iMac M1 Monterey running slowly.

[chscag]

Great video Jake. Brings back memories of when I was stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hickam AFB and would run outside of the building to watch the "Big E" pass by in the channel. One has no idea how big a carrier is until you can see it in person.

 

[MacInWin]

Yeah, they are large until you try to land on one, Charlie. I was on Kitty Hawk for three cruises. Four and a half acres of flight deck, of which one acre was the elevators. We had 6000 crew when the air wing was aboard, a fire department, maintenance shops, electric company, water utility, retail stores, library, chapel, multiple "restaurants" open 24/7, laundry, post office, radio, TV station, small boats and oh, yeah, an airport on the roof and a hangar just below, with about 100 aircraft onboard. The ship in my avatar is the USS America.

 

[Slydude]

As a kid, maybe in my early teens, l read a description of the takeoff and landing procedure used aboard carriers. I think I had to read the process several times before I even came close to understanding it.

 

[Jonzjob]

I really do feel like someone is picking on me now, because I have just awoken this thing and got the message



I have checked the available space on that disk



As I said above, the auto backup is disabled and I have TimeMachineEditor enabled to do 1 backup/day, or I think that I have?

Going off piste for a moment longer. The only carrier I have ever been on was HMS Albion. That was in about 1955 when it was visiting Malta. My old man was in the R.A.F. and stationed at Luqua and met a couple of their NCOs in a Valetta bar and we had an invite on board. At 11 or 12 years old I thought it was quite big! It was the very first angle deck jobbie and the drivers quite liked the idea that if they didn't quite get the take off right they weren't going to get run over!

When we lived in France one of my good friends was a navigator on Buckaneers and a total knutter! On the Buck the nav's seat is in the guts of the aircraft with a tiny window so he can see if it's day or night. He then relies on the driver getting it right every time they try to land. My one thought about that was always sod that for a game mate! Bucks are great aircraft, but I like to see what's going on.

Anyway. Back on subject I suppose, but I think that I'm loosing the will to live over this T M thingy?

Anyone any idea what I'm doing wrong pretty please?

Edit : - I have just had a look back at TME and realised there are other options I had missed in my confusion. I have now set it up for 'Every day at 12.00' so I will see what happens.

With T M auto backup disabled and the Energy Settings in System Preferences to 'Prevent your Mac from automatically sleeping when the display is off' am I correct in thinking that the TME will still run the backups when requested?

 

[MacInWin]

When we lived in France one of my good friends was a navigator on Buckaneers and a total knutter! On the Buck the nav's seat is in the guts of the aircraft with a tiny window so he can see if it's day or night. He then relies on the driver getting it right every time they try to land. My one thought about that was always sod that for a game mate! Bucks are great aircraft, but I like to see what's going on.

I think that was a Sea Vixen, John. Buccs had nice, big glass canopies.

Sea vixen:


Buccaneer:

With T M auto backup disabled and the Energy Settings in System Preferences to 'Prevent your Mac from automatically sleeping when the display is off' am I correct in thinking that the TME will still run the backups when requested?

Yes, it will.

As for the TM space issue, I seem to remember reading a post somewhere about why that message comes up. Let me do some digging, it's not in the "usual" places I looked.

 

[Jonzjob]

I think that you are right Jake. It didn't click before, but he was only a Lt Commander so ???

Before we moved to France a bloke I knew from along the lane we lived in was an ex navigator on English Electric Lightenings though. They were crazy things and it seemed that the cockpit was an afterthought and just stuck on the top of the fuz?

 

[MacInWin]

Yeah, the Lightning was a curious airplane. Over and Under engines, one intake feeding both. Found this on the internet article on them at Wikipedia:

 

[Jonzjob]

Well, this TM situation seems to be progressing and after a nice neat 'bakers dozen' call and helps from Apple Support I still don't have a final conclusion for the problem, but each time it's getting a bit closer, I hope, to the fix. My contacts now are ALL senior people in the help centre.

We have definitely got our money's worth out of our AppleCare cash! At the moment the T M appears to be operating correctly and the external T M disk seems to be going through the T M backups fine, but when it's finished the external disk indicated that the folder/files have been saved but the Sys Preference/ T M tells me that there are no saves done and this was from a few seconds ago



It has now got to the situation where, after the holidays, I will be getting yet more aid from Apple Support and doing a system wipe clean and reinstall bit by bit.

We have tried a 2tb spinny disk and a 1tb SSD on different USB ports in both our base sign on user and a newly created second user with full authority and all have failed. The OS has been reloaded by 'System Recover' ( I think that's correct ? ) and nowt has worked. So???

