB drive now had just 65GB space remaining, according to Finder, Get Info, Disk Utility and About This Mac/Storage. But Finder showed nothing. First Aid said the drive was fine, nothing appeared. After examining everything, he had me erase the target drive, delete a plist for Time Machine, restart Time Machine, set it up to point to the empty target drive and launch a backup. He stayed on line for a hour as it ran, watching it as it took up disk space, showed no files and eventually ended with nothing done, just as it had before. He asked a lot of questions. Apparently Apple has had a few calls on the issue, none resolved, but I was the first one to have a log entry to look at, the one I posted earlier. A bit of research on his part while we were watching the backup run and he came back and said that it was a "very rare" error. When I stopped laughing at that, he continued that apparently it's not been seen before, ever.

So, the problem is off the the engineers. We'll see. What puzzled him most was the fact that space was consumed on the target drive, but there were NO files showing in Finder, and that at the end, it stayed the same--no files, space gone. And that the only way to get the space back is to reformat. So, was genuinely stumped.

If the mods want to gather up the posts on this topic to put into another thread, that's fine. If they want me to stop, I will. Let me know. I'm updating so that anybody who has the same problem can come here and see whatever solution (or lack of) finally arrives.

 

[chscag]

If the mods want to gather up the posts on this topic to put into another thread, that's fine. If they want me to stop, I will. Let me know. I'm updating so that anybody who has the same problem can come here and see whatever solution (or lack of) finally arrives.

Nah... keep it going Jake for when we publish the book. Seriously, it's good stuff and definitely a learning situation for all of us.

Come to think of it, your adventures with Time Machine will make an excellent addition to the great blogs you already have published.

Charlie

 

[Jonzjob]

If they had done a search on this problem then why didn't they find my problem? it's identical to yours mate!

Save done, target disk space used and nothing showing on Finder.

No saves shown on Time Machine.

Next failed because of lack of space and on at least one occasion snapshots taken and logs recorded.

Engineers involved.

As I said above, all is well now after a complete system wipe and reinstall followed by the applications going back on one at a time and a TM save done after each application installed.

The snag is though is that my problem is still an unknown?

"Just as you thought it was safe to go back in to the water" Queue 'Jaws' theme

Edit : - I forgot to say that I am now thinking about reinstalling TimeMachineEditor??? As I would like the auto backups, but not every hour. That may be good for some systems, but OTT for us.

 

[ferrarr]

problems other users have experienced.

AKA hearsay. Most of the time with lots of information about what they were doing missing.

user-induced.

As are most issues with PC's in general. Some users refuse to accept their inadequacies.

And by the way, this test was done with a clean Samsung T5 SSD.

Are you using an Mx Mac?

In fact one a week wouldn't be a bad idea because we don't make many changes to the sytem. A few photos or new web sited, but not enough for what it's doing at the moment.

Then just connect your drive, and select Backup now from the Time Machine menu bar icon, whenever you want to make a backup. You can uncheck "Back up automatically" in System Preferences > Time Machine.

but it doesn't interfere with what I am doing at the time,

TM never interferes also.

having ANY backup is vital

This is the best point.

Now, if Apple can figure out how to separate the storage from the rest of the SoC (assuming they even want to do that), a bootable clone could go back to being the "emergency" system again like it was in the Intel days.

I believe Apple eventually will separate their Pro and Air machines for different roles, in that regard.

And I have just realised that it had started a backup even although I have cleared the tick box for 'Back Up Automatically'.

TME may have activated the backup?

I wouldn't be surprised if the only people who *ever* have an SSD problem with their M1x-based Mac are those who chose too small an SSD at the outset, and fill it up.

Users need to become educated for external HD uses. While also being educated about backups of their most important data.

I believe that the extra-long time for the TM backup is that John chose case-sensitive Encrypted for his backup. I mentioned in an earlier post that it was my belief that APFS alone was standard practice for the great majority of users and that neither case-sensitive, nor encrypted backups were necessary.

I believe this is the result of choosing "Encrypt local backups".

Don't know what to say Charlie. Could it be something in your system defaulting to Case Sensitive?

