Monterey Back-Ups

[DCM_UK]

My software is up to date, I'm using an Apple time capsule to save back-ups to, it all used to work fine until Monterey, now I get an error 19 failure, I'm not certain they failures started exactly when I switched to Monterey but they roughly co-incided and back-ups certainly don't work now. I'm not highly skilled in this computer messing about stuff but would appreciate any clues or tips.

 

[MacInWin]

Welcome to the crowd. Something in Monterey broke Time Machine in general. Apple is allegedly aware of it and "working on it," whatever that means. But there aren't any fixes or work-arounds at this point. What some folks are doing is use a third party cloner like Carbon Copy Cloner, or Super Duper!, or Chronosync, to make backups of their data. You would need to get a direct attached drive for the clones to work well, although there may be a way to use the Time Capsule as a networked drive. it might put your existing backups there at risk to do that, however, so you may be much better off getting a new external drive, one of the less expensive rotating drives (no ssd needed), to make the backup clone. But don't use TM, it's broken, as I said.

 

[rbpeirce]

I had to restart Time Machine. It has been working fine.

I also use SD! to make a daily backup on another drive and I back that up to a third drive once a week.

 

[DCM_UK]

Hi Jake, I have just been playing with an old Samsung D3 back-up drive I have. I reformatted it from Windows to Mac and it seems to work, at least my first back up this morning did. I can't leave TM on auto as the Samsung drive is USB connected and not always present but I'll have to back-up weekly manually. At the moment I don't know how to restore should I have to but I did it once with a restore pass word a long time ago. Does anyone know what the cable from the bottom socket on the Time Capsule to the router is for exactly?

 

[DCM_UK]

I had to restart Time Machine. It has been working fine.

I also use SD! to make a daily backup on another drive and I back that up to a third drive once a week.

Surely TM restarts every time you power up the machine.

 

[mfpv]

Surely TM restarts every time you power up the machine.

A lot of users don’t power down their Macs at night

 

[DCM_UK]

What did you do to restart Time Machine? Jake says Time Machine is broken in Monterey and that's the way it is until Apple fix it. I have backed up to a hard wired Samsung HDD after formatting to APFS but see no way whatsoever of restoring should I need to. There is no way I could restore from the Time Capsule either as the OS just keeps searching for it. I'd like to go back to Big Sur but after looking that up it is impossible.

 

[MacInWin]

TM works for, as far as I can tell, folks with an Intel Mac and running Monterey. However, it does have issues with the M1 Macs. I have tried Safe Mode, a clean install, SSD as the destination, RDHD as the destination and NAS as the destination. Every single backup fails with the same error message in the log, but no indication to me that the backup failed. The error is that the backup ended unsuccessfully because of failure to backup "protected files." It doesn't list any such files and there doesn't seem to be any way to find out what those files may be. When done, the destination drive has space used, but no files listed. First Aid does not find anything to fix and reports the drive is fine. The only way to recover the "used" space is to erase and reformat the drive. The NAS shows a sparsebundle file, and that is about the right size, but when mounted, the file is, again, empty. No files, nothing. I haven't tried to delete that sparsebundle file yet, but I have not a lot of optimism about that. Entering TM shows no backups. The log shows that TM has failed to complete a backup since December 15. Apple told me to wait for the next release, but reports say the beta doesn't have any fixes for TM.

And that is why I say it's broken. It may work for some, but it doesn't work for a lot of folks who have complained to Apple about it.

I'm making SD!, CCC and Chronosync backups daily for now.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

TM works for, as far as I can tell, folks with an Intel Mac and running Monterey. However, it does have issues with the M1 Macs. I have tried Safe Mode, a clean install, SSD as the destination, RDHD as the destination and NAS as the destination. Every single backup fails with the same error message in the log, but no indication to me that the backup failed. The error is that the backup ended unsuccessfully because of failure to backup "protected files." It doesn't list any such files and there doesn't seem to be any way to find out what those files may be. When done, the destination drive has space used, but no files listed. First Aid does not find anything to fix and reports the drive is fine. The only way to recover the "used" space is to erase and reformat the drive. The NAS shows a sparsebundle file, and that is about the right size, but when mounted, the file is, again, empty. No files, nothing. I haven't tried to delete that sparsebundle file yet, but I have not a lot of optimism about that. Entering TM shows no backups. The log shows that TM has failed to complete a backup since December 15. Apple told me to wait for the next release, but reports say the beta doesn't have any fixes for TM.

And that is why I say it's broken. It may work for some, but it doesn't work for a lot of folks who have complained to Apple about it.

I'm making SD!, CCC and Chronosync backups daily for now.

I've never had issues with Time Machine on my Intel iMac running Monterey. I'm not having troubles now on my M1 MBA since the 12.1 update. It's crazy weird how it worked for you before 12.1 and that update fixed me but apparently broke you in the same manner I was beforehand. Or at least a similar manner. I don't recall seeing an error specific to "protected files". I can definitely confirm that, at least in my case, deleting the sparsebundle so it could be rebuilt from scratch didn't help.