We have certainly got our money's worth out of our AppleCare so far!! And everyone that I have spoken to has been so friendly, helpful, knowledgeable and patient. Nothing is too much trouble and it has made it so much easier.

If a clean reload doesn't do it then it's further up the ladder to the Engineers! I wonder just what the heII I have done wrong?

 

[MacInWin]

John, I have discovered that TM on my MBP stopped making backups on Dec 16. Same symptoms as you are seeing. No error messages in the log, process runs to completion, no backup on the target drive and no recognition that a backup was made. So, when you get a solution, please post it so I, too, can fix my machine. Curiously, I have two other machines on the same version of macOS and they back up with TM flawlessly, so it is something in THIS machine, not every machine. It's going to be ugly to diagnose!

 

[Jonzjob]

I wouldn't wish it on you Jake, but I'm glad that I am not alone in this

I will certainly post the result, and reason if I get that, but at least it seems to be doing a CCC 6 jobbie. I thought that I was going to have troubles with that too until I found out that the CCC I had opened was CCC 4. I was quite surprised because I had upped from 5 to 6 a couple of weeks back. I didn't know that 4 was still there on the old iMac. It must have come across on the Migrate?

 

[Slydude]

Yes, CCC 4 would have come across via Migration Assistant unless expressly excluded from the transfer.

 

[IWT]

John, I have discovered that TM on my MBP stopped making backups on Dec 16. Same symptoms as you are seeing. No error messages in the log, process runs to completion, no backup on the target drive and no recognition that a backup was made. So, when you get a solution, please post it so I, too, can fix my machine. Curiously, I have two other machines on the same version of macOS and they back up with TM flawlessly, so it is something in THIS machine, not every machine. It's going to be ugly to diagnose!

Jake, I could have missed this point in the very long thread, BUT:

You use TME. Have you tried disabling it and then turning on "Back Up automatically" to see if TM will resume backups - maybe even better after unmounting the TM Hard Drive and then remounting it?

Knowing you, you've probably tried everything. It was just a thought I had.

Ian

 

[MacInWin]

Last night I started a new TM backup on a new SSD, formatted APFS. As soon as I invoked TM, the format changed to APFS (Case-sensitive), which I expected. I left the backup running overnight as it was going to be a FULL backup. This morning TM reported it had made NO backup. I used Finder to look at the backup drive and nothing was there. Get Info seemed to indicate that nothing was on the backup drive. That triggered me to the post I made earlier. Got back to the Mac a while ago and did some digging.

1. If I ENTER Time Machine, the backup appears, so it's there, even if it's not showing in Finder. I can see files with creating dates to prove that the backup is current.
2. After a reboot, the backup drive shows 600GB consumed of the 960GB, but Finder still shows nothing.
3. I used Terminal commands "defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles true" and "killall Finder" to show hidden files, which worked as I could see other hidden files, but still nothing appears in Finder for the backup drive.
4. ENTERed Time Machine again, the backups show up and I can see that it did appear to back up.
5. Repointed to the original drive, ENTERed Time Machine and the backups from Dec 16 on are there.
6. Confirmed that Finder doesn't see them, even with hidden files showing, on that drive either.

The Utility TheTimeMachineMechanic (T2M2) from Eclectic Light reports in the last 24 hours:

Analysis from 2021-12-24 10:32:59 -0500 to 2021-12-25 10:32:59 -0500 for 24 hours:
Backing up 1 volumes to Samsung (/dev/disk5s2,16): /Volumes/Samsung
Backing up 1 volumes to Samsung (/dev/disk5s2,1e): /Volumes/Samsung
Backing up 1 volumes to Samsung (/dev/disk7s2,16): /Volumes/Samsung
Backing up 1 volumes to Samsung (/dev/disk7s2,1e): /Volumes/Samsung
Backing up 1 volumes to Samsung (/dev/disk8s2,16): /Volumes/Samsung
Backing up 1 volumes to 960 SSD (/dev/disk14s2,1e): /Volumes/960 SSD 1
Current free space on backup volumes:
/Volumes/Samsung = 55.93 GB
/Volumes/Samsung = 55.93 GB
/Volumes/Samsung = 55.93 GB
/Volumes/Samsung = 55.93 GB
/Volumes/Samsung = 55.93 GB
/Volumes/960 SSD 1
Started 4 auto backup cycles, and 3 manual backups;
no backup has been completed successfully in the period,
currently still making an auto backup,
last manual backup started 82.1 minutes ago,
Created 0 new backups, and deleted 0 old backups,
Created 7 new snapshots, and deleted 5 old snapshots,
Of 1 volume backups:
1 were full first backups,
3 were deep scans,
0 used FSEvents,
0 used snapshot diffs,
0 used consistency scans,
0 used cached events.
No error messages found.

