Q: Sierra and Time Machine

Hope this helps those running antivirus software and Sierra (10.12)

I had been using Sophos pre/post upgrade to Sierra.  My backup device is a 2T Time Capsule. 

After upgrade to Sierra Time Machine did the same thing...stuck in preparing backup...I also notice when I would attempt to browse the Time Capsule shared drive it would prompt me for a password to connect despite it being cached in keychain.

Yesterday I googled for ideas and found Sophos AV and Time Machine hits.

https://community.sophos.com/products/sophos-home/f/sophos-home-for-mac/80195/ti me-machine-running-slow-problems

Sophos confirms they have a problem and are working on fixing it.

After reading this thread I removed Sophos and sure enough I could kick off a backup and it went to immediately backup and has successfully complete while I am leaving this post.

So I took this one step farther and tried another antivirus client...I installed Avira...exactly the same problem with Avira.  If I disable Avira Real-Time Protection (which is easier to do than Sophos) Time Machine kicks right off and performs a back.

At first I thought it was a Sophos issue I wonder if this is an Apple problem now

I had this yesterday, after upgrading to Sierra. I have an external hard drive which I back up to.

I'm not really much of a techie, but I looked at these answers and followed other trails as well. None of the other answers on this thread, worked for me. However, one of the trails I followed, led me to opening 'console app', and looking at CPU usage, to see what was going on when it tried to back up. I noticed that 'keychain' kept appearing on the Console App. I don't use Keychain, and I wondered if it was getting stuck, looking for some kind of password.

I enabled Keychain, and turned both my computer and it's external hard drive off, for several minutes. When I turned it all back on, with Keychain enabled, TimeMachine worked! I have since disabled Keychain, but TIme Capsule is still backing up.

Before anyone seizes on the reboot - I had rebooted with each of the other possible ways to solve this. And I had done that thing with 'cmd', 'alt', 'p' + 'r' on start up.

As I said, I'm not much of a techie, so it could be chance. Although, I have been taught by a techie to only change one thing at a time, and it was after changing Keychain the problem was solved.

I found that Sierra sets System Preferences/Energy Saver to logout in 15 minutes. It would seem that Time Machine is not recognized as being "in use" as far as the Energy Saver is concerned. I saw the advice to check Energy Saver and after setting it to Never, TM did proceed to completion in about 2 1/2 hrs for the 16GB backup. However, three times during the backup, at random intervals, I got a popup that the system would logout in one minute. I cancelled that logout each time.

Apple needs to make TM recognized as "using" the system and not use the Energy Saver logout.

For those of you having problems with Time Machine backups, I finished a support call with Apple today regarding this very problem and I'll run through the steps that the support rep suggested. Like the OP, my Time Machine backups were reaching the "Preparing backup" stage but wouldn't move beyond this point. The Apple support rep told me that they have been getting some calls about this problem and they are looking into it. In the meantime, here is a fix:

1. Go into the System Preferences and click on Security and Privacy to turn off the firewall (if it's turned on).

2. Stop any Time Machine backups that are running either through System Preferences or via the Menu Bar TM icon.

3. Open Finder and scroll down to "Shared" in the left-hand pane, where you should see the name of your Time Machine drive. Double click on the drive.

4. In the window to the right of the pane, you should see "Not Connected". Click on the "Connect As..." button to the right.

5. You should now see the name of your MacBook (and other MacBooks that have been backed up previously, if the drive is shared by several MacBooks). Double click on the name of your MacBook in order to view the Data folder.

6. Double click on the Data folder and find the Backups.backupd folder. Double click on this folder to reveal the Time Machine backups.

7. Delete any “xxxx-xx-xx-xxxxxx.inProgress” files. If no such files exist (as they did not on my MacBook), delete the folder named Latest.

8. From within the left-hand pane of the Finder window, locate your MacBook hard drive (usually called Macintosh HD) and select it. In the group of folders that appear in the window on the right, open the Library folder and find the Preferences folder.

9. Open the Preferences folder and locate the file named "com.apple.TimeMachine.plist". Delete this file.

10. From within the left-hand pane of the Finder window, dismount the Time Machine drive (see Step 3) by clicking on the upward arrow next to the name of the drive.