Intel vs Mx?



Well, I came back to this thread after a long time away, and I came back on at page 4. So, I will be replying to quite a few responses. Sorry about that, but it seems like issues will always happen, because people use different apps and hardware, and never communicate all available information.

Made it through page 7, but I will return to it.....

 

[MacInWin]

VERY LONG UPDATE: Did some more exploring with TM, still no solution. But I did find that when TM runs, it remounts the target drive with a different name, but that drive is not available to Finder to show, nor to the user to look at. Then when TM ends, the remounted drive disappears. Curious behavior?

You can stop there unless you want the ugly details that follow.

Here is what I did to discover this: There are some useful little utilities at Eclectic Light website. One is The Time Machine Mechanic (T2M2). T2M2 has several functions, one of which parses the Universal Log that Monterey builds to pull out all TM-related log entries. So, I triggered a backup and watched the log entries T2M2 pulled out. The target drive name was "960 SSD." I saw this entry in the log:

2022-01-05 17:11:42.648768-0500 Backing up 1 volumes to 960 SSD (/dev/disk7s1,1e): /Volumes/960 SSD 1

So, TM looked like it mounted my "960 SSD" drive as "960 SSD 1" instead. Note that the /dev/disk location had appended the ", 1e" part. In Terminal "diskutil list" only showed the disk7s1" without the ", 1e." Curious, I used Terminal and went to /Volumes and sure enough, there was an entry for "960 SSD 1" mounted there. But no "960 SSD" even though it was still on my desktop and I could open it in Finder. So, for some reason, TM is manipulating drives, mounting one drive with an invisible mount, then writing the backup to that invisible mount. Every so often it updates the Universal Log with progress reports so that the estimate of time to go can be calculated. I found lots of progress entries like this one:

Current: Zero KB/(l:289 KB,p:291 KB) - /Volumes/960 SSD 1/2022-01-05-171144.inprogress/Macintosh HD - Data/Users/<<my account>>/Pictures/Photos Library 2.photoslibrary/resources/derivatives/9/961CBF64-AB20-48D8-A3F2-D4721BCDD518_1_105_c.jpeg

But none of that shows up on "960 SSD," which is logical, sort of, because it's been written to "960 SSD 1" and that volume isn't showing in Finder, Terminal, or Disk Utility, for that matter. What seems to be going on is that TM is writing to a secret Volume it has established on the drive, with some intent to re-identify "960 SSD 1" as "960 SSD" at some point in the process. But it fails at that, and I end up with 400GB of space missing on the drive that First Aid can't recover (it reports no errors) and which Terminal won't let me see (I tried to cd to 960 SSS 1 and was told "Operation not permitted." I tried to use ls to see what was there, but that was also a failure with the same message. Tried sudo and got the same message. So, whatever is being done by TM is at a very high authorization level (maybe root, or something even higher?).

When TM ends, I get the same error:

2022-01-05 17:53:52.502051-0500 Backup failed (104: BACKUP_DELAYED_UNFINISHED_PROTECTED_FILES)

And in /Volumes, 960 SSD 1 is gone, but 960 SSD is back. Finder sees no files on it, nor does the CLI ls command. "com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots" is there and I could use cd to change to it, but ls results in "Operation not permitted."

Another thing I noted in the log is that TM creates a snapshot as the first action of the backup, to a virtual drive. The log has this:

"Mounted stable snapshot: com.apple.TimeMachine.2022-01-05-184743.local at path: /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/MacBook Pro16/2022-01-05-184743/Macintosh HD - Data source: Macintosh HD - Data "

The next set of messages in the log seems to be copying that snapshot to the destination drive that has been mounted, i.e., 960 SSS 1. The messages in the log are a bit cryptic, so I'm not totally confident of that.