NOTE: In that report the Samsung volume was the original TM backup drive, the 960 SSD was an empty SSD that I did the full backup to.

Despite T2M2 reporting that it is supposedly currently making an auto backup, the icon on the top bar does not have the arrow indicating a backup is underway. TM thinks the last backup is December 16, despite showing a more recent one when I ENTER TM itself:


From all of this I can only conclude that somehow the files are "super hidden" even from Finder with hidden files showing. And that this super-hidden function started Dec 16 on this machine. From the Installation logs, nothing was installed Dec 16th except for a security update from Apple called "XProtectPlistConfigData."

As you can see, I have turned TM on, but it's still showing that the last one was December 16, despite making hourly backups again.

So, Officially, at this point I am totally stumped. It is working, the files are backed up, but it doesn't think it's working and thinks it's in the middle of a backup, when it is not.

I'd call Apple, but it's Christmas Day and I don't want to fight through the layers to try to get to an engineer who might actually know something. I think I'll wait and let John see if they have any suggestions. For now, the Chronosync backups are working fine, and TM does "seem" to be working, even if it doesn't know it is.

One more observation: There are now five snapshots on my boot drive, probably because I've turn on TM again. Usually there are just three. I'll have to keep an eye on how that changes through the day. I wonder if TM is showing the snapshots instead of what is on the actual backup drive? But then, what is taking up 600GB on the 960 SSD and is totally invisible?

 

[Jonzjob]

Blimey Jake, I nearly lost the will to live ½ way through that lot mate! You lost me fairly quickly but as I have said before, if I can hit it I can usually sort it, but...

Next for me will be a total reinstall, clean and clear, and if there are still problems the Apple engineers will be getting involved. At the moment it is only the senior help staff, or whatever they are called, who are dealing with this jar of worms. As far as I can remember the Apple Care place is closed today anyway?

CCC 6 has now completed OK by the looks of it, but as has been said before, when I look at 'Start Up Dosk in Sys Preferences it isn't showing as a boot disk. That isn't so important as being able to back up files if needed though.

Ian, if Jake's situation is the same as mine then it doesn't matter what is tried, including the un/remount. And I have tried 2 different disks, one spinny 2tb and one SSD 1tb and they were in different ports

 

[Jonzjob]

CCC 6 has now completed OK by the looks of it, but as has been said before, when I look at 'Start Up Dosk in Sys Preferences it isn't showing as a boot disk. That isn't so important as being able to back up files if needed though.

Ian, if Jake's situation is the same as mine then it doesn't matter what is tried, including the un/remount. And I have tried 2 different disks, one spinny 2tb and one SSD 1tb and they were in different ports

 

[Jonzjob]

I really don't believe this! Nothing to do with ™, but now this iMac will NOT stay in sleep mode and re-awakes after 5 seconds or so!

Nowt is touched or moved and the only way I can get if off is to powere the flamin thing off!

Any ideas PLEASE?

 

[MacInWin]

You can look to see if there is a check in System Preferences where you set the power options with "Wake for network access."

 

[MacInWin]

I wrote an email to Howard Oakely at Eclectic Light about the Time Machine problem I'm having. I don't know if he will have time or interest in it, but thought it worth a shot. I'll post if I hear from him.

 

[Jonzjob]

You can look to see if there is a check in System Preferences where you set the power options with "Wake for network access."

It has got me really confused now Jake, because I had a look at this

Determine Why Your Mac Wakes Up From Sleep

Have you ever put your Mac to sleep, only to find it awake seemingly on it’s own when you return to the machine? I’ve run into this mystery of a randomly waking Mac a few times, and wit…

osxdaily.com

And it bought up a load of lines in Terminal that didn't seem to have anything to do with it, but I wondered if it could be a mouse? I have the Magic mouse that comes with the iMac and a Logiteck MX Master3 for Mac mouse too. I switched them off one at a time and now they are both back on and all is operating as it should again and sleep doesn't wake on its own.

I have used 2 meece for years now, including from the time we have had this new Mac and had no problems with them. I use the Magic for my left hand and scrolling around sites and photos and the Logiteck for clicking, etc. and get confused if either is not there. When doing photo/video editing I use my Wacoms pen tablet.

I think that I must have a Friday afternoon jobbie?

 

[pm-r]

I think I'll wait and let John see if they have any suggestions. For now, the Chronosync backups are working fine, and TM does "seem" to be working, even if it doesn't know it is.

Just curious, and I may have missed any mention of it, but have you tried the Time Machine backup procedure during a Safe Boot Mode???

From the sound of things, it sounds like you might also want to try some Christmas eggnog with a good shot of rum or whiskey to stabilize it.


- Patrick
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