11. Restart your MacBook.

12. Open System Preferences and select the Time Machine preferences. Select the Time Machine backup disk and enter the password (if necessary).

13. After Time Machine connected to the backup disk, allow the Time Machine countdown timer to proceed so that the first backup begins.

14. Leave your MacBook running for 24 hours, if necessary. If you have a lot of data on your MacBook, it may take several hours to prepare and verify the backup, before the backup occurs. Be patient. It took my Macbook about 14 hours to run through the preparation and verification stages, before the backup occurred. If you don't have a lot of data on your MacBook, these stages (and the backup) may be completed within an hour or so. Do not close the lid of your MacBook, nor shut it down, until at least the first backup is done. You can use your MacBook during this time, however.

15. Open System Preferences and turn the firewall on (see Step 1).

At this point, your Time Machine backups should proceed without any problems. I hope this helps!

I've figured it out with the help of @dwb, i just stop TM backup or temporarily turn off TM backup on TM preference then go to TM drive and navigate to backup folder and delete inprogress file, empty the trash and open again TM preference and turn on TM backup and start manually the backup. hope this help.

followup to my previous posting

I don’t see the final solution yet.

These are what I have experienced up to now.

At a very early stage, immediagely after upgrading to Sierra, I experienced the inPgogress-file issue a couple of times but not now.

At the moment I see two types of issues (all are about the incremental backup):

  a) the backup stays at “preparing” forever

  b) the backup is very slow

In case the backup keeps “preparing” for long, %CPU stays at over 95% and the console repeats very quickly as:

default hh:mm:ss.ssssss +hhmm kernel AFP_VFS afpfs_vnop_ioctl:  afpfs_FindForkRef failed -1

There is no way other than stopping the backup. However I haven’t seen clear reasons of this occurrence.

It is up to about 35%, if the operation is normal.

As to slow operations, NAS and Sophos have some impacts. Sample data of four consequent backups are:

NAS/Sophos ON　31min　5.73GB (794MB) = 0.18GB/m

USB/Sophos ON    9min　 7.14GB (719MB) = 0.80GB/m

NAS/Sophos OFF  5min　 4.91GB (107MB) = 0.98GB/m

USB/Sophos OFF  27sec   6.4GB  (103MB) = 14.2GB/m

where as

NAS: backup HDD (USB3.0) is attached to Airport Extreme (Tx Rate 450Mbps 802.11n 5GHz, 40MHz RSSI -43dBm)

USB: backup HDD (USB3.0) is directly attached to MBP 15 (2013E)

Sophos: 9.5.2/engine 3.65.2

xxGB: required (including padding)

xxMB: needed

Note, however, that the elapse time is not stable/constant but fluctuates very largely among backups.

arizonadonn wrote:

 

Do you think Apple monitors these forums and makes notes or 'fixes' based on these posts?

No.

Did you read my earlier reply to you?

YES THEY DO!

This afternoon I had Apple Care United States on the Phone (AppleCare Outreach) "on behalf of Apple Engineering" (!!)

This was regarding my question about Console and Time Machine.

Re: Re: How can I see Time Machine activity in Console with macOS Sierra.

I can say no more because of "confidentiality restrictions"

What I can say is that Apple is following the discussions regarding Time Machine!

I appreciated that Apple reached out to me.

Now you know.

Jur Kuipers, The Netherlands.

I have the same thing happening.  Talked with a very kind Senior Tech who told me I need a new Time Capsule since what used to work perfectly before the Sierra update will not work.  I took his advice(though hesitantly and not trusting Apple much these days) and got a 4 TB external drive to do my backup on.  Now the TIME MACHINE is taking 48 hours to do 8 GB.  Only 938 GB to go.  At this rate I can update this question in two weeks.  Holy crap for crap!  I should have trusted my gut and held off on the update.  NEVER UPDATE IMMEDIATELY.  I have another gut feeling.  This is Apple's way of getting us all on the Cloud.  I DO NOT believe this is coincidental.  At all.