 

[MacInWin]

I've never had issues with Time Machine on my Intel iMac running Monterey. I'm not having troubles now on my M1 MBA since the 12.1 update. It's crazy weird how it worked for you before 12.1 and that update fixed me but apparently broke you in the same manner I was beforehand. Or at least a similar manner. I don't recall seeing an error specific to "protected files". I can definitely confirm that, at least in my case, deleting the sparsebundle so it could be rebuilt from scratch didn't help.

The error is buried in the log. I used The Time Machine Mechanic (T2M2) from Eclectic Light Co. It scans the log for any messages related to Time Machine. At the end of every run, the final message is the one with the error:

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

I guess technically TM isn't "finished" so it doesn't produce an error message, but it stops. T2M2 also shows that TM unmount the target drive and the snapshot from which the backup is built, so it's partly closing and partly not. Just before the error message it shows what it has done:

2022-01-05 17:53:51.043414-0500 Finished copying from volume "Macintosh HD - Data"
944125 Total Items Added (l: 445.98 GB p: 439.24 GB)
0 Total Items Propagated (shallow) (l: Zero KB p: Zero KB)
0 Total Items Propagated (recursive) (l: Zero KB p: Zero KB)
944125 Total Items in Backup (l: 445.98 GB p: 439.24 GB)
801598 Files Copied (l: 430.92 GB p: 424.18 GB)
107023 Directories Copied (l: Zero KB p: Zero KB)
33266 Symlinks Copied (l: 948 KB p: Zero KB)
140 Files Linked (l: 970.6 MB p: 970.9 MB)
2098 Files Cloned (l: 14.08 GB p: 14.09 GB)

And yet, there is NOTHING showing on the drive, just that the 445GB is "used" but no filenames, no directories, nothing. It's just strange. It's finished, failed, delayed and missing. Other than that, perfect! And it is exactly the same in Safe mode, so not something I'm loading at boot or login. I verified Safe boot with Etrecheck, and nothing is loading, no kexts, nothing. It just fails, every time.

 

[MacInWin]

I have done searching for that error message, btw. Some report success excluding certain Find My.. related files. No change.

 

[rbpeirce]

TM works for, as far as I can tell, folks with an Intel Mac and running Monterey. However, it does have issues with the M1 Macs.

I have a 2021 14" MBP with the M1 Pro chip running Monterey 12.1. When I got the new computer I could not add any further to my previous TM backup and had to start a new one. I have had zero trouble since I started it on 12/11/21. As I said before I also update a SD! sparse bundle backup each day and copy that to another drive each week so I've got stuff on three different drives, just in case.

 

[chscag]

As I said before I also update a SD! sparse bundle backup each day and copy that to another drive each week so I've got stuff on three different drives, just in case.

Make sure you test your Time Machine backups to see if you can actually recover files from it. Also carefully read through this thread especially what Jake (MacInWin) has posted.

 

[MacInWin]

I got it sorted, thanks to a new discussion on the Apple.com forum boards. Read it here:

iMac M1 Monterey running slowly.

I have now read the blurb on the site and I have a couple querys? Does it do the backup copy of the complete system and does it do it to an external HDD/SSD? Sorry if I am being a bit superduper thick, but I'm not too sure?

www.mac-forums.com

It's post 227 in that thread. Hope that works for anyone with TM problems on Monterey.

 

[rbpeirce]

Make sure you test your Time Machine backups to see if you can actually recover files from it. Also carefully read through this thread especially what Jake (MacInWin) has posted.

Just tried. I picked up an app from my earliest TM backup and it restored with no problem.

 

[DCM_UK]

I got it sorted, thanks to a new discussion on the Apple.com forum boards. Read it here:

iMac M1 Monterey running slowly.

I have now read the blurb on the site and I have a couple querys? Does it do the backup copy of the complete system and does it do it to an external HDD/SSD? Sorry if I am being a bit superduper thick, but I'm not too sure?

www.mac-forums.com

It's post 227 in that thread. Hope that works for anyone with TM problems on Monterey.

Hi Jake, I had another chat and screen share with Apple Support today over my Time Machine/Time Capsule problems, after a few tests he said to erase and reformat the Time Capsule, everything is working fine now with hourly backups and I tested restoration of some files. I don't know what happened to the requirement for a restore password but it didn't ask for one. It seems like Monterey screws the wireless back-up process and the disc has to be erased and a fresh start made.

 

[MacInWin]

I use direct-connect for TM. I did test with a wireless backup to another Mac I was using as a server for storage and the same issue occurred until I ran the exclusions to block the "Find My" files from being backed up. The most recent update, 12.2, has fixed that issue. All is back to normal here.