What I'm thinking now is that when TM gets the error and backup is delayed, it does not finish the process to put back 960 SSD properly, the meta data about the file structure in the superblock is not updated, but the allocation table in the superblock shows the space used. Technically, the backup is not finished, and the system knows that. T2M2 gets this status from the system:

Analysis from 2022-01-05 14:50:35 -0500 to 2022-01-05 22:50:35 -0500 for 8 hours:
Backing up 1 volumes to 960 SSD (/dev/disk7s1,1e): /Volumes/960 SSD 1
Backing up 1 volumes to 960 SSD (/dev/disk7s2,1e): /Volumes/960 SSD 1
Current free space on backup volumes:
/Volumes/960 SSD 1
/Volumes/960 SSD 1
No auto backups started in the period, no backup has been completed successfully in the period,
currently still making a manual backup,
last manual backup started 243.0 minutes ago,
Created 0 new backups, and deleted 0 old backups,
Created 2 new snapshots, and deleted 0 old snapshots,
Of 2 volume backups:
2 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.

You can see the 960 SSD 1 is showing in this summary. I bolded the part where it thinks it's still making a backup. That message, by the way, survives a shut down, wait five minutes, power on boot cycle. So the system boots thinking it's in the middle of a backup.

One more data point. John said he got TM working by a fresh install of the OS, then adding in one app at a time and backing up after each. I had already done one nuke/pave installation, which made no difference, so I took a slightly different approach. I know Apple is discouraging the use of kernel extensions (kexts), so I used Etrecheck to find all kexts that are being loaded. I decided I could do without any of the applications that were involved, so I used AppCleaner to delete the app and all associated files. I rebooted, ran Etrecheck again and it duly reported no kexts. Tried TM, same failure, same messages, same, same, same. So, it's not some errant kext blocking TM.

What a mess Apple has on their hands!

 

[chscag]

That's quite a saga Jake. Has anyone from Apple gotten back to you acknowledging the problem and given you an indication they're working on a fix?

 

[Jonzjob]

Blimey Jake! I understood the first paragraph mate, but ??

I have just done another manual TM backup. It took less than 2 minutes and my 2tb HDD has now dropped to 1.95tb available after 15 backups. So it still appears to be behaving itself.

The only things I have on the system SSD are the OS and applications. Pretty well all of Documents, photos and our other files are still on the CCC HDD

I am going to see about sending an email to the bloke who was dealing with my problem to give him an update.

On a slightly different tack? I am still transferring various folders and files from CCC and TM to the system SSD and backup SSDs. It's a great game as a load of folders have been duplicated with slightly different names and I have found possibly hundreds of duplicated photos and video.

One particular folder has got me totally confused? My Canon video folder is on both one of my photo SSDs and on CCC. Have copied the complete contents of CCC to the Canon video folder on the SSD and just to ensure that all of the data has gone across I looked at 'Get Info' on both


They show the same folders and when the folders are expanded show the same files with no duplicates, but the CCC version is almost twice the size as on the SSD?

 

[Jonzjob]

This seems to have gone very quiet? Any news on your TM Jake?

Just browsing through some threads and I came across this one. Ring any bells ??

beware-monterey-time-machine-problems.368063

 

[MacInWin]

I had forgotten that thread. My problems started Dec 16. No backup that day, or since. Apple says the engineers are aware and working on it. The last email from them said to wait until 12.2, try again. Whatever. I'm making lots of other backups using CCC and Chronosync. SD! failed for me, too. Tried to work through it, but couldn't get it to work properly. Would not finish the first backup. Said it could not run "bless" for some reason. Filed a problem, but we couldn't figure out why. I stopped trying.

TM had a place in my backup scheme. CCC and Chronosync (and SD! when it worked) are good at being a backup of the data generally, but TM was much better for the "oops, I didn't mean to do that" kind of scenario where a file gets changed/deleted and I want it back from before that mistake on my part. Yes, I can (and have) turned on Safety Net for CCC and so I do have that working, but I preferred TM for that and just let CCC make a new copy.

But for now, TM is broken, SD! fails, CCC works and Chronosync seems to work.

 

[Jonzjob]

SD! ? What is that Jake

 

[MacInWin]

SD! = Super Duper! (Yes, the "!" is part of the name of the product.)

 

[Jonzjob]

Ta Jake. I thought that it was something I hadn't heard of, but I do recognise it.