I had this week a long call with a very friendly assistant of  a special taskforce support team of Apple. This team is currently very strong investigating the issues around Sierra and TimeMachine. Also they are contacting proactive a selection of users which should  provide a bunch of special log  and test data to Apple. Since Apple contacted me and not I contacted Apple I was very glad surprised about the kind of work as Apple here act by scanning this forum.

With respect to this kind of work I'm absolutely sure that Apple is taking the issues very very seriously. Remarks as  the last here that Apple will force us to the cloud by producing such issues are total nonsens and stupid.

As Apple scan this forum it could helpful to announce your willing here if you are:

- able to describe exactly the issues which only should appeared since the update to Sierra (free of emotions)

- have the issues with a more or less new Apple Hardware

- NOT have installing a Virus scanner like Sophos

- The TM Target ist an original Apple product (AirPort Extrem, Time Capsule - not a netatalk using NAS like Synology)

- familiar with the Terminal program

- willing to have a longer call with Apple and providing private log data to Apple

- noted a reachable phone number in the Apple-ID account data

After applying a suggestion from this forum (ie, automatic TC backup OFF, delete small TM file, put FireWall on OFF, restart iMac, and manual TC backup), I was happy to see that the backup process by TimeCapsule seemed to work again. However, after backing up some 40 GB it gave another error message. This same problem has also happened a few years ago after a similar OS migration. I seem to recall that a TC firmware update solved these issues. I keep on monitoring all your suggestions on this forum in order to try these shortcuts.

I am using a mid 2011 iMac with OnyX maintenance software but without antivirus software. My 2TB TimeCapsule is of 2012. I am happy to assist Apple in solving this nuisance.

"Since Apple contacted me and not I contacted Apple I was very glad surprised about the kind of work as Apple here act by scanning this forum."

As I mentioned, Apple also contacted me.

Apple is monitoring discussions regarding TM.

To suggest there's some kind of conspiracy going on is not helpful and completely ridiculous.

kt-top is wrong, I can understand his frustration though...

Let's hope Apple comes up with a fix soon.

Jur Kuipers, The Netherlands

In my case, Time Machine hourly backups do not occur, though backups initiated manually appear to work as usual. When the "Next Backup" time is reached, the time indicator in the Time Machine preferences pane simply advances an hour, while the "Latest Backup" remains unchanged.

I've tried unchecking and rechecking the "Back Up Automatically" box, rebooting, and disconnecting/remounting the backup drive, all to no avail.

Thank you SO much, Entropee for these very thorough, simple instructions!  Hard to believe you're a Level 1 because you're pretty damned good at idiotproofing fixes for the rest of us!  I called Apple and someone called "Mark" knew nothing that you did, and even less than me.  I eventually gave up on him and went back to sorting this myself.  Having a horrible time with a very confused MacBook Pro so facing a clean install (PleaseGodNO!) with an equally confused backup. Cannot do a straight migration back so absolutely HAVE to have a good backup in Time Machine before going forward and yours was the only good answer.  Worked like a charm.  Took less than 20 minutes to 'prepare' - as opposed to 8+ hours previously- and it's chugging away nicely with the backup now.  You're a star...  

Now if I could get the 'Helpful' button to be the vaguest bit helpful with your post, I'd make sure other people should read and try  it.  But I can't.  It does nothing.  Much like my TM until you.  Sorry...

When this first happened, I tried a few of the steps listed in this discussion, but none of it seemed to work. What I eventually did was just left my computer on for a few days, and eventually my Mac got out of "Preparing Backup" and performed the TM backup. But it did take days. After that, I had a day of quick, back-to-normal backups. Yesterday, however, my Mac once again entered the painfully long "Preparing Backup" mode. The only thing I did yesterday was boot my Mac in Safe Mode because I was also having the problem of the Mac not shutting down or restarting properly (would hang with a black screen -- rebooting in Safe Mode fixed this issue for now).

For kicks, I tried the steps listed by Entropee. However, my external hard drive (OWC Mercury Elite, 1.5TB) is listed under "Devices" in the Finder window and not "Shared," so I couldn't do all the steps verbatim. End result -- no change to being in "Preparing Backup." I may let it go again for days and days and see what happens.

So now my Mac sits, broken-hearted. Tried to back up, but it's barely started.

Hello: